“Block 101” is a live broadcast of conversations launched by the Binance New Media Team, hosted by Jiayi, Anna, Liuliu, Yingge, Sisi, Qiqi, and Doris. Here Binance invites entrepreneurs in the industry, investment giants, opinion leaders, trading bulls, or ordinary people with stories to tell. Every Monday to Friday, with you in the live room.
Views of Patrick Dai:
- This industry has a very strong cyclicality, and some long-term players will eventually win;
- If it is an industry that is always out of regulation, there is no long-term future;
- Compared with traditional assets, the liquidity of blockchain assets is still excellent, which brings a great premium.
- In a direction like DeFi, I feel that there is no bright future;
- At present, we are promoting offline staking. Presently, with Qtum Proof-of-Stake, you needed your coins online. Therefore, we are developing offline staking, which will also increase the Qtum staking rate.
Interviewer Binance Yingge
Guest Patrick Dai
Binance Yingge: Today is the eighth issue of “Block 101”. We will talk about the future of the public blockchain track with the Co-founder of the Qtum Blockchain, Patrick Dai. Patrick, could you briefly introduce yourself.
Patrick Dai: Hello everyone, I’m Patrick Dai, Co-founder of the Qtum Foundation. I’m delighted to have the opportunity to come to Binance’s “Block 101” and share with you some of the things we have been working on recently. Thank you all.
Binance Yingge: In 2017, you were selected to the Forbes Elite List. Have you entered the blockchain industry since then or earlier?
Patrick Dai: I entered the blockchain industry in 2012.
Binance Yingge: Is it convenient for you to talk about your asset ratio, for example, do you have more coins or more cash?
Patrick Dai: I would say about half and half.
Binance Yingge: What did you do before entering the blockchain industry?
Patrick Dai: I was enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the Chinese Academy of Sciences when I was exposed to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. After that, I left school to pursue cryptocurrency-related work.
Binance Yingge: Is this your first job?
Patrick Dai: No, I started my own business after I left the Ph.D. program. I got into the blockchain industry in 2012 but didn’t leave the Ph.D. program until 2015.
Binance Yingge: Your first contact with Bitcoin was in 2012. Who helped you along the way?
Patrick Dai: In 2012 and 2013, China’s blockchain ecosystem was more barren. At that time, most of the projects were overseas projects. We also participated in offshore projects. I had the impression that everyone in the foreign community was engaged and had an idealistic spirit. Many people have given me a lot of help. Back then, including in 2016, we also got support from a lot of people when we made the Qtum blockchain, like Chen Weixing, who made one of China’s largest ride-hailing apps.
Binance Yingge: I entered the industry in 2018. I heard about you in 2018, but last year there seemed to be no news from you. Did you withdraw from the blockchain industry?
Patrick Dai: There was not much new in 2018, 2019, and even 2020. We spent more time on research and development. I believe the whole market has reached a high point since 2017 and personally feel that there are not many new changes in the entire industry. It’s true that something new and hot comes out from time to time, but everyone speculates. The industry as the whole does not exceed the industry framework involved in Bitcoin and Ethereum. So, I don’t see the need to say the same thing every day.
2.
Binance Yingge: I see. Have you heard these questions before, from the community asking previously, would you choose to disappear because of questions?
Patrick Dai: I think as long as you work in this industry, no matter how you do it, no matter whether it succeeds or fails, I guarantee that some people will always question you. Because the starting point of each person is different, more questions are about whether you will manipulate the market and hurt the community. I believe many people who participate in this industry may not fully understand it.
In 2017, Qtum made some investments and had some community projects. In a sense, we also made a big mistake. At that time, I wanted to support the ecosystem, but you will find that many projects were like an angel investment. 99% of the projects were unreliable. We’re also an injured party, which means that you have invested in 100 projects, and 99 projects have collapsed. In a sense, you are the investor, so you must deal with this outcome. Many times, neither I nor the Qtum Foundation benefited from investing in these projects.
Another question may be why the market cap of the project or the price of coins haven’t been up. This is also difficult to explain. In fact, the price is often not relevant to what the team does, including Bitcoin. Bitcoin has risen and fallen a lot in the past years. Bitcoin has more of an impact on the whole industry and is very cyclical. Some economic cycles in society also have some strong correlations. In response to these questions, it is difficult for you to respond one-by-one. Basically, I have never really given my personal opinion, and it’s a never-ending question. I’d rather continue to do what I feel is meaningful and valuable for the project.
