Web3 Meetup

I remember at the end of 2018, my companions and I organized blockchain technology workshop meetup, I invited Louis Liu to speak to the community partners about the future trend of Crypto, because he wrote a lot of in-depth articles to introduce Crypto and preach the new technology trend and business logic, I read all his articles and decided to invite him to our event, he came to Wanxiang's conference and he prepared very detailed materials to explain what web3 is to the partners who attended the meetup, and he predicted that the application chain might explode in the future, and later he slowly enriched his theory and focused on cross-chain and application chain development, and finally established the Near-based OctopusNetwork.

Application Chain

Why do I bring up this story? Because our discussion about application chains at that time slowly turned into a real story, as we all know AXIE created its own new chain Robin, and Defi Kingdoms on Harmony also recently announced a partnership with Avalanche to launch DFKchain , which I understand as DFKchain equivalent to Avalanche’s sidechain or parallel chain, but in any case they have launched their own chain, and I predict that many applications will consider this option in the future.

Create your own public chain

I made a comment in the Stepn community three days ago that I think they should also consider creating their own public chain that fits their product requirement. Stepn is a project I really like because I'm a sports fan and have join half marathons events many times. As a participant in the Crypto space, I also expected some great Web3 apps to appear in Crypto industry. Stepn was on my watch list at the end of '21 when my friend mentioned it in one talk show and I accessed their website to check out project information. I was a fans of Mable Jiang's podcast, and later, I learned the story of the two founders of Stepn on her podcast, which was very, very important for me to understand Stepn. Since then I've been following the project's development, becoming a loyal Stepn runner and participating in community discussions.

Uncritical thinking

When I tried to do an internal transfer after my run 3 days ago, the whole transfer process took 2 hours. This is not the first time this kind of problem happened, and users of Stepn community also faced this trouble long time, and I know that the reason why the chain transfer is full is caused by Solana's network problem. I also consulted with solana engineers about this problem, but there is no good solution.That's why I made a statement in the Stepn community that the team need to consider creating their own public chain, and the reasons for developing a new public chain are basically the same as AXIE and DFK.

Last night when I finished my activation with stepn, I suddenly remembered the discussion about application chains of meetup in 2018, and I realized that my previous statements in the stepn community were very inappropriate, and now my opinion is Web3 applications should not be urgent to create their own public chains.

Why

The question of whether Web3 applications should create their own public chains should be discussed in two ways：

1. Whether the existing public chains can no longer meet the requirements of the application? Further, the team can determine whether the current public chain will not be able to meet the requirements of the application in the future as well? The usual view is that application chains are faster, lower gas cost, and low cost for users to use, which is a big reason for AXIE to leave ETH. Another reason is that it is highly customizable, all parameters can be adjusted, you can modify the execution environment, modify the wallet, the community own on-chain governance, or you can reach consensus, upgrade the protocol, quickly evolve to adapt to new requirements, or troubleshoot software bugs, etc..For example, Axie Infinity, which has seen an explosion since it went live with its own custom ethereum strategy in April '21 because it reduced transaction costs by several orders of magnitude,and integrated fiat payments in the wallet, that making an explosion of whole protocol , which is the advantage of developing new public chains.
2. There is another important question for the team to think about, does the team have the ability to design a more perfect chain? we know that ETH, Solana, or even certain ZK-rollup projects which still face scalability issues, speed issues, decentralization issues, security issues now, but they can solve these pain points in a short time? Fork and Copy code ,modify parameters，it looks easy to develop a new chain, but running up a public chain that takes a long time and requires huge investment. So creating a new public chain you will still face the same problems in this industry, and the best way to solve the TPS is to be highly centralized, but this also means a high risk, easy to be manipulated and other problems. Some time ago, we all know that AXIE was attacked. Although Flow and IMX are exploring this direction, it is still difficult to solve the above problems, and now all Layer 1 public chains are trying to solve these problems.

What to do?

Waiting and keep attention, keep learning, optimize the speed problem by other methods, such as cross-chain, share part of the pressure to other chains. waiting for the application chain infrastructure to mature and then deploy the product to these chains, such as Defi Kingdoms' attempt on AVAX, or wait for the maturity of Layer2 zk-rollup technology or you can try to based on multi-chain services like OctopusNetwork, rather than taking the risk to create new public chain.