* This article is the content of the speech by Dr. Xiao Feng, Chairman and General Manager of Wanxiang Blockchain, at the 2020 Web3 Conference.
Thank you Web3 Foundation and Polkadot. I have a lot of thoughts coming to this venue today. On the one hand, I am very honored to be invited by the Web3 Foundation to give a report here; on the other hand, this venue is the venue for the first Wanxiang Blockchain Global Summit in 2015. We just finished the sixth summit yesterday, and the first one was held at this venue. It was also in 2015 that the first Blockchain Global Summit brought many developers to Shanghai, and during this period, I officially met Gavin Wood.
In 2016, the second Ethereum Developer Conference and the second Wanxiang Blockchain Global Summit were also held at this venue. I remember that year, a participant said on Weibo that he had never encountered a conference in China where 90% of the participants were foreigners. Later, the blockchain industry developed in full swing, and this venue could no longer accommodate so many participants, so we moved to other hotels. This time, returning to this venue again, I couldn't help but think of many things in the past 6 years.
I like the term Web3 very much. It can more perfectly explain information technology or the Internet, and the development from the Internet to blockchain. Everyone distinguishes between what is the Internet and what is blockchain. In fact, Web3, from the three stages of Web 1, 2, and 3, can well explain the development. It is based on the continuous iteration of the Web that we have gradually liberated individual creativity through technology. Web2 liberates everyone's power to transmit information. You can freely publish any information and express your opinions without prior review. Of course, it needs to be subject to some compliance constraints, and you cannot publish illegal and non-compliant information at will. However, before the Web world, you had no place to publish information. After the Web, especially after Web2, everyone's ability and power to create and transmit information have the opportunity to be fully respected and exerted.
Web3 goes a step further. Whether it is the Internet or blockchain, everything is done in the Web world. What is something that originally belonged to you and is now returned to you? It is the sovereignty of data.
The day before yesterday, I said at the Wanxiang Summit: In a world of public chains, many basic capabilities that startups or business operations need to rely on have been sunk on the blockchain to form a commercial public infrastructure. On such a strong commercial public infrastructure, everyone's creativity can be better equipped to explode. I once mentioned a case on Ethereum, and I believe that Polkadot will also have many such cases: you no longer need to consider storage resources, computing resources, and raise funds for this. You no longer need to consider how the two parties to the transaction establish trust - the infrastructure of trust, storage infrastructure, computing infrastructure, and transaction infrastructure will all be based on distributed ledgers, and these blockchains can all provide you with them. On top of this, you only need to think about what you want to do, and then present it with 500 lines of code or 1,000 lines of code. In addition to food and accommodation, you will not even have other startup costs.
This tremendous power is brought by blockchain and Web3. A lot of information and behavioral data need to be confirmed and protected so that the information creator or data owner can get the value they deserve. From Web2 and Web3, we move forward step by step to the blockchain world. Web3 is actually blockchain, but we cannot only talk about blockchain, and we cannot separate it from the Internet.
To sum up, Web1, Web2, and Web3 are more perfect ways and frameworks to describe such a development process. This is my understanding of Web3.
In addition, I would like to talk about Polkadot. Wanxiang Blockchain and Web3 Foundation have had continuous and very good cooperation on Polkadot, especially since the epidemic. Dr. Jia just mentioned that we held a six-month training camp course together, and we hope to have more cooperation in the future. The responsibility and mission of Wanxiang Blockchain Lab is to promote blockchain technology in China. Because we know that for China to build a digital economy, blockchain is a very basic and core technology. Therefore, we established Wanxiang Blockchain Lab to continue to promote the implementation of blockchain technology in China. Of course, this is not just a matter for one person, nor is it just a matter for one institution. Once blockchain technology is recognized as a public commercial infrastructure, it must be open source, because something that is not open source cannot become the bottom-level commercial infrastructure.
Open source and openness are the themes of our Web3 conference today, and Wanxiang Blockchain Lab has always followed this spirit. We are currently collaborating with the Web3 Foundation, and as you may know, we have also been collaborating with the Ethereum Foundation since 2015. We are committed to promoting this technology so that more people can understand it, master it, and start businesses based on it: using blockchain technology to deploy their own wisdom and talents to benefit the entire society.
At the beginning, people tended to regard Polkadot as a cross-chain technology. It is certainly a cross-chain technology, but the practice of cross-chain is not simple. Polkadot not only solves the connection between two chains or builds a bridge, it is itself a multi-chain system based on cross-chain technology.
What role can a multi-chain system play? A multi-chain system is a good blockchain framework that can build a complete set of commercial infrastructure. Because of multi-chain, you can provide more basic services on the parallel chain, and then deploy many blockchain applications based on these basic services. Because Polkadot is a multi-chain system, I believe it can better and more conveniently call some underlying basic services at the application layer. Whether it is storage or computing, or security, trust, or exchange. This is a very important ability of Polkadot. After the multi-chain system is truly built, I believe it will be a very complete commercial infrastructure system that can provide all kinds of basic capabilities needed by any business or entrepreneur. People can give full play to their creativity on this basis. Not only engineers can do things on it, such as deploying their own programming and applications at home. Even if you are not an engineer, but have a good idea, find a partner, you can also use code to call Polkadot's basic service capabilities in the multi-chain system. No matter what you need, you can deploy applications.
The biggest difference between Web3 applications and Internet Web2 applications is that they do not require permission, and all the code you need is open source. At the same time, you only need a very low cost, and you do not need to raise a lot of funds to start a business. This is what blockchain brings us, what Polkadot brings us, and what the world of Web3 brings us. In the next 3 to 5 years, we believe that many commercial applications will be created based on Web3 and blockchain.
Finally, I want to say that truly large-scale commercial applications that reach tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars may not be native to blockchain applications. Think about it, in the real world, there are commercial entities worth tens of billions of dollars or hundreds of billions of dollars. In the future, there will be commercial applications based entirely on blockchain, but we can also think about how to use blockchain to solve the problem of going from off-chain to on-chain, offline to online, and offline to online, so as to combine off-chain with on-chain, offline with online.
Wanxiang Summit also talked about digital finance yesterday. In fact, I have always believed that for digital finance or open finance, it is more important to think about how to integrate the offline financial market with a market value of tens of billions or trillions of dollars. Did you notice that two weeks ago, the chairman of the US Securities and Exchange Commission said on a certain occasion: All stocks may become tokens in the future. This is the most exciting reality. In the world of Web3, based on blockchain technology, we can turn stocks into tokens to issue and trade. This is a huge prospect in the blockchain world.
So I suggest that based on Polkadot and Web3, the technology combining on-chain and off-chain, online and offline has matured. We can't just focus on the native assets and native applications on the blockchain, we should focus more on offline assets and applications. This is a point that everyone should pay attention to when the blockchain technology matures.
That’s all for my speech, thank you everyone.
