Public chain survival note: I want to do outsourcing

Text: Wang Ye

Production: Odaily Planet Daily (ID: o-daily)

 

Someone has imagined the end of the public chain:

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• Dean of CCID Blockchain Research Institute: Blockchain is about to erupt in the field of e-government, and ordinary people will eventually get used to the existence of blockchain
• Research on Layer 2 protocol review attack, Vitalik claims to synchronize 99% fault-tolerant consensus or solution

"We have to make the road wider, we need to increase the viaduct, but also the subway and light rail. If necessary, maglev must be added. At this time, a carriage came from a distance, but the road No one … "

It's a phrase now.

The emergence of Ethereum makes many people think that the public chain is the future of the blockchain. Recently, the existence status of various "disbanded" and "soft running roads" of domestic public chains has made many people regret that the public chain is dead, and the story is difficult to continue.

Recently, EOS, which once shouted 3.0, is busy with congestion. The survival status of domestic public chains is even less optimistic. The project landed in the foreseeable future. The entire public chain ecology is full of funds and spinach projects. DApps cannot run.

Many public chains have almost exhausted the funds raised in the primary market, and the currency price in the secondary market has been low and sideways, with no buying at all.

Recently, a number of domestic public chains told Odaily Planet Daily that in order to survive, they have started to turn to the alliance chain: "Decentralized blockchain business does not make money, centralized business is growing every month", and some public chains do not even Then declare itself to be a public chain.

The public chain is in constant turmoil, and the founders "resign in batches"

Since this year, the public chain field has been exposed negatively, and even founders have left.

In addition to the often mentioned founders of Dfinity and Zilliqa, in July of this year, Wang Guan, the co-founder of Nebula Chain (NAS), announced his withdrawal from the Nebula team. At the same time, he also announced the exit statement of Fan Xuepeng, the dean of the Nebula Research Institute. Mention a different understanding of Nebula's future development.

In August, the operating entity of the old domestic public chain Gongxinbao (GXC) was seized by the police because it involved an illegal reptile business.

In October, the domestic star public chain aelf was disbanded by the explosive community, and there were rumors later that the community was disbanded. The suspected boss Ma Haobo deliberately broke the market in order to transition to B in order to absorb chips.

On November 7, IOTA co-founder Sergey Ivancheglo announced that he had sold the coins in his hand and announced that he was withdrawing from the cryptocurrency circle.

On November 11, Danny Rowshandel, general manager of global business development of HPB, issued an open letter in the telegram group, stating that the core chain project will be changed to community autonomy. He himself announced his resignation, three co-founders and half full-time Employees have also decided to leave the project.

According to people familiar with the matter, the founder of Core Chain (HPB) Wang Xiaoming is now devoting himself to the operation of an e-commerce project. In order to explain to investors, there are only a few technologies left in the core chain to update the code.

Public chain has no profit model

The departure of the founders also reflects the difficulty of public landing and profitability of the public chain.

In the early days, Ethereum was criticized for its performance issues. Low TPS has caused Ethereum network congestion and DApps not running smoothly. Gas fees have further raised the threshold for Ethereum use.

Then, a bunch of high-performance "Ethereum Killer" (Ethereum Killer) began to appear in people's vision. Unfortunately, not only do they not "kill off" Ethereum, they are still far behind.

The story of the public chain was told for two years, from capacity expansion, to DApps, and this year's Staking. There have been no success stories so far.

In terms of capacity expansion, EOS on Ethereum has recently encountered severe CPU congestion caused by the EIDOS Wool Party, which is still far from the "million-level TPS" desire that year.

Early DApp stories are mostly analogous to Android. Some celebrity public chains want to imitate Android to subsidize early developers for ecology, in exchange for only a group of wool parties.

Take the Nebula chain as an example. In May of this year, after the Nebula mainnet was officially launched, it launched the "Nebula Incentive Program Season One", announcing that it will give out up to 1 million NAS rewards to developers each year. If a developer successfully submits a DApp, There are six thousand yuan rewards. This did not bring much actual users and traffic, but instead formed a DApp pipeline model that relied on public chain subsidies. The rewarded NAS has become a smasher.

DApps have become a feast for money. EOS has become the cradle of spinach mining. TRX has taken over the baton of EOS, and the homogenization is serious. There is a lack of star projects on the entire public chain, except for USDT. ETH has thus been ridiculed as a USDT transfer chain, and finally has an application scenario that ordinary people can understand.

The Staking project does not have enough participants to consume Staking inflation, and the inflow of funds is insufficient to support the currency price.

In the final analysis, the public chain has failed to find its own unique scene, and its performance is still too fragile for the needs of the current huge business scene. In terms of performance, security and flexibility, they are far less than centralized systems.

At the same time, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei and other large companies related to the alliance chain platform are building capacity-Baidu Super Chain platform, Ant Blockchain BaaS platform, Tencent Cloud TBaaS, Weizhong Bank led FISCO BCOS alliance chain and many more. Existing companies are more inclined to run their business on the alliance chain.

Except for Ethereum and EOS, most of the public chains have no demand, and they are vulnerable to the alliance chain piled up by the giant with funds and technology.

Digital Finance Group (DFG) CEO and founder James Wo bluntly stated in the live broadcast that the public chain has no profit model.

Few blockchain companies have been proven to make money. For example, exchanges, OTC, and derivatives trading are actually bridges between fiat and digital currencies, as well as borrowing and mining. Unfortunately, most of these businesses do not run on the public chain.

The public chain did the technical outsourcing

The bear market is long, and many public chains fail to convert the ETH or BTC raised to fiat currency in a timely manner. The funds raised in private placements have suffered shrinkage to varying degrees, and the tokens used for marketing and team incentives have shrunk even more.

