Metaverse CTO Chen Hao Talks about BaaS and the Internet of Value（Part 1）

This article aims to discuss the integration of public blockchains with existing internet applications;

1. From the Internet of Information to the Internet of Value

The internet of information refers to the vast, complex Internet as we know it today. Currently, this internet of information serves purely as a means of information exchange and does not have financial attributes — hence a trusted third party is often required to provide credible financial services. Information systems with multilayered architectures allow business logic and data access rules to be developed and maintained as separate, independent modules.

The internet of value refers to the construction of an internet network with financial attributes. This network does away with the need for trusted third parties (although they can exist), and currently blockchain technology seems to have the ability to make the internet of value a reality: blockchains have an exclusive nature and often intrinsically contain a financial system. When separated from this financial system, blockchains become a classic distributed system.

On the internet of information, the typical product separating business and technology is cloud computing.

Today, cloud computing has gradually expanded beyond its typical applications and is attempting to penetrate multiple verticals and industries to provide better technical solutions. A common example would be financial services solutions hosted on the cloud;

However no matter what kind of financial cloud solutions, they all have a repeatable and instantiated nature: factory A and B could both buy F application; however their actual operations will run on completely separate instances. There is no direct relationship between the two factories, apart from perhaps a small connection in their third-party intermediaries (O) such as banks or securities.

In this case, it can not be called the Internet of value.

To achieve the Internet of value, A and B could run different subnets on the same instance of application F and hence be directly connected; in other words, some of the services provided by third party intermediaries O such as payment functions (which blockchains come with) are no longer necessary.