Binance Yingge: A lot of media came out in 2018, and a lot of exchanges came out in 2019. Do you think it is too much, too complicated, and too messy?
Patrick Dai: I think this industry is too impetuous, and the quality of industry practitioners is also uneven to some extent. Everyone may think that this industry is closest to the internet in the early stage. With the bubble economy in 2017 and 2018, you will find that this industry is not what it was imagined to be. I think some long-term players will eventually win. At present, the entire industry is at a very early stage, and many things are not fully compliant or fully regulated. I believe that if the industry is always out of regulation, then there is no long-term future.
Binance Yingge: Have you been in the industry for so long, have you encountered any interesting anecdotes?
Patrick Dai: In early 2012, I did some development work in the community. At that time, on Bitcointalk, I once sent 10,000 posts and replies. A lot of time was vested in the blockchain industry. Almost every day, I averaged 12 to 15 hours of work. I think the past 5 or 6 years have been a high-strength industrial state of this industry. I’d also received a lot of rewards from my earlier contributions, especially in the early days when I posted on Bitcointalk or doing something for others. At that time, Bitcoin wasn’t valuable, and people would reward you 5 or 10 Bitcoin directly. If you think about it now, it is a substantial sum of wealth.
Binance Yingge: Have you delved into other projects?
Patrick Dai: I would say that about 90% of my energy is leading and managing the Qtum blockchain project.
Binance Yingge: Patrick Dai you have made a comeback recently, do you feel differently?
Patrick Dai: I think the entire industry took a lot of detours in the earlier days. Bitcoin is essentially peer-to-peer electronic cash designed by Satoshi Nakamoto, but in fact, this function has slowly become electronic gold. In a sense, electronic cash, including many of its features and value, has been replaced by stable coins. We’re more inclined to use stable coins for most of the circulation and transactions. A stable coin is kind like a digital dollar formed by the migration of the U.S. dollar to the blockchain field. Such a space is vast, but it will face some compliance risks.
In the long run, because Bitcoin was unable to issue and circulate other tokens, Ethereum introduced a smart contract that can issue tokens, introducing more complicated logic through these smart contracts.
I feel that the market value of many projects so far is very high when it comes to public blockchains. Still, I think that most projects have liquidity because the current state of the entire cryptocurrency market has a good flow even though the liquidity has significantly reduced from its peak period compared to traditional assets.
Many blockchain projects still have a relatively high valuation today. This valuation is relative to some other entrepreneurial projects in society.
However, if the entire blockchain industry proceeds to develop further, it needs to integrate more applications. I feel that there is no bright future in the direction of DeFi because the distributed application and the user experience are contrary. Most applications don’t need to be distributed, and users only want to have the application experience, which causes a dilemma for the entire industry. There are many problems in the industry that need to be rethought and reorganized. Of course, I hope there will be some breakthroughs later.
3.
Binance Yingge: In the past few years, in the development of the public blockchain for the new public blockchain, will there be some threats or impact on the previous ones?
Patrick Dai: In fact, the entire public chain can be divided into two parts. One is to meet the needs of market transactions. So far, everyone has bought a variety of cryptocurrencies or various currencies for the purpose of trading and speculation. This solves 90% of the demand. The other part is less than 5% or 10% of the demand is for application development on the blockchain. In fact, this demand can drive the creating of value for a long time. It is also valuable for pure transaction needs. The demand for liquidity will also create value, but I think its value ceiling is actually within sight. In the end, it still needs to combine the real needs of people in the real world to create some new value. Such a blockchain has a bright future, and the transactions also have a bright future. The transactions themselves also solve the needs of many people.
Binance Yingge: In addition to the public chain, what type of projects or technologies are you more optimistic about?
Patrick Dai: I think there are two forces in the whole industry, one of which comes from the bitcoin community, that is, some of the spirits and ideas left over from the early cryptographic punk movement which may be more obvious in overseas communities.
There are a lot of loyal fans of Bitcoin, who firmly believe about privacy, about encryption economics, about the landscape of cipher punk created by these, there is a valuable network effect, just like for the video-sharing site Bilibili (B Station), as long as a lot of people recognize it, there will be a very strong consensus, which is one of the sources of the great value of Bitcoin today.
