On September 18th, IOSG’s sixth “Old Friends Reunion Meetup” was held in Shanghai Lavin Rose. A total of more than 600 people consists of well-known investors, project developers and founders and blockchain enthusiasts from home and abroad participated in the event. The Meetup is hosted by IOSG, the star cross-chain project Polkadot, the deep segment expansion project NEAR Protocol, and the blockchain platform CasperLabs. It’s an excellent opportunity for the audience to get in touch with the blockchain industry.
As the initiator of this Meetup, IOSG VC founder Jocy Lin gave an opening speech. In the past three years, IOSG “Old Friends Reunion” Meetup has passed through Beijing, Tokyo, New York and other cities. The event enrolled more than 600 people, attracting well-known institutions and guests from home and abroad.
Keynote speech
First, Jocy Lin gave a keynote speech. Jocy Lin reviewed the cycle properties of cryptocurrency over the last three decades from the cyclical nature of the traditional Internet. In contrast to the S&P index technology industry, cryptocurrency industry is still in the early stages of development. At present, early projects led by professors from universities in the United States are on the rise (including Algorand, Oasis Labs, DTR, Ava Labs, etc.), while Fortune 500 companies headed by Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft are beginning to transform from traditional technology industry to the cryptocurrency field.
As for the concrete progress, Bitcoin and Ethereum 1.0 optimize the security and decentralization, and Ethereum 2.0 optimizes scaled scalability and security. IOSG believes that it is unlikely to solve the impossible trinity problem in short run. In the past five years, a large number of protocol Layer0 – 1 – 2 expansion solutions have emerged, focusing on consistency, availability, and zonal fault tolerance in solving industry infrastructure expansion problems. Traditional Internet companies such as Facebook are introducing more early players, and the use cases of cryptocurrency itself are actively expanding into more areas.
For the application of the cryptocurrency, IOSG believes that there will be more exciting projects. At present, IOSG’s investment strategy focuses on three directions: the construction of open financial infrastructure (replacement of trust media, more inclusive finance), Web 3.0 governance and dual-coin model innovation and cross-chain ecology. In the direction of cross-chain ecology, we are highly concerned about how to solve the interoperability of blockchain.
In the speech, Jocy Lin cites many Internet stories in China and explains how they evolved in the blockchain world, such as the inspiration from Zhihu and Stevemit, WeChat red envelopes and Ali Ant Forest for blockchain technology. IOSG believes that the opportunity for an open financial ecosystem comes from the flat competitive environment, the lowering of financial services barriers, and increasing market liquidity competition, all of which create innovative profit motives for start-ups.
For Web 3.0 governance and dual-coin model innovation, IOSG is currently optimistic about the dual token model (MKR / DAI & SPANK / BOOTY), governance token (Ox protocol / token: ZRX) and other innovations. In the direction of cross-chain ecology, IOSG maintains a high level of attention on how to address the interoperability of blockchain. IOSG’s current layout in the industry is still focused on the infrastructure and protocol layers. Currently, Polkadot, Blockstack and NEAR, and Casperlabs are accelerating their development. Conflux and IoTeX are also promising POW and IOT public chain.
Then, the outstanding project of deep sharding field, NEAR Protocol, co-founder Illia Polosukhin gave a wonderful keynote speech. According to Illia, the biggest oppotunity of the NEAR Protocol is its excellent scalability through sharding technology, which uses dynamic shards to support fast transactions between different regions. In terms of security, NEAR sets up a lot of hidden verification nodes, which greatly reduces the attack rate of the platform.
In the speech, Illia officially announced that NEAR will establish a developer community incubator center in China. IOSG, as the only Chinese investment institution of NEAR in addition to Baidu VC, will serve as a developer community cooperation consultant in China and create an “incubator + fund support plan”. IOSG will set up a three-month rapid incubation camp for application projects for NEAR, providing technical, business, community, market, and team building support. IOSG is responsible for project screening and post-financial support to provide technical guidance for NEAR.
At the same time, NEAR’s China Developer Community Programhas attracted IOSG as well as other partners such as D1 Ventures and Digital Renaissance Foundation. They will help NEAR better connect the developer community and media to collaborate and build Web3 ecosystem and application projects. Early application developer teams will receive multiple support including technology, media, investment, and Token rewards.
