Interview with Jack Lu, Founder and CEO, Wanchain
Wanchain aims to build a super financial market of digital assets, connecting different blockchain networks together to exchange value. Just as traditional banks are the infrastructure of the current financial framework, Wanchain seeks to build a new, distributed infrastructure of digital assets to form an improved, modern framework.
Hi Jack. Thanks for joining me today. Can you tell us more about yourself and your journey that got you to where you are?
I’m happy to be here. I majored in Enterprise Management at Peking University in China. I stayed in the financial industry for several years in China before I journeyed to the U.S. to study Economics and Computer Science at The Ohio State University. Then, I transitioned into the internet world where I became a software engineer for about 20 years in the eCommerce industry.
I got into Bitcoin in the early days around 2012, but only started investing in 2013. Luckily, one of my friends was organizing a fund in Austin, TX, and I was exposed to many projects. I was asked to look into a project called Ethereum at a very early stage. I looked at the white paper, researched it, and felt it was a great project. Immediately I started coding on Ethereum. At the same time, I was approached by several guys, my investor David Johnston, and my partner Paul Snow. The three of us started Factom, where I joined as the CTO. Meanwhile, I invested all of my Bitcoins in the Ethereum ICO. I figured if one of them were to be successful, I should be alright. Luckily, both were extremely successful.
I went back to China to start a company called Wanglu to sell blockchain solutions to local enterprises and the government in 2016. It was at this time that I started incubating the idea of Wanchain. We did a proof-of-concept and built a platform with Ethereum as the base with privacy protections added in. We added cross chain technology as well and launched it in 2017 with the main net launching in January 2018.
Who do you see as your peers in the cryptocurrency space? What other CEOs and founders in crypto do you look up to?
I view all the professionals in the space as my peers. The technology in this space changes very fast and we all must remain humble and respectful of others; especially the young guys. The young guys have fresh ideas and when new tech comes out, I go talk to go any of their teams.
I would say that I look up to Vitalik Buterin, I read almost everything about him when I invested in Ethereum’s ICO.
I worked with him for a long period of time, in fact, he helped Factom a lot on the whitepaper and technical solutions. He lived in China for about 9 months and we had a lot of opportunities to collaborate, both online and offline. He provided me with a lot of insights, on a personal note as well as on Wanchain’s project.
What does a typical day in your life look like working with Wanchain, as well as your blockchain accelerator and incubator, WanLabs?
It begins early, answering emails and collaborating with my global team. After that, I am typically in meetings with my business development and marketing teams reviewing strategy and hearing progress updates. Having calls and face-to-face meetings with potential partners and current partners in the afternoon, followed by more meetings or calls into the evening. I am working closely with the research and development teams to deliver the best possible products to the market. It’s a very busy and hectic schedule, but I would not want to be doing anything else.
If you could change one thing about the cryptocurrency space, what would it be?
The cryptocurrency market has been plagued by scams, pump and dump schemes and security breaches. People with malicious intentions have taken advantage of the ICO funding mechanism to raise funds and disappear. Millions of dollars have been wiped from ICOs due to a lack of proper security measures. New tools, measures, and procedures need to be implemented to ensure investors are safeguarded from future project funding rounds.
Could you tell us how the Wanchain idea originated?
The idea of Wanchain had been on my mind for a long time, since the days of the Factom project. We needed to connect a lot of data and different blockchains into some sort of network. Factom’s architecture was referenced by Bank of England’s RSCoin, a digital currency designed for central banks. The relation between a central bank and commercial banks is similar to the one between Wanchain and other connected chains. We put Wanchain in the middle and all the other chains were branches like side chains to it. So, when you send an asset from one chain to another, it goes through the Wanchain network. I think the future digital economy depends on three basic technologies, three pillars of Wanchain. One is privacy, the second is cross chains, and the third is smart contracts.
Ethereum brought along smart contracts into the industry which was a big step from Bitcoin and other projects that existed at the time. We can program real contracts on a blockchain between a human and human, a human and an institution, and even machine to machine. My vision is to expand Ethereum to the next level by bringing together all of these other chains, including the permissioned chains designed for the traditional financial world.
Assets will be digitized and put on blockchains, so we are going to have more and more chains being added along the way. We need to build the bridge to connect all of these different chains.