In addition, let’s put aside these cultural attributes and really solve some of the real needs of ordinary people or in various industries, whether it is industrial or various scenarios on the Internet. Then I think it will also realize some great value in this respect. It’s just that the road is still very long, and I don’t think industry should develop so fast.
This path really needs more exploration, such as how to transparently flow and trade with real-world data on the chain, such as financial data, and even confirmation of electric utility power. This may take a long way to form a scale advantage, but it is also very valuable. For the consumer, there will also be a lot of blockchain personal products, but these products maybe I think there may be more and more small innovations in the next two to three years or even one or two years, and the industry as a whole is still making continuous progress.
Binance Yingge: So, what do you think of the recent DeFi cross-chain activities? I feel like you are not very satisfied.
Patrick Dai: I think this can be regarded as a kind of micro-innovation in the industry. I also believe that it can’t promote the industry to have particularly significant development, but it does have some progress in the industry. Because of a direction like DeFi, I feel that it is challenging to make a substantial breakthrough because most of the current DeFi is a type of application outside of regulation. You can see whether it is running on Ethereum or all sorts of chains. Many applications are free from regulation. I think in the short term because the number of users is minimal. Regarding some of the applications brought by DeFi’s so-called distributed finance, I feel it is essentially a self-circulating closed game.
It is still difficult to extend the boundaries of this industry. It is the users who mortgage themselves. In a sense, they add leverage, and they want to get more benefits from this ecosystem. Still, if this ecological circle cannot expand, then this benefit is minimal, and what can precipitate in this industry is also very limited. I think that in this direction, there may be some application scenarios, but it cannot turn the wheels of this industry. It is difficult for this ship in this industry to move forward. Cross-chain is still at an early stage. If there are not too many valuable things on the public chain itself like valuable data, valuable user behavior, or valuable needs on the two chains themselves, then the cross-chain itself is meaningless.
Binance Yingge: You are also an old man who has experienced a bull and bear market. What do you think of the recent changes and the conversion of the bull and bear market?
Patrick Dai: I joined the industry in 2012 and have gone through three industry cycles. The first strong cycle should be in 2013, when bitcoin rose from 200 yuan in February 2013. In November of the year, it grew to 8888. Then it fell to nearly 900 yuan by 2015, at the end of 2014. In 2016, it rose from 1500 to 120,000 in 2017, and at the lowest fell to less than 20,000 yuan, just over 20,000. There was another wave of increase last year. I think that the logic of each industry is different. I can’t simply go and say that the industry will have a big bull market before or after the halving.
Because of the dramatic price fluctuations in the industry, the simplest logic is that more people are buying. When you buy more, you need more funds from the entire society to enter this industry. I feel that the economic situation of various countries is not so optimistic, and it will also have some negative impacts on the entire industry in the long run. All walks of life interconnect in this society. However, cryptocurrency, including blockchain, is an entirely digital industry. Practitioners still live in the real world and can’t merely apply such logic. It’s because the supply of Bitcoin will decrease after each halving of cryptocurrency, then I feel that naturally, there will be less pressure, and there will be some long-term impact. From my point of view, the entire cryptocurrency field itself or Bitcoin as an emerging alternative asset still has a better future.
Binance Yingge: What is your opinion about the halving of Bitcoin. Do you have any expectations about the price of the currency?
Patrick Dai: So far, I feel that a market like Bitcoin is not a completely natural financial market because there are a variety of roles involved in it. It is a game-based market. There can be an expectation in the long run. I think short-term expectations are difficult to judge, including, for example, whether the currency price of the day is US$ 8,000 or 7,000. It can happen. Of course, I just mentioned that there is a lousy factor, which may bring adverse effects to the economic downturn. In the long run, there is a good advantage, because various countries are issuing more money to save the economy, which is equivalent to the spread of a flood. At that time, some flowed into the field of cryptocurrency. From the end of this year to next year, I think that the entire industry will still develop again, or even break out purely from assets, solely from the field of transactions but it will be more difficult in the short term.
Binance Yingge: I think that there may be some significant differences in the future, because you look like Chinese financial institutions are now engaged in DECP, and the United States has also changed from a package of currencies to anchor the U.S. dollar for regulatory reasons. If the government does not endorse the public chain, is there any chance to participate in terms of financial reform?
