DeFi has become the moat of Ethereum. Is there any competition space in other public chains?

DeFi on Ethereum cannot be copied, but it does not mean that the success of Ethereum DeFi cannot be copied.

The Shanghai blockchain week has been over for more than a week, and my flu has recovered 70%. It is said that this cold is also a by-product of the blockchain week. During the 7-day period held in the Shanghai blockchain, physical strength and mental strength are a bit After the overdraft, the back actually did not do a good job with friends to do a back-to-back Hangzhou blockchain weekend, impromptu invited a group of overseas public chain projects to Hangzhou to do several activities.

Today I want to talk about some ideas about this Shanghai blockchain week. A major feature of this Shanghai blockchain week is that almost all next-generation public chains are gathered in Shanghai, Eth2.0, Polkadot, Near Protocol, Solana, Harmony, Klaytn, Nervos, etc. We specifically treat Near Protocol, Harmony, Solana The team, as well as the 1kx partner of the German fund that invested in many public chains, made a public chain PK Meetup from Shanghai to Hangzhou. Since the relationship between the individual and these teams is good, some sharp questions are discussed on Meetup, and it is meaningful to discuss whether it is meaningful to do a new public chain.

Since entering the big bear market, the big chain bubble has broken a lot. Many public chains released before the bear market have actually withdrawn from the market. Therefore, many market observers have pointed out that the competition in the public chain has ended, and later it is the Ethereum family. The blockchain 3.0 era. Not to mention whether this view can stand the test of time, at least Ethereum co-founder V God does not look at it this way. He has repeatedly said that Ethereum has been "full" this year, calling for the rapid deployment of Ethereum as soon as possible. Expandable program. This is indeed the case. A fairwin fund has blocked Ethereum, not to mention the historical blockage caused by the previous encryption cat to Ethereum. ETH1.0 is weak in performance, although the current Ethereum developer ecology A ride on the dust, far more than other public chains, but, realistically, the prosperity of the Ethereum ecology is mainly because of the network effect and governance structure of Ethereum, developers do not choose Ethereum because of performance, many developers are working Before comparing the performance and ecology of other main chains outside Ethereum, the choice of Ethereum is actually no choice. It can be said that the bursting of the public chain bubble 1.0 is not because ETH1.0 is too strong, but it is because those "ETH killers" are too weak, and almost every piece of the ETH1.0 era has a lot of money, in the final analysis. Still a human problem.

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At present, the era of ETH1.0 is turning pages. The process of ETH2.0 has already started. It is a very realistic problem in the face of the current next-generation competition chain. How to avoid repeating the mistakes of the ETH1.0 era competition chain? This is an open-ended question in progress. I am here to give you a thought process. I hope to inspire more discussion. I will further break this down into the following two problems:

Do you want to compete with Ethereum? What do you want to compete with Ethereum?

1. Do you want to compete with Ethereum?

Why compete? First of all, of course, because of the ability to compete, all developers have the ambition to create their own public chain, which is commendable, but the difficulty of doing a public chain is obvious to all, but the current development team of the Ethereum 2.0 competition chain The non-leisure generations, such as Polkadot, are directly led by former Ethereum CTO Gavin Wood. The Near Protocol development team has four ACM gold medals, 10 finalists, and the Solana team comes from Qualcomm's core technical team. Therefore, these cattle people get together ETH2. .0 The competition chain has a very unique and amazing design in the architecture. The code implementation capability is far beyond the competition chain of the ETH1.0 era. In addition to the strength of the competition chain team, more importantly, the limitations of Ethereum itself. There is plenty of room for competition for these new generation Ethereum challengers.

Although the design of ETH2.0 is excellent, PoS+ beacon chain + shard + eWASM, the performance of ETH2.0 is far beyond the current Ethereum, but even if it is thousands of times stronger than the existing TPS, there are still limits. Assume that in the future, all kinds of application ecosystems will explode, and ETH2.0 will face the challenge of re-expansion one day sooner or later. Furthermore, the dispute between PoS and PoW consensus is still fermenting. The developers and currency holders who support the decentralization of the PoW consensus in the community are not a few. Although it was clear in the ETH2.0 roadmap, it was deployed at all stages of ETH2.0. Afterwards, the Foundation will evaluate the “computational availability” of ETH 1.0 to determine whether the community still supports ETH 1.0. If the Foundation and the community finally decide not to support ETH 1.0, the Ethereum community will inevitably re-hostile hard-forked community splits. The result is that both lose, there will be some developers and Dapp to go to other public chains.

In addition, DeFi Fever exists in the current community of Ethereum. Even the two co-founders V God and Lubin acknowledge that Ethereum is becoming a global decentralized finance ledger, which is a good thing for Ethereum. After more than three years. After the wilderness, the Ethereum community finally found the promised land. The entire Ethereum community has been active recently. Regardless of business logic or reality, DeFi is indeed a self-consistent business model that is very suitable for the early stage of the blockchain. A valuable chain-on-loop can be formed.