At the same time, we figured that privacy is important. When you have an open network, your transaction can be traced and that is not a good idea. We not only want to link to existing public blockchains but also to the traditional financial area as well. If their assets or fiat currencies move to a private or consortium blockchain, we want to connect to them too.
So, the key to Wanchain is “private, cross chain, smart contracts.”
What are your biggest accomplishments with Wanchain and WanLabs?
Wanchain
We are helping shape a new paradigm — the new digital economy. We are confident we can eventually connect various forms of tokenized assets across multiple blockchains. We foresee a world where public and private blockchains leverage Wanchain to exchange all sorts of value. The technical team is focused on the roadmap (Wanchain 2.0 integration with Ethereum was released in July and work on Wanchain 3.0 integration with Bitcoin is going very well). We are aiming to have the Test Net out before December. The big plan is to have a solution that we can use to plug into any blockchain (no manual setup needed for each integration).
We understand that connecting all the world’s digital assets is a hefty and complicated task, but we strongly believe that the ecosystem we are building will provide important frameworks for present and future projects.
I want to be consistent with our vision but more than that, the Wanchain team want to deliver on what we promised. Achieving our mission requires hard work, dedication, and compromise. We have a strong team that will continuously work for the betterment of the ecosystem. That is why we have set out our different entities (from an incubator to developer community to enterprise solutions in 4.0 release). These different entities will shape the way we do business. Having a strong community backing is a key ingredient to success and we will continue to nurture the relationship with our community. Having a clear vision, mission, values, and metrics in place ensures the team will have the essential information to efficiently execute the different tasks and responsibilities set out.
Scaling is very important in both technical and non-technical terms. In technical terms, scaling has been the big topic of 2018 and many projects, institutions and universities are researching on how to scale blockchains. Wanchain is also in talks with several institutions and universities to pool resources together to find the right solutions. This is a combined effort. In non-technical terms, scaling is extremely important and is often overlooked. You can build a blockchain that can accommodate one million tps but what really matters is whether anyone is using it.
WanLabs
While the roadmap in the whitepaper is quite short, we want to remind the community of the long-term impact that we want to achieve, one example being our goal to create a strong network effect. As previously mentioned, our focus is on connecting to other blockchains, the use of privacy protection, and laying the foundation to make it simpler for projects and institutions to build, connect and exchange value in the form of digital assets.
WanLabs is still in its infancy but we believe it is an important entity as it will help shape the projects of the future. We have already included a few companies that are now looking at blockchain for future-proofing their systems.
Through our guidance, marketing, community support and investor network, we offer part to complete packages for the different projects.
We are constantly optimizing our business development procedures and have implemented a process that is highly adaptive. This way we can keep up with market trends and include all sorts of projects in the pipeline. Wanlabs has received over 60 applications in the past month.
What do you think is the biggest problem Wanchain will solve and why is the problem important to solve? How will Wanchain change the landscape of the cryptocurrency industry?
The biggest problem that Wanchain is solving is Interoperability because there are so many blockchains that are isolated in their own silos, and they cannot exchange value (yet). We are making the digital economy programmable into one single network. For anything cross-chain, you must rely on centralized exchanges which is very limited for the future digital economy. We use private, smart contracts and cross-chain transactions to link all these assets from different chains.
We use a proven mechanism that allows us to connect assets both public and private chains, so that all the assets on public chains as well as assets on traditional financial world (fiat) can all be moved to Wanchain and then we can really move traditional finance into the blockchain world.
Not only finance, but lots of other digital economic activities can be moved on the blockchain. That’s a huge problem we are solving. To use a real-world currency as an example, every country will have exchange services for a certain number of currencies (USD or EURO) but for some countries when they deal with their neighboring countries, they have a specific need to have exchanges for a specific number of currencies. I think the same logic applies to the crypto world.
Without major assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum, for some networks or altcoins, they may have specific requirements to have exchange rates or trading pairs with some other specific set of coins. Wanchain not only provides infrastructure, but we will also enable the cross-chain capabilities with any coins and it’s up to these projects to find out what kind of trading pairs or special objectives they need. It’s up to us, Wanchain, to provide basic infrastructure for the developers to compete for the limited resources.
How long would it take an experienced developer to learn how to use Wanchain?