Patrick Dai: I think that in the end, some users’ actions are necessary to form some substantial network effects. No matter whether it is Bitcoin or Ethereum, it has done certain things in a particular historical period. The most significant network effect and the largest scale, so the above, also carry more valuable transactions. However, I think there are still many opportunities for development in the public chain. The focus of each project and team is different because it is challenging to have a unified project to complete all the business. I think there are still some opportunities in the public chain.
First of all, I think there is an opportunity to say that although there are still many doubts about this kind of supervision or trading of the entire domestic cryptocurrency. There are more and more compliance tendencies overseas in Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies. You can hold transactions legally. I think that once legal transactions can lawfully hold digital assets, a certain kind of asset emerges, which is a great opportunity in this era. It is equivalent to you having the opportunity to create a joint venture with regulated assets.
It turns out that traditional asset creation is the power of nature. For example, gold, silver, copper, and iron, is difficult for us programmers to have the opportunity to create a physical asset. Using the power of software, you can complete the creation of assets because of the low-cost expansion of software and the open-source features.
Of course, this requires the development and maintenance of a long-term concept. Bitcoin has not become Bitcoin in one day. Many people have invested numerous hours and resources in this industry to maintain such a valuable network. I feel that Ethereum has also traveled for 7 or 8 years. There are still many opportunities for the entire industry. Indeed, I believe there will be significant changes in the industry every year or every few years. I feel this is some kind of a more substantial opportunity.
The focus of the public blockchain is different, and there will be some various competitions. It is indeed because, earlier, many projects or teams did a lot of homogenous competition, including many project teams today are also homogenous. I think that differentiation will also slowly appear, just like there are too many people before who branded themselves as an e-commerce company. I think this kind of slow distinction will also give each project some room for survival.
Of course, I think there are definitely a lot of projects that will be eliminated in the tide of history. Let’s take a look at the fact that Coinmarketcap’s list of the top 10 is changing every year. There are not many kinds of cryptocurrencies that have survived since 2013, and most of them have died. So, I think it ultimately depends on whether the whole team, including on the project side, has long-term thinking and a long-term plan, including a clear positioning of itself. Of course, there are enough human and financial resources to promote the development of this project.
4.
Binance Yingge: I know that you are relatively good at public blockchains, in addition to doing some entrepreneurship and doing some platforms, what do you think will be popular in the industry? In fact, this year and last year do not seem to have changed much in my eyes.
Patrick Dai: Yes, I think this big breakthrough in the industry may come from several directions. A big direction, I think, actually comes from the power of compliance. How do you understand this? The technology equivalent to the entire cryptocurrency and the entire blockchain has built a new financial system. Can such a financial system be recognized by the creators of the traditional financial system, including regulators, including whether it can bring resources and funds from the traditional world to this industry? I think this is the fastest way for the industry to expand its boundaries.
How do you understand? For example, after the approval of ETFs for gold, the market value of gold has increased ten times. I think if the ETF of cryptocurrency can be approved, it means that everyone can enter the industry with a low threshold. That cryptocurrency itself includes Bitcoin as an asset, as a digital epoch-making, a new type of asset, its market value should be able to increase continuously. Then I think that the most significant opportunity comes from external motivation. As entrepreneurs, as industry practitioners, we cannot always hope for external changes. There may be no external changes, and even the external environment is getting worse. It is possible due to inherent power.
The internal motivation is how to serve thousands of users like the internet. If some products made by us can then bring in tens of thousands of users in the industry, then I think the industrial scale will continue to expand. If there is no breakthrough in these two directions, I think the industry will not have a significant breakthrough. So, I think both internal and external need to work hard.
Binance Yingge: What do you think of the possibility of the internet and blockchain merging?
Patrick Dai: This is a relatively large and broad topic. There are still many changes in the blockchain industry because now you can’t do much on the blockchain network, except for the circulation, circulation of transaction symbols, including a valuation of it. There is no traditional infrastructure on the internet. Blockchain is not constant and continuously integrated, such as the computing storage network existing on the internet, which is impossible to achieve in the blockchain world. Primarily, Bitcoin and Ethereum include public chain network logic. It is too simple, because it is a single-threaded computer, equivalent to the same program run by tens of thousands of nodes around the world, and then gives the same result at the same time. This result is currently extremely redundant to ensure this consistency realizes the confirmation of value.
However, such logic will also limit the development of the blockchain industry because its repeatability is too high. However, like traditional cloud computing, each company may rent different hosts on Alibaba Cloud. Each host runs its logic. The two aspects will continue to merge in the future, including storage and continuous integration. Of course, this is more about how to integrate from the perspective of the underlying technology and infrastructure continuously.
