Raullen Chai holds a Ph.D. in Encryption from the UWaterloo University of Waterloo. He was previously the head of Uber’s cryptography R&D, and was also a former Google information security engineer. He has 8 years of cryptography and blockchain related work experience. Like many recent hot items, IoTeX is a heavy technical project that focuses on the combination of blockchain and Internet of Things. It claims to be based on the blockchain public domain in the Internet of Things.
The main workshops include:
- IoTeX project introduction;
- IoTeX core team member introduction;
- What is the separation of powers and responsibilities of IoTeX and how to achieve large-scale deployment?
- What is “Mimblewimble” mentioned in the white paper of IoTeX;
- IoTeX how to solve the IOT device computing performance, storage capacity uneven and strong heterogeneity between nodes;
- In the architecture design of IoTeX, if too many child chains will drag the node performance;
- How to solve the problem of poor privacy protection for IoT devices;
In terms of project design, what is the expected TPS? - How IoTeX achieves anonymity in the transaction process;
Current actual development progress of IoTeX; - In which areas will IoTeX try to land and what partners are there?
Horizontal comparison of IoTeX and IOTA, ITC and other Internet of Things projects; - How to look at the current “public wave” phenomenon in the industry.
Reporter:
The IOTEX core team consists of the core academic qualifications, working background, expertise in the field, resources available, and what role they play in IoTeX.
Raullen Chai:
Overall, the team of IoTeX Co-founder now has six full-time members, five part-time employees, and two interns. The entire team members are from Silicon Valley and are an international team, not only Chinese but also from People in other countries are a very diversify team. Here I introduce six full-time members who are also core members of our team.
I first introduced myself. I was actually more of a technical and academic background. I used to do a few years of research on lightweight cryptography while I was studying at UWaterloo. After graduating, I entered Google. I was mainly engaged in security projects. Later I joined Uber and led a team to do cryptographic research and development. Later I came out and did IoTeX.
Another Co-founder on the team is Qevan Guo, who is also based on technology. He is Ph.D from National University of Singapore, has years of research in machine vision and AI research, joined Facebook as the earliest group of employees after graduation, worked at Facebook for more than seven years, and led a very large team , responsible for a large part of Facebook advertising revenue, this is his background.
Then another of our founders was named Sun Yun. Her background was mainly as an investor in Silicon Valley. She had previously operated a number of more successful funds. There are many cooperations with many companies and funds here. A very resourceful person.
The team responsible for cryptography research is Xinxin Fan. He is also from Uwaterloo University. He graduated from Ph.D. and has more than 10 years of experience in R&D in cryptography. Then he was responsible for the entire IOT and blockchain research in Bosch, Germany. Some work.
Then there was a full-time engineer, Dustin Xie, who was a doctor of USC. He had something to do with distributed systems during his reading. He joined Intel after graduation, and worked at Intel for several years. He is very familiar with the Linux kernel. , so he can join our team is also provided us with very strong technical support. This is the approximate situation of our team.
Reporter:
The name of your project is IoTeX. IoT I understand refers to the Internet of Things. What does the “ex” in the back mean?
Raullen Chai:
Ex actually has a lot of meaning here. First of all, it can be interpreted as extending, which means to expand and expand the industry of the Internet of Things. Secondly, it can be understood as explore. We hope to explore different development directions of the Internet of Things industry. The third is explosion, and we hope that the Internet of Things industry can With the help of chain technology, the real explosive growth has been achieved. The last one is the next generation. Now that we have Internet of Things 1.0, we hope to see the Internet of Things 2.0 form as soon as possible.
Reporter:
Can you briefly introduce your core team composition, including the qualifications of the core members, the background of the work, the areas of expertise, the resources available, and what role they play in IoTeX, respectively?
Raullen Chai:
Overall, IoTeX Co-founder has six teams in full-time, five in part-time jobs and two internships. The team members all come from Silicon Valley and are an international team, not only Chinese but also People from other countries are a very diversify team. Here I introduce six full-time members who are also core members of our team.
I first introduced myself. I was actually more of a technical and academic background. I used to do a few years of research on lightweight cryptography while I was studying at UWaterloo. After graduating, I entered Google. I was mainly engaged in security projects. Later I joined Uber and led a team to do cryptographic research and development. Later I came out and did IoTeX.
Another Co-founder of our team is Qevan Guo, who is also based on technology. He is Ph.D from National University of Singapore, has years of research in machine vision and AI research, joined Facebook as the earliest group of employees after graduation, worked at Facebook for more than seven years, and led a very large team , responsible for a large part of Facebook advertising revenue, this is his background.
Then another of our founders was named Sun Yun. Her background was mainly as an investor in Silicon Valley. She had previously operated a number of more successful funds. There are many cooperations with many companies and funds here. A very resourceful person.
Our team is responsible for this work of cryptography research is Xinxin Fan, he is also from Uwaterloo University, Ph.D graduated, has more than 10 years of experience in the development of cryptography; then was responsible for the entire IOT and blockchain research in Germany Bosch Some work.