There are hundreds of thousands of solidity developers currently working in the space. Solidity is one of the most common programming languages. Any developer familiar with Ethereum will find deploying contracts on Wanchain straightforward. Currently, we are working with developers from the community on establishing a Wanchain Developer Community which will be a global community-driven establishment of solidity developers with the aim of supporting the Wanchain project throughout its development. The developer community will be composed of high-caliber community developers and Wanchain Foundation team members.
There will be a strong emphasis on our interoperability as well as privacy features. The support for current programmers will be done with documentation, Youtube videos, and tutorials. The developer community will organize these “virtual” and “local” tournaments for solidity developers from around the world. Through these various channels, Wanchain will put resources into ensuring current and future solidity developers receive the right documentation and tools to build out the ecosystem.
The ecosystem has to be adaptable and reactive. Enterprises are slowly entering the cryptocurrency space and are looking for guidance to build out their platforms.
With our developer community and our private blockchain solution “LANchains”, the foundation will be set to make development and integration simple and straightforward for current and future projects, individuals, governments and enterprises.
The cryptocurrency world has seen extraordinary growth in 2017 and 2018, what have you learned in the last year that will inform Wanchain in the years ahead?
The rise of the new digital economy was focused on privacy while remaining transparent and open to everyone. Instead of attaching personal information to wallets, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies thereafter attached pseudonyms. Wanchain has public transactions and public smart contracts which can be displayed on a public ledger. The Wanchain Mainnet (1.0) was launched in January 2018 and included smart contracts, privacy protection, explorer, and wallet. Wanchain has private transactions and private smart contracts that can provide several layers of added privacy to users. Here are some useful applications that can be built and/or used with this feature in mind:
- Private transactions for paying out employee salaries or other “sensitive” payments.
- Private transactions and private smart contracts for lending and borrowing.
- Private smart contracts for an enterprise that want to run “filters” on transactions and data without revealing any information. e.g. A bank wants to set up accounts on Wanchain but also wants to keep future transactions (data) private. They can display information on the public ledger but have their personal information securely hidden.
Public smart contracts are important for testers, auditors and users to verify there is nothing wrong going on. Paving the way for mainstream adoption requires the process for creating a wallet, sending, receiving, storing data, etc. to be simpler. That is also why we announced the Wanchain Name Service (WNS); users will be able to create a “domain” for their wallets instead of having to use the current system of numbers and letters. The launch of Wanchain 2.0 in July 2018 verifies that our cross-chain mechanism works in practice with similar blockchain codebases (Ethereum in this case).
We are making significant development on Bitcoin integration (3.0) which will effectively prove that our cross-chain mechanism works with any blockchain codebase; whether private, public or consortium.
2017 marked the year of the ICOs and the first instances of mainstream media mentions. 2018 set the trend for dApps and research into scalability and consensus algorithms. I expect 2019 to be the year of institutional investors, custody services, enterprise solutions, and governments from around the world on future-proofing their traditional systems, moving from heavily centralized servers to distributed ledger technology. I, along with the rest of the team, am working on all fronts to ensure that developers, projects, traditional companies, and future projects can make use of our expertise, technology and network.
We have learned to adapt to current market trends and have focused heavily on cross-chain, which will be the biggest topic since the beginning of the internet. Connecting blockchains is the key to adoption as these chains cannot continue to operate in “silos”.
Think of “blockchain interoperability” or “cross-chain integration” as the next big step for the blockchain industry.
Like the early days of the internet, only a few computers (also known as hosts) could connect to other computers outside a local network. Interoperability is one of the most important topics in the blockchain space. Over 1,500 different tokens and coins have been created, with hundreds of dApps, protocol layers, and blockchains. As many of these have specialized, we have started to witness verticalization of blockchains. I am starting to see a variety of new data storage solutions, financial data, medical data, and asset trades being put on the blockchain.
According to Wanchain’s roadmap description, Wanchain 3.0 will launch in Q4 of 2018, can you tell us more about the goals you plan to achieve with the launch?
For Wanchain 3.0, we plan to connect and be completely interoperable with Bitcoin. At the same time, we are working with other infrastructure tools to ensure the Wanchain ecosystem is optimal for future tools, dApps, and platforms.
Our main goal is to connect with Bitcoin and to prove to the community that our approach does work with the Bitcoin family, the Ethereum family, and most of the other chains in today’s blockchain world.
Once we have these two established, we can help other communities, developers and projects to scale up and to connect with the most chains. After 3.0, we will be connected and compatible with the two biggest digital crypto economies and we can host a lot of dApps.
