Personal History:
- Eric runs Metaverse (Public Blockchain), is the CEO of the Metaverse Foundation and ViewFin Consulting, which owns more than 10 companies, including ViewNodes, ViewDam, VFMG (ViewFin Media Group), Finwise Summit, to name a few, and Eric is committed to continuous progress and developing a robust ecosystem for blockchain
- Having a background in Financial System Architecture, he first developed a financial matching engine at age 16 and first bought stock at age 18
- In 2014, he and co-founder Michael Jiang established ViewFin, a fintech consulting business that incubates promising companies in the financial services and technology industries by leveraging market opportunities in cryptocurrencies and blockchain.
- Eric is an early angel investor in many projects, including Ethereum, NEO, TRON, BitGo, Mastercoin, and more.
It was Eric who first invited Vitalik to kick off the roadshows for Ethereum in China. He made a joke that Vitalik became “the Vitalik” after he joined Eric on the roadshow and took a picture together.
Metaverse is devoted to establish the infrastructure of blockchain, digital identity, digital assets, and oracles. Eric insists that Metaverse only wants to focus on thriving as a “highway” for the blockchain industry, where many use cases and dapps can run smoothly in its infrastructure.
The following is the featured transcript of a CoinVoice interview with Eric Gu on WeChat that was hosted on April 11, 2019. Audio clips from the interview are available on the WeChat community of “CoinVoice Class.”
CoinVoice: Since you joined the blockchain industry at an early stage, what are those unforgettable moments that you would like to share with us?
I went to Miami Beach to attend a Bitcoin meetup back in 2014. Bitcoin’s price was not high back then, and there weren’t “gurus” who we could identify. I met Roger Ver, BM, and Vitalik there. Also, I found Chang Peng (CZ) there, and both of us were thinking of developing wallets for Bitcoin back then.
Nowadays, many of Vitalik’s fans in China call him “V-God.” I was joking that he became the “V-God” after I invited him to his first ever roadshow in China. He was then a 19 year-old boy, and I was impressed by his talks, programming skills, and his understanding of blockchain.
The second time I met him was in April, 2014. He rented a small office within the Chinatown of Toronto. There were PM’s, graphic engineers, and developers from Eastern European countries. In 2014, it was very rare to see this level of maturity in a functional and international team working for crypto and blockchain technology.
Vitalik was planning to develop a decentralized platform. I was interested in his idea and invited him to visit China, launching roadshows for Ethereum in six cities. That was how he started his trip here.
I voluntarily contributed for this industry, stemming from my personal interest. For example, I was working on the community Shanghai Bitcoin.meetup, which increased the regional craze and hype for founding blockchain businesses. Da Hong Fei, Ju Xie, and I made our meetups to Beijing in person to share our experiences and passion about this industry. I was invited to speak on TEDx in China to share my personal views about blockchain.
Then, we incubated FINWISE, a conference dedicated to fintech and blockchain. It was not a profitable business, as we always source the best service providers and venues to deliver high-quality services for our guests. It became successful once many people in this industry started to talk about the conference FINWISE. Nowadays, the newcomers don’t know the fact that we, ViewFin and Metaverse, were driving this business.
CoinVoice: As reported, you got to know Bitcoin as early as 2013, and you started to be dedicated to this industry when there was not a lot of competition around. Could you please tell us more about it?
Eric Gu: I was a software engineer back then, working for the Ontario Government optimizing its finance and taxation processes in Canada. The moment I got to know about Bitcoin, I continuously poured over materials for over 14 hours without break. I was so intrigued by it.
Correspondingly, I found the right marketplace and opportunities. I not only know how to code myself, but I also was exposed to the financial market at an early age. Not matter if this industry was new and unsaturated, I am good at sourcing information and found that market information was accessible to me. I realized that the financial and technical features of Bitcoin are advanced enough for the era. I feel called upon to participate in this market as my mission.
I learned the trading process by entering the secondary market. I bargained and the OTC person taught me how to do it. I sold my stocks and bought a lot more from BTCC. Still, I was not satisfied and decided to quit my full-time job and started my own business.
CoinVoice: Metaverse focuses on digital identity as you mentioned a few times in public. Would you share your understanding about digital identity, and what are the competitive advantages of Metaverse?
Eric Gu: Unlike Ethereum, where developers need to write smart contracts to be able to access the chain, Metaverse has a set of rules ready for entrepreneurs to use its functionalities by a single click. We are not willing to see any inexperienced engineers slow down the mainnet by embedding in unnecessary lines of code. This is a significant different approach than Ethereum.
Many people ask Metaverse, what are your dApps, platforms, and use cases? Well, Metaverse focuses on driving its technology advancements like an “optical fiber.” A considerate number of Internet communication, which we are currently using, is enabled based on the optical fiber produced by JDS Uniphase (JDSU). Just like JDSU, Metaverse is dedicated to improve the infrastructure of the blockchain industry. We are a B2B2C infrastructure layer blockchain.
Digital identity, digital assets, and oracles are the core elements for a digital finance system. Without them, the system can become obsolete. More information about Metaverse can be found in the official white paper here. Metaverse is developing this “highway” for the people to ride their cars and build their businesses, thus please don’t ask me how good those cars or businesses are.
CoinVoice: Metaverse is scheduled to release the “Binary Chain” system in September. Would you elaborate more on this? Apart from this new advancement, what are the plans for Metaverse this year?
Eric Gu: Many blockchain developers, they always want to resolve the issues on the blockchain’s mainnet. However, the core of blockchain technology is having an interweaving net of trust that can solve problems in ways other technology cannot. The priority of blockchain development is not purely about accelerating the speed or the TPS. Rather, we should look at maintaining safety and decentralization, along with increasing speed where we can without sacrificing the two former traits. These are the pain points of traditional finance that blockchain can solve, and Metaverse is well positioned to do this given our triple consensus binary chain.
There is a large portion of the market eager to witness an upgrade in speed. This is the triangle dilemma; you can have speed but not decentralization, or safety but not speed. Therefore, we will make Metaverse run on a binary chain, where there is a side chain that has the DPoS consensus which can handle the transactions that need speed.
We are proud to share with our community that we completed our developments on digital identity, digital assets, and oracle for the core features on Metaverse. So now, we are confident to develop this binary chain to hit our roadmap targets.