As the last guest speaker, CasperLabs partner Mrinal Manohar believes that any advanced technology looks like magic at the beginning. When the first generation of the iPhone was released, Jobs took out his mobile phone and zoomed in and out with two fingers. And what the current technology developers have to do is to make the blockchain look more like “magic” rather than “technology.” Mrinal believes that as decentralization increases, iterations and upgrades of technology will become more difficult, and it is important to identify controversial and non-controversial issues through smart contracts. Technology is the most important for solving all unfair and ambiguous problems.
In the final part of the Mrinal presentation, CasperLabs announced that it will work with IOSG to incubate and build a Chinese developer community. With the support of IOSG, CasperLabs will hold wide-ranging developer meetings around China to help Chinese developers adapt to the platform. IOSG will actively support the infrastructure construction of Casperlabs, and support the rapid development of Casperlabs through hub operations, offline meetings, incubators, and developer workshops.
Investment Panel: Early Investment Opportunities during the Recovery of the Crypto Market
The Investment Panel was moderated by IOSG founding partner Jocy Lin. Attending speakers include Kyle Samani, founder of blockchain world-class online investment institution Multicoin, Jamie Burke, founder of European famous venture capital firm Outlier Ventures, and United Square Venture Capital partner Nick Grossman, founding partner of Primitive Ventures, Dovey Wan, and founder of the local organization NGC,Wayne Zhu, FBG founder Zhou Shuoji, and vice president of distributed capital, Rin Huang. The speakers gave a wonderful discussion on the early investment opportunities in the recovery of the encryption market.
Kyle, founder of Multicoin, said that in the investment decision-making process, they tend to focus on market structure, market appeal and return. Jamie, founder of Outlier Ventures, believes that their team is concerned with the different agreements that the startup team makes at different levels. From a business perspective, it is difficult for start-ups to make profit. From an asset perspective, Jamie prefers entrepreneurs to focus on basic products, but not just to make solutions on protocols.
Nick from Union Square Ventures believes that whether the project has a network effect is very important, and it should also give consideration to the quality of business when concerning scale. As a long-term investor, it is more important to achieve long-term planning of 5 – 10 years.
Regarding the investment direction of the blockchain industry, Rin Huang, vice president of Fenbushi capital believes that blockchain investment can be divided into three categories: industry ecological services (centralized exchanges, derivatives exchanges, wallets and services that reduce user thresholds), enterprise services (technical services that provide blockchain service for institutions, such as alliance chains, regulatory technology, data analysis), blockchain native projects (similar to public chains, protocol layers). At present the applications tend to be tokenized or smart contracted in the traditional business model. In fact, it is impossible to catch up with the centralization project. In fact, entrepreneurs can be more committed to the improvement of the protocol layer, including open finance and web3. The subdivisions include identity, oracle, privacy, and defi. Instead of adopting traditional thinking to make a product, deconstruction and re-restructuring the original business model and using technical and economic mechanisms to decentralize and secure these protocols can be of better effect.
For the relationship of investors and project parties, the guests also gave their own unique insights.
FBG founder Zhou Shuoji said that FBG will not actively help to promote the project in theory, but will provide support in terms of flow and resources. Product iteration speed is very important for a project, and really good projects require very little intervention and help.
Wayne Zhu, founder of NGC, believes that the project itself can be self-reliant and openly communicated with investors. This industry does not need “politicians” who only distract existing resources, but needs some people who truly create value and create new things. Dovey Wan, founding partner of Primitive Ventures, is more positive in defining the term “politician”. She believes that “politicians” are entrepreneurs of higher dimensions, and successful entrepreneurs need to be diplomats, investors and politicians at the same time.
Round Table Discussion: Technology for Next Generation Platform Infrastructure
The round table discussion was hosted by Liu Feng, editor-in-chief of ChainNews. The forum focuses on the re-construction technology of the next-generation platform infrastructure, and has gathered many well-known developers in the blockchain field, including the deep-fragment project NEAR Protocol partner Illia Polosukhin, blockchain platform CasperLabs partner Mrinal Manohar, Oasis labs Founder Dawn Song, Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko and bloXroute Labs co-founder Aleksandar Kuzmanovic, Conflux CTO Ming Wu, Parity main developer Wei Tang.