As you just mentioned, I feel some integration in different business models will still have some opportunities in the future, which more often depends on the changes in the regulatory environment just mentioned. In essence, if many tokens have repurchasing behavior or some consumption activities with common interests, they would be considered securities in different countries. In many countries, securities haven’t been legalized so far. The industry needs recognition, so it will continue to move forward in this pattern and continue to explore such boundaries. I think overall, more and more people are willing to promote this industry in the past few years compared to before. There are also more traditional resources that continue to lean into this industry.
Binance Yingge: Our Binance mining pool was also launched yesterday, I would like to hear your opinion about the mining industry and the company’s mechanism? Do you support PoW or PoS, or do you support them all?
Patrick Dai: I think I support them all. Why do I support it? The entire industry has come a long way. From the release of Bitcoin in 2009, the first block was created. This system has also proven to have strong security and fault tolerance. Before Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin system appeared, there was no such thing in the entire internet world. Then I think this opened a new era. The whole PoW has vital significance for the entire industry. There’s also a profound logic behind it. Bitcoin represents PoW and is bound to a vast number of resources in society and the most upstream chip industry. From manufacturing to production, to mining machines, the manufacturing and production of mining include some maintenance of minerals and electricity. The overall market value of Bitcoin is also the result of the wisdom of countless industries and the efforts of numerous people. Only then can the market value of Bitcoin be achieved today. From the perspective of industry applications, PoW has some shortcomings. We just mentioned that there would be large-scale applications in the future, so I think more will return to a more lightweight verification method. Why did Bitcoin choose PoW? It is on a public network. To prevent someone from doing evil, everyone must do some repetitive hash collisions, some random algorithms that have no real value, and the mined coins will be distributed. However, in the real world, regardless of many blockchain projects in the permissioned chain, everyone is not entirely without trust. In many cases, PoS accounting can be comparable to PoW in terms of speed, cost, and security. If you focus on creating another set of Bitcoin systems, but to provide services to your customers and users to provide value, PoS may be a better choice.
Binance Yingge: On April 27, Binance’s mining pool brand “Binance Mining Pool” was officially launched. Binance Mining Pool will provide users with multi-mechanism, full-category mining services, including PoW and PoS. Binance Mining Pool provides comprehensive one-stop services from mining to trading for global customers and connects the mining pool platform and trading platform business. From now until May 31, 2020, join the Binance mining pool to participate in Bitcoin mining at a 0 rate!
Next question, there are a lot of your fans or your loyal users in the community who are more concerned about the details of Qtum’s future. Can you tell us about it?
Patrick Dai: I think so. Since 2016, we have been working on the Qtum blockchain project for the fourth year. The entire Qtum blockchain project has also gone through several stages. It is indeed a big bull market for the whole industry in 2016 and 2017, and the market value has reached a very high price. But of course, I made some mistakes in the entire development process. It was a bit too idealistic at the time. We think, how can we make this technology better, which is related to the style of the team. Most of the entire Qtum blockchain team is technical, and 90% of them should be programmers. At that time, whether it was financial understanding or market understanding, I think it was not so profound, there are also many lessons learned, and many mistakes made. But I believe the technology still dominates the industry.
Binance Yingge: At that time, it must have been technology-based. It was not as chaotic as before.
Patrick Dai: Yes, but I think that the entire industry is still running long-distance. We always do a lot of technical R & D. Many technical R & D will wait until a particular stage. I think it may form some market effects. In the short term, it is difficult to have any apparent market effects. For some of the things we do, I think, for example, with Qtum Phantom we have developed “hidden transactions” for the privacy field, to issue a lot of privacy assets on the Qtum blockchain, including privacy contracts, which takes a vast amount of R&D.
At present, we are promoting offline staking. Currently, you must have your coins online to use PoS. At present, we are working on offline staking, which will also increase the Qtum network weight. Like many other PoS public chains in the industry, their network weight is very high. Their weight can be as high as 70%, 80%, or even 90%, which means the listed value will be very high in a certain sense because not many coins will be in circulation since not many coins will be circulating in the market. Qtum itself requires coins to be online for staking and many users are reluctant to run PoS nodes and may worry about some risks. There will be an offline staking launch in the July — August time frame. Everyone who stores their coins in a cold wallet can enjoy the benefits of mining, which will increase the number of locked coins on the network. I think for many users, this will also solve many security issues, which is our main focus.