However, things always have two sides. The DeFi of Ethereum has inadvertently crowded out developers in other applications in Ethereum. The recent Ethereum community conferences have almost become DeFi conferences, leaving them for other applications. There are very few opportunities for developers to show up. In the community, investors and developers are fascinated by DeFi, while non-DeFi applications are hanging out. In the era of ETH2.0, the ETF may have "DeFi self-enhancement effect". That is, when a large number of DeFi protocols are deployed in Ethereum, the new Ethereum EIP will not be more inclined to consider the interests of DeFi applications and users, making Ethereum more functional and governance-oriented DeFi vertical. This leaves an opportunity for the public chain that does not currently lock a vertical application direction, and in other vertical applications, Ethereum does not have a network effect.

Of course, in addition to the above vision for ETH2.0, the most certain opportunity in the competition chain is actually time. The phased deployment of ETH2.0 leaves competitors with at least one and a half years of time window, if there is an extension of each phase. The time window will be longer enough to verify that the competition chain is successful. From the above opportunity window, the competition with Ethereum is not only feasible, but the probability of success is not small, but the key to success is still whether the competition chain team has seen the opportunity and whether it can correctly grasp the precious opportunities.

2. What is the competition with Ethereum?

As mentioned before, although Ethereum has excellent network effects, it is far from perfect. The challenge of upgrading ETH2.0 is more than developing a new chain. The current new generation of competition chains are almost the same as the main ones. High-performance fragmentation schemes, such as Polkadot, Near Protocol, Solana, and Harmony, among which there are many experts. For example, the Near Protocol team has previously implemented fragmentation on a high-performance distributed database, which is the world's first distributed fragmentation. System, therefore, compared to ETH2.0, who is better off the fragmentation scheme, still not known.

What's more, technically, these competitive chains have a latecomer advantage over Ethereum. These new chains don't need to consider how to convince miners to support PoS. There is no need to consider how existing smart contracts can be migrated to ETH2.0. Said that the ETH2.0 upgrade is like changing four tires while driving, very image, and these star competition chains can be built in the garage, waiting for the road to be a blockbuster.

But even with the technology's latecomer advantage, the competition chain needs to consider another, more important question: What applications and services should be carried on the high-performance chain of thousands of TPS? Although all the competition chains are eyeing the current DeFi ecosystem in Ethereum, and they are all supporting their own DeFi ecosystem, I am blunt, meaningless. The network effect of Ethereum DeFi is the result of the integration of many DeFi protocols. The endorsement of ETH token market capitalization and full liquidity as collateral assets is the community trust accumulated by the entire Ethereum community for more than four years. At present, it is impossible for any competition chain to have such capabilities and opportunities, unless these public chains think of their ideas to be able to graft their DeFi ecology into Ethereum DeFi, and vice versa, such as some DeFi projects in the Polkadot ecosystem. PolkaWallet The cross-chain capabilities of the Polkadot network are being used to interface assets on the Ethereum and Bitcoin chain.

The DeFi on Ethereum cannot be copied, but it does not mean that the success of Ethereum DeFi can't be copied. The application direction of blockchain is not only DeFi. I also look at the vertical direction of native digitization such as games, social and entertainment. Developers need to find a blockchain native domain like DeFi, with a focus on native. DeFi is not a direct migration of traditional financial business models to the blockchain, but based on the decentralization of blockchains, using digital currency. The original financial property, based on the special arbitrage demand of the current digital currency market, redesigned from the bottom, and the new dimension of the financial model with full trial and error, DeFi's success is quite difficult, and even a bit of an accident, for the future development of blockchain business Landmark.

It is not an exaggeration to describe DeFi with the holy grail of the chain. Of course, the Holy Grail is not only a DeFi one. The competition chain also needs to forge its own holy grail with the community according to its own technical characteristics. It may be DeGa(me), DeLe(isure), DeSo(cial). This kind of exploration can be like an ether. Fang DeFi Eco-like big waves, the survival of the fittest, the so-called permissionless innovation, can also be curated innovation, that is, the public chain development team and application developers have a common design, I think, taking into account the current trend of public chain competition, curated Innovation may be more beneficial to the development of the competitive chain.

Looking forward to it, in the future, many public chains need a curator role. Through deep thinking, the theory and influence lead the community to find, design, and develop the native On-chain business model. Now the role in Ethereum is made up of a large number of KOL assumes that these DeFi KOLs have their own occupations, some are investment partner, some are the founders of the DeFi project, and some are the heads of the exchange. The common feature of these KOLs is that they are the stake holders of the DeFi ecosystem, so from the will In order to be competent in this role, the competition chain also needs to find and support KOL as the community role of curator.

In summary, at the moment when ETH2.0 is just launched, the competition chain that has joined the high-performance public chain track is actually not a small win, but the win or loss of this test is not to see who can beat Ethereum, as long as Ethereum does not In the event of a fatal super black swan, the position of Ethereum as the first public chain is almost untouchable. For the competition chain, find the holy grail of the public chain like DeFi, and the development of Ethereum, promote each other, and learn from each other. Do not make a big mistake, that is, the success of the competition chain.

Original title: "Shanghai blockchain week thinking: how to do public chain"

Author: Cao Yin, general manager of the Digital Renaissance Foundation Director

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