On Apr.16, 2020, the Head of PlatON Community Kai Yu was invited to join the AMA hosted by HelloPool, and talked about the role of public blockchain and the solution to the development of blockchain industry.
How Does PlatON Think about the Future of Public Blockchain?
Kai Yu: According to the role and responsibility, we don’t think public blockchain is an accurate concept, neither is consortium blockchain. The positions of both public blockchain and consortium blockchain will limit the development of blockchain. Blockchain is born to be a specific financial infrastructure, and many cross-industry, cross-identification and cross-account platforms similar to consortium blockchain require a trustable global backbone for the purpose of the final consistency of transaction.
The definition of public blockchain we talked before is defined based on the tech community and academic background, which focus on the technology innovation and are far away from the commercial practice.
There is still a long road ahead for the applications of public blockchains such as DApp and DeFi. DApp is still in its early stage and not able to be applied in massive commercial practice without mature technology; while DeFi is still a centralized trading model, even though it has connected decentralized assets, it can’t offer decentralized trust. Despite being performed on the chain, the traditional financial business is a game of marketing, and has no strong demands on blockchain without absolute innovation.
In my opinion, blockchain is not the solution for the existing problems or transferring today’s financial business completely, but bringing in new industries and satisfying new demands instead. Otherwise, the revolution vision of blockchain won’t take effect. Blockchain, as a distributed ledger technology for multi-party book-keeping to ensure the tamper-resistance and transparency, is meant to address the final consistency issues in payment and settlement, and then solve the measurement and transaction issues of computable resources. Futhermore, blockchain should be a part of the infrastructure for data circulation and digitalization activities, and collaborate with the rest parts including privacy-preserving computation, AI, IoT. Thus, treating blockchain as an independent concept is narrowly defined. It is a significant and indispensable part of the infrastructure for the whole digital world.
Is Bull Run a Solution or Barrier?
Kai Yu: Either bull run or bear market is just the fluctuation form of the value of cryptocrrency, a kind of application of blockchain. If blockchain is an alpine, several rolling stone, though they looks dangerous, they won’t affect the stability of the alpine.
In today’s blockchain industry, we can still see active investments and elites who deeply dive into the development and innovation. Meanwhile, the blockchain applications are still not commonly used, and we need more and more skiller apps . Plus, the engineering also requires time. It usually takes around or more than 10 years to build an infrastructure. Blockchain is a technology, which should not be evaluated by the profit of cryptocurrency.
We PlatON are confident about the value of blockchain, and we believe blockchain is one of the core infrastructures for the whole digital era. Short-term fluctuations or other fluctuations irrelevant to the technology development of blockchain won’t affect our judgement and confidence for the whole blockchain industry.
How Do You Think about the Dilemma of User Base the Blockchain Industry is Facing? And What’s the Solution?
Kai Yu: The reason caused the dilemma of user base, in my opinion, is that there are so many things to be opportunistic, such as gold, stock, futures, house prosperity, and even shoes and the recently hottest Switch, etc. All of them are already in a mature stage with a large user base. The cryptocurrency speculation is just a beginner, and will surely facing challenges to compete for the marketing share and users with the existing giants.
The expansion of true users of blockchain technologies is the solution for this dilemma. To achieve the expansion of true user base, we need practical DApps, excellent games and new models that could revolutionize the production and our life. The whole blockchain should bring in true values and something improve the efficiency or lower the costs. This is the only solution to acquire and keep the users.