One of the most popular topics in the blockchain industry is the “impossible triangle”. The founders explained the technology of their own projects around high performance, scalability and security. Dawn Song, the founder of Oasis Lab, who specializes in privacy, first proposed that there is a new technology in the field of privacy protection called Nimbo, which can separate consensus and execution and put them on separate layers.
And Parity’s engineer Tang Wei believes that the technical highlight is the interoperability of public and private chain. And he pointed out that Polkadot has more room to explore in this regard, and ultimately can achieve greater interoperability between public and private chains. Illia, the CTO of the deep-fragment project NEAR, pointed out that the current technical limitations are not at the consensus level, and there is no way to increase the blockchain calculation rate by the consensus layer. If you want to improve the computational power of the blockchain, you should use sharding technology. This view was endorsed by CasperLabs founder Mrinal: “The most discussed topic in the blockchain is TPS, but when it comes to capacity expansion, I think system throughput is not a good parameter. In addition to focusing on the expansion of the blockchain, we should pay more attention to the security of the system. Therefore, in addition to the expansion problem, we still have a lot of things to do.”
Conflux CTO Wu Ming further explained the expansion and security issues: “I think the security of the blockchain is not high enough. We hope to redesign the structure to solve this problem. We designed the structure of the tree diagram, in the case of bifurcation, users can still process their blocks and trade. We can reduce the delay and determine a deal within 30 seconds without sacrificing security.”
Regarding the popularity of blockchain applications, the founders have put forward their own ideas about when the blockchain can be widely used and what specific scenarios are. Illia first proposed that as a deep sharping project at the protocol level, what they did was to build infrastructure for developers. “All of our infrastructure is limited now because it is centralized. We want to invite more users to join. Some people don’t understand the blockchain. But if we can provide some interoperability for these applications, more people will join in.”
The founder of CasperLabs, Mrinal further added that traditional technology giants don’t want to apply blockchain technology to solve existing problems, even if it is the best solution at present, they are still not willing to take the first step; once the people’s psychological impression of the blockchain is changed, the blockchain will have a wider application.
For specific application scenarios, bloXroute Labs co-founder Aleksandar pointed out that they are not only concerned with traditional payment applications, but also need to pay attention to the application of new features that users will not use in the future. There is still a great deal of unknownness.
The conflux CTO Wu Ming pointed out that the application scenario of cross-border payment is the scenario that he can think of most likely widely used. Using the decentralized network to solve the current problem may be a direction. But we have to pay attention to the issue of security.
Final Talk:Celer and IoTeX
As an investment institution focusing on the early-stage projects in the blockchain industry, IOSG’s entrepreneurial projects cover expansion, infrastructure and DeFi. The last part of the Meetup is the sharing of IOSG startups Celer and IoTeX.
Celer China COO Chao Qi presented his views on the blockchain industry at the event and introduced Celer. He said that the blockchain mainly solves the trust problem and the governance problem. For the peer-to-peer interaction, the two parties can first open the smart contract in the chain to act as the court, and then sign the contract for multiple times in the channel at high speed and freely. After that, the private key signatures of both parties will be stamped, so that many transactions can be completed very quickly. When the dispute ends, the status certificate of the chain channel is taken to the smart contract in the chain, and the judgment can be passed. End the activities under the chain. High-frequency trading is achieved through the interaction on the chain, thus achieving flat expansion without an upper limit. According to Chao Qi, on July 8th, Celer’s main network will be online, there is basically no difference between Celer’s decentralized transfer with WeChat pay or Alipay. The game experience on Celer is similar to the QQ game hall, so that all users can experience blockchain application the same as the Internet.
Wei Sun, CMO from IoTeX, explained how they “made the blockchain available and possible in the IoT industry”. Sun Wei believes that the blockchain is more suitable for machines, as machines are decentralized and can form a society, each of which has an identity. If you are building a public-chain platform, game or in vertical field, you should talk to developers and users in this field. As a public chain project, you can’t just provide a blockchain, and you need to build an ecosystem and provide developers with choices.
After the final talk, the 6th Meetup officially came to a close, and the guests and staff took the group photo.
In the past three years, IOSG’s reunion has passed through Beijing, Tokyo, Shanghai, New York and other cities. Developers, geeks, founders, early investors in the industry, Crypto fans from all over the world gather together for the event. The IOSG Meetup is one of the most high-quality and attractive event in the blockchain industry.