In addition, we have also promoted a lot. Basically, at present, except for the exchange of Coinbase, we have been listed on all the exchanges at home and abroad that we can reach, especially the overseas compliance exchanges. Like Kraken, Coincheck in Japan, Qtum should also be the first Chinese project launched in the Japanese market in a sense. We launched Coincheck, the largest compliance exchange in Japan. To continue to promote, better liquidity is a foundation for the development of the project.
We have also consulted a lot of lawyers, and there are some legal and regulatory risks in this respect in the long run. So far, because the positioning is still a project with a utility token that is not completely driven by the Foundation. I think if it is completely driven by the Foundation and there are some behaviors in the market, it may be a good thing for the project in the short term, but I think it may not be a good thing in the long run. So, we are also assessing these risks in this regard.
Binance Yingge: I heard you said cold wallet just now, is there a cold wallet already cooperating or you did it yourself?
Patrick Dai: Now, for example, users who stake need to open the Qtum Core client to be online all the time. With the launch of our offline staking, the user doesn’t need their coins to be online in real-time, so the risk of losing coins is less. If you put them in a lot of cold wallets, you only need to sign it. After signing, you can enjoy the automatic benefits brought by the network by proving the ownership of the coin, rather than having to stay online all the time to stake.
5.
Binance Yingge: A friend is asking, what are the advantages of the Qtum technology roadmap compared with Ethereum and EOS?
Patrick Dai: Good question, the entire Qtum development has a meaningful background. We launched this project in 2016. At that time, Ethereum was still doing PoW mining, and today’s Ethereum has not entirely switched to PoS. Qtum blockchain is based on the PoS smart contract protocol. It is the first in the industry to do this. Today, Ethereum is gradually switching PoS. We were the first to implement smart contracts on PoS.
The underlying logic of Qtum development and the underlying foundation is indeed relatively similar to Bitcoin. In a sense, Qtum can implement many technological developments, whether it is developed on Bitcoin or Ethereum. At the time, we were able to integrate the two communities of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Now, we are slowly having some independent innovations and routes, including offline staking which I just mentioned, and the Qtum development of x86. The new x86 virtual machine is entirely different from EVM and more efficient. There’s also a series of privacy-related protocols and work developed on Qtum. I think these things will make Qtum a lot different. In the industry, I think there will be a lot of different things.
At that time, it was a very simple idea. We hoped that the entire blockchain network could still be sufficiently decentralized and distributed. We did not choose some faster block confirmation. If you think about it, faster block confirmation means that the nodes of the network could become very concentrated. Network nodes at the peak of Qtum, there were more than 6,000 full nodes in the entire network, which should be second only to Bitcoin and Ethereum. Even today, the number of full-chain network nodes operating on the Qtum blockchain is still close to 1,500 to 3,000. It is also the most significant number of users in all blockchain networks to participate in and maintain, which is related to our insistence at the time. In a sense, it was indeed possible for the network to have faster confirmation at the time. No matter whether it is DPOS or PBFT, it may be that the time of the block will become very short, and this is also a balance in the long run. If the block time becomes very short, the nodes of the network will become very large, and there are only a few people who can run the network in the end. I think the number of full nodes in many projects may be few, which is not necessarily long-term, which is a good thing. I think the industry still has a lot of design issues and time to verify.
Binance Yingge: In comparison, do you think there are any competitive or comparable projects?
Patrick Dai: I think there is. In this industry, there are a lot of entrepreneurs. Then I believe that everyone is doing something with a certain positioning and some things with different positioning. From the initial design concept, we continued to learn Ethereum, which was continuously designed in 2013 and released in 2015. Since we only started to do blockchain projects in 2016, Ethereum is also an object of our learning.
In September 2017, our main focus was to go online. Since then, there have been more and more blockchain projects in China. I think everyone is not a complete competitor. Still, perhaps everyone in the industry can continue to learn because many blockchain projects in many industries should be open source projects. The first issue of the coin was not Ethereum, but every one issued a lot of coins on the Bitcoin network. Later, on Ethereum, everyone issued a variety of tokens, which also creates opportunities and related factors. I think there are indeed many homogeneous competitions in this industry so far, which relates to the early stage of the industry. It is also difficult to promote any breakthrough in this industry by one project alone. I believe for this industry to have a significant breakthrough; it may require many projects in the industry to develop continually.