According to informed sources, in order to survive, many domestic public chains that have not yet run are busy picking up projects and outsourcing.

In the first two weeks, the Odaily Planet Daily participated in a developer innovation competition held by the BMW Innovation Department. The participating teams came from various fields such as AI, big data, and cloud computing. The winner won not only get 25,000 euros (about 20 Million yuan), and also get the opportunity to cooperate with BMW.

At the event, Odaily Planet Daily met Amy, the operation manager of a public chain project from Shanghai.

Amy told Odaily Planet Daily that after financing last year, their main energy was spent on technology research and development. After the mainnet was officially launched this year, the cryptocurrency market has become very bleak. Currently they are actively looking for more Project opportunities to keep the company running. So I flew over from Shanghai to participate in this BMW event, hoping to win the competition, get the bonus and the opportunity to cooperate with BMW.

According to Amy, like most projects, the main form of initial financing for their projects was Ethereum, and over the past two years, the price of Ethereum has fallen by more than half as the entire cryptocurrency market has fluctuated. At the same time, according to CoinMarketCap data, since last year, the currency price of Amy's project has been falling, and it is currently in a sideways period with almost no buying.

The entire team is reducing expenses. "Probably since the beginning of this year, the company has planned to save and use funds in promotion and operation. Only some large nodes, such as the main online line, will conduct some interviews. The company has already done it early. Winter's plan. "Amy said helplessly.

In order to survive in the cold winter, the company had to find other ways, started to contact some physical industry projects, do some technology outsourcing to make money, and hoped to cooperate with more companies related to the Internet of Things, automotive and other industries to obtain Revenue.

Judging from the previous B- and G-end projects in the market, the scale of a project is generally between several hundred thousand yuan to millions of yuan. If you can cooperate and complete several projects in a year, maintain a small and medium-sized block The daily expenses and operations of the chain company are possible.

The opportunity point of the technology outsourcing market is, "Some traditional large companies want to be in touch with blockchain technology, but they know very little about blockchain technology and have no technical sedimentation, so small companies can provide technical services. Large companies without technology accumulation want to compete for some projects, which can be subcontracted to small companies for development. "

There are many blockchain technology start-ups in the market that are similar to Amy's. Most of them do not have the accumulation of resources in traditional industries, and it is difficult to directly contact large enterprises or government projects. Amy believes that for them, providing blockchain technology outsourcing to traditional large enterprises is a new opportunity. Becoming their technology supplier or providing technology outsourcing may be able to obtain the opportunity to survive the cold winter.

We no longer claim to be a public chain

"Since the end of last year, we no longer declare ourselves as a public chain. We now call ourselves the industry chain."

Wilson, the founder of a domestic public chain project, told Odaily Planet Daily.

From Wilson's point of view, in addition to some of the star public chains (such as Ethereum and EOS), their early fundraising is relatively large, and the community is relatively large, and everyone's consensus is strong. Only this type of head with a large number of participants The public chain will continue to move forward. However, in China, there is currently no public chain that can achieve real commercial application.

Wilson believes that most of the public chain's profits are currently mainly on "public chain coins", but the entire cryptocurrency market experienced a long bear market last year, and many "public chain coins" were bleak. The public chain has no way to make a profit at all, eventually causing problems in the public chain's cash flow.

"Only by creating more actual circulation scenarios and more users, can the currency price rise. Otherwise, it will be popular to gather dishes, but this road is not sustainable and not feasible."

Wilson's public chain project has been running for two years. At the end of last year, in order to reduce costs and survive the cold winter, he also cut nearly half of his staff, from a team of dozens of people directly to about 20 people.

Wilson also summarized three ways for the public chain based on the current status:

1. Holding a coin to death: layoffs in order to reduce expenses, some companies even left only two or three technology update codes, waiting for the market conditions to improve before sailing.

2. Technology outsourcing: Split your own technology into various modules, and then start outsourcing, take some enterprise or government-oriented projects, and make "chain reform" to make some money.

3. Transforming business models: In China, we must focus on the applicability of the enterprise side and the regulatory nature of the government side, so many public chain projects can no longer be called true public chains. If you want to involve all parties and meet regulatory requirements, the public chain can only be launched in the form of an alliance chain.

"We belong to the combination of 2 and 3, while transforming business models, and taking projects as technology outsourcing," Wilson said.

Wilson revealed that they are currently negotiating cooperation with some listed companies. They are still in the early stages of commercial testing and have not reached the scale of commercialization.

"Commercial testing has only done two or three cases, but after the 1025 speech, more and more companies intend to find us to cooperate."

When asked if he would normally pick up some overseas projects, Wilson said that at this stage there are almost no foreign projects, and the implementation of cases is very troublesome. It is easier to do the industry chain in China or to execute cases. Other than that,

"The core reason is to comply with the trend and the national call. It is the current priority to carry out technology research and development and to accumulate industry resources in the country."

Conclusion

As the most important infrastructure in the blockchain world, the public chain itself will not die.

However, since the outbreak last year, the gap between the development status of public chains and everyone's expectations has become wider.

Wilson uses the history of the Internet to look at the development of public chains.

"The development of blockchain is very similar to the early Internet. At the beginning, everyone fights for technology; then it goes down to products; then it fights for services; the next is market share (market monopoly). Whoever has more monopoly has pricing Right. These four stages have gone through. "

"At present, the blockchain is still in the first stage, the transition from technology to products, so we need to give the public chain more time to continue trial and error and development." However, today's blockchain field does not need and can no longer afford to explore with so many public chains. After the capital boom, the shuffle will finally come. The question of survival is finally here.

(Amy and Wilson are pseudonyms in the text)

References:

Hongchain Finance: "The Crossroads of the Public Chain: An Awkward March Without People and Uses"

Leek No. 1 Node: "Death and Life of the Public Chain"

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