Then there was a full-time engineer, Dustin Xie, who was a doctor of USC. He had something to do with distributed systems during his reading. He joined Intel after graduation, and worked at Intel for several years. He is very familiar with the Linux kernel. , so he can join our team is also provided us with very strong technical support. This is the approximate situation of our
Reporter:
As a whole, the academic level of your team is very high. Most of them are doctoral graduates. Basically, they also have some cryptography or distributed system work experience. But one thing I’m curious about is that you just mentioned that your team currently has full-time staff of six people. There are also a small number of part-time and intern trainees. For a team that claims to be a blockchain, there are only six full-time employees. Will it appear to be less, will it constrain the progress of your development?
Raullen Chai:
IoTeX Co-founder is, so we are also actively recruiting small partners with common hobbies and common dreams to join our team. Because in this place in Silicon Valley, engineers who specialize in blockchain are relatively hard to find at present, but we may change our minds and recruit some software engineers who are relatively experienced in the development of the system. This talent is in Silicon Valley. There are lots of small partners like Google and Uber who are interested in the blockchain and come to us for some interviews. In short, we are definitely now actively expanding our team.
Reporter:
Going back to the project itself, as mentioned in your white paper, IoTeX proposes a “separation of powers and responsibilities” concept in order to solve the problem of large-scale deployment. Can you give some introduction to this? And how does it have to overcome the immense variety of IoT devices to achieve large-scale deployment?
Raullen Chai:
IoTeX Co-founder is an interesting topic. There are actually many Internet of Things projects, and everyone’s practices are different. The Internet of Things we see has about two characteristics. First of all, it is a very heterogeneous computer system. The equipment inside is very large and small, strong and weak, and the functions, purpose of use, price, and so on are different. There is no way to make a big net to connect everyone, so our idea is to make a main chain, and then there are some different side chains, each application or each device is inside a side chain, this side Chain may be based on some of the hardware devices or applications specifically for some customization and optimization, in order to solve the problem of the heterogeneity of the Internet of things.
Secondly, the number of IoT devices will be relatively large. We now see that there are several thousand full-net sites such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. But if this thing can really be done, it certainly is not a few thousand. The number of companies, which may be hundreds of millions or billions, or even more, it is unrealistic for such a large number of devices to be connected to a large network. Therefore, we have only thought of using this so-called separation of duties. ) Each side chain has its own responsibility.
When we were designing, we did a lot of thinking about how we can take care of the heterogeneity of the Internet of Things and take care of the huge number of IoT devices. In fact, the answer is very simple, this thing is actually like the Internet, we know that the Internet has a backbone network, for example, each country has its own backbone network, but more often it is actually in the LAN, and LAN and LAN It is through this backbone network to communicate, so the entire Internet is actually a hierarchical structure rather than a flat large network. We are also similar concepts.
Reporter:
I saw in your white paper that there is a concept called “Mimblewimble” (“Mimblewimble” is a spell in “Harry Potter”). As far as I know, this concept was first introduced into the blockchain in 2016. Then I would like to ask, what is the goal you are trying to achieve by introducing the concept in your technical plan?
Raullen Chai:
IoTeX Co-founder First of all, I want to clarify that “Mimblewimble” is still in the early stage of attention and testing. It is not our core technology. It is mentioned in the white paper as a reference. But why we will mention this concept, this is a very good question. Because “Mimblewimble” has two major selling points, the first selling point is that its storage is relatively small, because it will not have a lot of intermediate state transfer, so its entire storage will be very strong; second, it provides a certain degree of privacy, It is because there is no transfer of intermediate status. No one in the middle knows this, so it also provides some privacy protection to some extent.
With regard to the “Mimblewimble” technology, once the storage is made particularly small and the privacy is particularly good, it is in fact consistent with our vision of the IoTeX chain. Then again, “Mimblewimble” itself has a lot of limitations, which is why we are now only in the technological exploration phase of it, rather than really apply to our chain.
reporter:
The Internet of Things has a notable feature, namely, the computing performance and storage capacity of various devices in the network are uneven, and the heterogeneity between nodes is strong. This is a significant feature that plagues the development of the Internet of Things before the emergence of the blockchain. In addition to the “separation of powers and responsibilities” just mentioned, how do you plan to solve this problem?
Raullen Chai:
IoTeX Co-founder is actually like this, we now have many nodes with very poor computing power, storage capacity, and connectivity. We need to do different things to solve these problems. First, for nodes with very poor storage capabilities, we wanted to make storage as small as possible while designing the entire UTXO architecture. There are several aspects to storage being small. First, each constant size needs to be made particularly small; secondly, it removes unnecessary intermediate processes (such as the intermediate state transfer process just mentioned); The records are all taken out of the form of checkpoints, which guarantees that storage will remain in the order of tens of kilobytes or even less.
Second, we also have some practices for the savings in computing power. For example, we are now doing a thing, we may use a new elliptic curve to do the cryptographic signature of the transaction, this signature is done lightly, while occupying a small storage, and then we will do before the scientific research Some of the work is introduced into the blockchain to solve its limited computing power.