Binance Yingge: This year is almost half over soon. Will you start doing some activities that may make the Qtum blockchain more promoted in the second half of the year?
Patrick Dai: We have been doing a lot of activities on Twitter, and we may indeed have done less in China because we have nearly 200,000 real fans on Twitter who have always been very involved. We also do a lot of AMA activities. We will also focus on offline staking in the second half of the year. The Foundation will also launch a corresponding incentive mechanism and will devote some funds and resources to do more marketing and promotion inside and outside Shanghai.
Binance Yingge: Do you have any more down-to-earth thoughts about the market and trends in the second half of the year?
Patrick Dai: I think that everyone involved in this industry should have a strong appreciation of risk. Perhaps many people are involved in this industry because they feel this industry is close to the money. Many are not entrepreneurs nor in blockchain companies, but many are traders in this industry. I believe it is essential to have a powerful sense of risk. It is difficult for the project side to affect this market when there are a lot of misunderstandings. They will think that the Bitcoin project side will affect the Bitcoin market. Yes, it is complicated for the Bitcoin development team to influence the Bitcoin market. For many projects that have been around for several years, it’s difficult for the project side to influence this market. Some innovations done by the project side may indirectly have some effect on the market. It depends on the things the project side does in the long and short term. Many things on the project side do not have much impact on the market and more are related to the market cycle.
The entire cryptocurrency industry has developed to a particular stage. In the future, I feel that it will become more and more. Trading players in the market are becoming more and more professional. There are even many, such as some trading institutions or special trading teams on Wall Street, that will continue to enter this industry like any other financial market. It will gradually become more compliant and specialized in this market.
In addition to studying cryptocurrencies, everyone must pay attention to global financial markets and even some macro changes. These will also have a tremendous impact on the entire cryptocurrency industry. The wave of rising and falling in early February 2020 is very similar to the stock market disaster in 2015. If you pay attention, it will also have an extensive linkage with the global financial market. Bitcoin’s trend and Nasdaq’s trend are very consistent in the past. Is that where the influential players in this market come from? In essence, the entire cryptocurrency industry dominates in U.S. dollars in financial trading products. The anchor object for everyone is the corresponding USDT. It is no longer a stock denominated in RMB, Euro or Japanese yen. I think it denominates in U.S. dollars. Stocks like dollar-denominated stocks pay more attention to changes in overseas financial markets.
Binance Yingge: Friends are asking, do you have any regrets in cryptocurrency?
Patrick Dai: The last thing I regretted was in 2018. At that time, I was in a hurry to support the ecosystem and made a lot of bad investments. It was not only a loss of money, but I think it was also a great lesson for me. As a result, I have carried a lot of heavy bags, which is something I regret.
At that time, I didn’t realize one thing, that there was nothing special about this industry. In fact, most entrepreneurs are not successful and 99% of projects die, especially at the stage of seed investment or angel investment, because this is the rule. In a sense, many DeFi projects that we incubated at that time were not even launched on Qtum.
In fact, many of the projects supported by Ethereum in early 2016 and 2017 are silent today, and many of the projects financed by Ethereum are silent today.
Binance Yingge: Some questions are asking about distributed storage projects, what is this?
Patrick Dai: We have done quite a lot of research on Filecoin, and overall, it is still quite optimistic. It will always bring some changes to the industry. In a sense, Ethereum has solved the issue of issuing tokens on the blockchain. Filecoin addresses the needs for future storage. There will indeed be real cases and applications that will be born on Filecoin. I think it is quite optimistic.
Binance Yingge: Do you have any views on other distributed storage projects?
Patrick Dai: It’s more challenging to make a complete public blockchain or project today than two or three years ago. It’s indeed because the time is changing, and the timing may not be the same. That is because Filecoin itself has some more luxurious teams. The team is indeed large, including the support of some resources from many groups, and the probability of success may be more significant.
Binance Yingge: Can cross-chain be realized? Is it a false proposition?
Patrick Dai: I think it depends on the perspective from which you stand to see this issue. If people outside come to see this industry, they will believe that cross-chain is a pseudo-proposition, but people in the industry still think that cross-chain is meaningful.
Binance Yingge: Our live broadcast is over for today; it has been more than an hour of hard work.
Patrick Dai: Thank you all!
Original article https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/-VwFDqwPSIWBrFVcpNL2XA