Basically, all the tokens on Ethereum and Bitcoin can then connect to Wanchain to leverage the cross-chain and privacy features. We can support DEXs, host ICOs and many other similar applications. We can create financial applications like token loans on Wanchain. We will prove to the world that what we talked about in our whitepaper, although ambitious, can and will become reality.
Wanchain 4.0 is scheduled to launch in 2019, can you tell us some of the goals you’re looking forward to accomplishing the most with Wanchain in the next year?
Wanchain 4.0 is really our goal, it’s the last step in our milestones set forth. As we described in our whitepaper, this goal is to connect with other private chains. Currently, our team has already started working on this with LANchain solutions (Wanchain enterprise solution). When the system is ready, we can integrate without any problems because of the similar design between Wanchain and Ethereum/Bitcoin. It is very significant in the blockchain world that our public chain can be integrated with private chains, not only our solution but other private solutions, like HyperLedger.
We can connect to the traditional financial world or any assets that are moved to the blockchain in the private network. We aspire to connect the crypto world to the traditional financial world.
Can you talk more about applications that will be built on top of the Wanchain blockchain?
WanLabs is our blockchain incubator for the Wanchain ecosystem that focuses on blockchain projects that address real-world problems by utilizing our unique privacy and cross-chain protocols and building an interconnected blockchain ecosystem. For more information on our founding class of ICOs, watch our video on WanLabs:
What do you think is the biggest challenge or obstacle Wanchain will face? How do you plan to tackle that challenge?
The current financial system faces many challenges and as of today, over 2 billion people are unbanked. The crypto economy was created in the midst of the largest global economic crisis in history. Bitcoin was first introduced by the media as a digital currency that was driven purely by the forces of the “invisible hand” — supply and demand. Many pioneers had researched and written technical papers on a “trustless digital world” before Bitcoin. However, they were either incomplete, impractical or simply too early to be introduced. Under the traditional umbrella, value is only given to something if there is assurance (safety net) and trust (e.g. Paypal).
The inception of Facebook, TripAdvisor, Uber, and Airbnb marked some of the most important technological shifts. Without selling any physical goods nor owning the assets of their core business, these companies all depended on two very important factors for their success: Data and Trust. However, blockchain technology allows us to have a “trusted system” in a trustless digital world. Since the Bitcoin genesis block, thousands of cryptocurrencies have been created. The tokens, coins, blockchains, and dApps are all trying to solve a different problem. Wanchain was created to tackle two core issues: Privacy and Blockchains operating in silos. The issues Wanchain faces are of course in the nature of competing chains with their own cross-chain mechanism and privacy changes set out by global regulators.
I believe our cross-chain mechanism is highly scalable and offers developers familiar with solidity the chance to create countless dApps on top of leveraging the core features.
A major issue that is common across almost all industries is the mishandling of our data. “Privacy” in today’s world is an illusion. Privacy is a right given to us but is often misrepresented or abused. Data control and management are centralized and in the hands of various third parties. Especially with the growing number of digital applications using social media, our private data has become a marketplace for businesses. Our profiles, names, medical history, social media information, and financial data are not securely stored or managed. We want to do our part in the shift to truly private data while complying with regulation.
What are your thoughts on the crypto market, short-term and long-term?
I experienced a 90% correction in 2013 and 2014. I think people must believe in the technology that they are investing in for the long run. If you believed in it back in 2013 and 2014, even investing a little bit of money and leaving it for several years would have made you super rich. Nobody can predict the future price. It’s possible the price will go down further and that would be the best time to come in, and it’s always best to come in when it’s low.
The market will always over-correct. Stick with the good projects that have a good vision, and enough resources. They will survive the winter and come back even stronger.
A lot of people like to speculate. I personally don’t like that. I like to sleep better at night, and in this space, the best strategy is to stick to very few and invest for the long run. As long as they survive, the return will be humongous. You cannot even imagine that with traditional financial markets, that’s how I always recommend to others. I benefited a lot from this strategy in the past. Luck plays a small part, but you also study see the trend and you should bet on the longer-term trends.
Thanks again for all of your answers. If people want to follow the Wanchain project and WANLab Accelerator Projects, where should they go?
You can find out more information about Wanchain on our website. To find out more about our accelerator, WanLabs, you can visit its website. Additionally, you can reach us through Telegram, Discord, Medium, Twitter, and Reddit.
