Ink Group: a group of literary and artistic geeks

7 min readNov 30, 2017

Despite the frequent bears of unfavorable results this year, some conservative economists are constantly trying to use speeches to suppress currency prices. However, the string of “digital addresses” invented by Dorian S. Nakamoto ashamed the traditional world.
According to 45 District (ID: block-45) recent research, in scientific utopia Silicon Valley, a large number of holders agree that next year bitcoin will rise to $13,000.
A whopping tenfold a year, this is a figure enviable to all entrepreneurs. But today a story about blockchain makers is still on the push. They are a group sample that guards the basic technology.

1. Images

Dubai’s violent sunshine went through the only few trees in the desert, sprinkling in front of a downtown hotel window. Tang Ling took off the suit, sitting in a swivel chair, staring at the K line graph on the screen, while readily grabbing potato chips to eat.

This is the first day the digital currency that he took the helm of goes public on exchange, which makes him feel excited and nervous when he came back from Russia, South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan and the United Kingdom.

Let’s push the lens away, and focus on Beijing. Chen Chang just concluded a meeting, and rushed to the next one. He was the target of four start-ups because of his experience of building up an alliance chain in IBM, but the Tsinghua man, who grew up with pianos and likes rap artist Eminem, decided to land on Tangling’s literary and artistic planet.

The deeper reason is that he has seriously brainstormed the speculative games in the blockchain and tried to reconstruct the “dark jungle law” in The Three-Body Problem with “suspicion chain”. This action mentally collided with Tang Ling, who had run for “science male voice” in the university age.

4000 km south of Beijing, the lens captured the moment that Hao Yiou just walked down the pulpit. Singapore is a place where he had spent four years studying. He was once depressed by Nanyang Technological University’s neatly unified value statues. But now he revisits with a romantic blockchain project.

This time he negotiated with the Singapore IP Department as a co-founder. In accordance with the idea of Tang Ling, he wants to get the entire ASEAN IP data by next March.

Then let’s look through the Malacca Strait, turn our eyes to the old financial capital of London. This year, two British young graduates from Saïd Business School, University of Oxford are now checking, and a cross-chain technical team from Imperial College London and University of Cambridge are awaiting them.

A few months ago, they met Tang Ling at a meeting on the top Asian blockchain project, which was jointly organized by Oxford Brookes University, Oxford Blockchain Association and the Business School Network.

In the United Kingdom, self-developed blockchain products are extremely scarce, so this meeting allowed them to quickly find resonance in this romantic startup story.

The lens cannot focus each picture one by one, as well as the Russian technical team. The 5 geeks who once made a matching engine for Bitfinex and made a wallet to Hitbtc, one of the top three European exchanges. They were recently inspired by the story from China and joined the cooperation.

It is the INK story that touches many romantic geeks.

2. Impression

INK’s predecessor is the InkChain, from the name you can see the project’s cultural genes. According to Tang Ling team’s idea, the project has always been focusing on the original contents of different cultural circles, participating in big IP operations and striving to lower the threshold of cultural IP investment.

In the InkChain era, this is also a public chain project. Considering that the original content of different cultural regions will be varied because of the complexity of ecological scenes, INK made further innovations and adopted a strategy of “global localization.”

Under this structure, INK will customize, deploy and operate multiple sovereign alliance chains across different cultures around the world. Each sovereign alliance chain will become the distributed infrastructure for the local original content industry, focusing on the “localization” of commercial networks. At the same time, in order to solve the problem of relative closure and isolation of each alliance chain, INK proposed a cross-chain protocol of sovereign alliance chain and reliable public chain, as the technical focus on linking different cultural circles around the world. Firstly, it provides Interoperability for INK alliance chain and Qtum public chain.

Compared to the current INK, Tang Ling does not deny the dilemma encountered by InkChain in the past: “On the one hand, we find it very difficult for enterprises to accept data sharing on chain unless there are some very strong industry background resources. On the other hand, as the evidence of authenticity, the traditional courts have no legal precedent on affirming blockchain authentic rights. Now it is a new gameplay, I hope it can become a demonstration effect. “

Under this new game, INK and 50 plus content platforms have achieved the authentic right of data content sharing on chain. More than 30 million IPs will be reached and two open source services will be launched in December.

According to the new design, “reliable sovereignty” means that there are authoritative nodes involved in the endorsement. Government agencies, semi-government agencies jointly participate in the formation of credible data.

However, at present, in addition to the Singapore IP department contract, Tang Ling did not disclose to block-45 what other specific nodes are involved.

Although INK’s concept is full of humanistic concern, it is essentially a technical architecture with multi-center, weak-center protocol layer. It is based on a secondary development of a super account fabric 1.0, which was released in July this year.

“We’ve added a lot of modules, a lot of changes, and we’ve also used the very popular Container technology in industry, including Kubernetes, to help keep the sovereign chains around the world running.” Chen Chang’s said to block-45.

He emphasized that sovereign chains are highly customized to match different environments, and different modules and functions can be used to develop different contents in different regions so as to meet local needs. “Sovereign alliance chains not only support many functions that fabric does not support, but also provide the cultural industry with many related services and applications, including registration, authenticity and so on.

3. Spirit

In the recruitment process, INK mainly focuses on the global coverage, which of course aims at using talents resumes for the endorsement of the project feasibility.

It is known that at present, the entire technical team has 25 people, accounting for half of the total number of the company, most of them are post-90s. The team is scattered in different places, including domestic cities Beijing and Xi’an. And the foreign countries recruitments are mainly in Britain and Russia, Japan, South Korea and Singapore.

Chen Chang told block-45 that most of the domestic members are cryptographic geeks, and they came from Tsinghua University, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an Electronic Science University and National Defense University. They emphasize more on the innovation of the basic protocol.

“The entire British team now has 10 people. As the global PR and cultural hub, UK will be a place to set the future trading platform for cultural assets. This technical team has once worked for Microsoft, doing performance optimization, and accelerated cloud computing for IBM. It is a geeks team and research team to provide technological solutions, focusing on how to develop cross-chain technology and how to optimize the chains speed.” Tang Ling said.

Interestingly, although INK character label is literary, western style, but in the recruitment, it rarely employs post-80s.

“ At the beginning, most of them are post-90s, because they are better at making some innovations in protocols, or upgrading and making breakthroughs in blockchain technology. But after our project became bigger, we had maintenance, security and other issues, which our young team does not have enough experiences to deal with, so we deliberately absorb some post-80 technological veterans.

This inclusiveness has also become a symbol of the product, the team even have to pay an extra price on it. According to Chen Chang, INK not only advocates open source at the code level, but also plans to build an open platform for developers. “This platform is not necessary in the system, and it also has some development costs. However, we want to stick to the idea of open source.”

It is reported that this developer platform is equivalent to a set of web services. Developers just need to simply apply, and then they can generate a blockchain development environment and get a smart contract with one touch of button. “The platform not only serves INK, but also adds other blockchains to integrate into the ecosystem of the blockchain developers. That will help geeks to do blockchain development in a simpler way without concern for the underlying operation and maintenance process “

However, these romantic geeks have some obstacles in front of them. The bigger problem is the performance. block-45 learns that although INK’s performance has been significantly improved itself, there are still higher requirements for data processing when encountering a large number of anonymous users’ data registrations and the larger needs of content distribution.