Finally, there is a problem of its limited connectivity. This may involve even bigger problems. Afterwards, I will elaborate on how we have solved this problem.
Reporter:
According to your white paper, there are many chains in the architecture of IoTeX, one of which is the root chain, that is, the public chain; there can be many child chains above the root chain. Can you introduce the original intention of such a design? In addition, I am also worried about a problem. Just now you mentioned that the computing power of IoT devices is very poor, and the network bandwidth is also very poor. If too many child chains cause the entire network to be too complex, it will drag down the node where the original computing power is not strong. performance?
Raullen Chai:
IoTeX Co-founder actually separates it, but it will not drag on it. For a very simple example, from a storage point of view, if many transactions take place in a side chain, then the main chain or each node of each side chain or other side chain does not need to store a lot of stuff. This is a separate benefit, and of course there are certainly other benefits. As for what you said to me if it feels that such a hierarchical structure will increase the complexity of the entire network, I think this is a certainty. Any design must have deficiencies. Since we must meet this heterogeneous character, it will inevitably require sacrifice. Something depends on what is sacrificed.
In order to ensure the complexity and security of our hierarchical structure, and also to meet this heterogeneity, we adopted a variant of DPoS to make a consensus mechanism. The advantage of DPoS is that you can vote for some that are always online and trustworthy. The node is responsible for the calculation of the entire network, with the characteristics of fast packaging and fast verification. So combining this hierarchical structure with the consensus mechanism of DPoS variants can basically solve the problem you just mentioned.
Reporter:
You just mentioned that the Internet of Things is actually doing very poorly in terms of privacy protection. It is not only about privacy protection, but also the security of some data and device control rights. In fact, there are many problems, so IOT devices are often hacked. News. For privacy protection and device control security, how do you plan to solve it?
Raullen Chai:
IoTeX Co-founder’s question about security should be divided into two points. The first point is the security of the device itself, including whether the software on the device is the latest, whether there are loopholes, and whether there are loopholes in the hardware design of the device. In fact, this part of the problem is not solved by the blockchain.
Another security problem that can be solved through blockchain is the so-called single-point failure. For example, if you have a lot of devices in this network, if one device is attacked, then the characteristics of blockchain distributed can well compensate for such a problem. One node can’t, and other nodes can also come up. From this perspective, it can solve a certain degree of security problems.
As far as privacy is concerned, there is another topic. The Internet of Things is basically without privacy at the moment. There are two reasons. First, the control rights and data of all devices are basically stored in a centralized place. For example, if you use Google’s speakers and cameras, all of the data actually exists on Google’s cloud. Of course, Google will certainly not do privacy violations, but in fact this thing is not within your own control. Another problem is that everyone does not pay enough attention to privacy. Because the number of IoT devices is still far below the level that can be seen everywhere, this is why everyone is not paying attention to the privacy issue. If the blockchain can really help IoT rise, then privacy will certainly play a very important role in it. Without privacy, the rise of talk is nothing more than
Reporter:
In terms of the design of your project, how much of your expected TPS can be achieved?
Raullen Chai
IoTeX Co-founder Because we are using a variant of DPoS, assuming that every 3–4 seconds out of a block, each block has 3,000–4000 transactions, then TPS can easily do more than a thousand if This time to do some sort of thing, that TPS may do it a few thousand. In fact, we have many transactions that take place in the side chain. In this side chain, the TPS can actually be adjusted according to its own needs. Assuming it has a thousand TPS, it can easily be done in this two-tier structure. One million TPS.
Reporter:
I have seen in your white paper that you have integrated invisible addresses, ring signatures and other technologies in order to achieve certain anonymity. Can you make an in-depth introduction to this? And does this mean that you think that payments in the blockchain domain should be completely anonymous?
Raullen Chai:
IoTeX Co-founder first asked whether the transaction needs to be completely anonymous. This, I think, depends on the use scenario and the purpose of the transaction. Sometimes transactions may not be better anonymously, which facilitates auditing and censorship; sometimes anonymous may be better, such as hospital visits that involve the privacy of some patients, in which case it may be better to be anonymous; there is also a transaction. Only some people can see that there are actually some advantages. Only the audit department and the supervision department can see these contents. For the vast majority of people, they cannot see it. This makes certain privacy protection for the transaction. This is actually a Very good model.
Returning to our project itself, there are probably three approaches to the so-called privacy technology in the blockchain first. The first is Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC). To give a simple example to explain, if there are three people who are going to count things, each person first calculates each one, and then we communicate back and forth, interacting, and eventually each person may not know what he is calculating, but three. Individuals can be combined to calculate very useful things, which is called safe multi-party calculations. The problem with this thing is that the cost of its communication is very high. There will be some scalability issues in a distributed or P2P system because once there are more people coming in, every two people will have to do multiple rounds of time. Communication becomes unrealistic.
The second approach is zero-knowledge proofs from Zcash. This practice is actually very cool, but the problem is that it is too slow and too big. It is not suitable for the IoT scenario. So in the end, we only have a third approach, that is, Monero’s ring signature technology. The ring signature technology is actually divided into three parts. That is, for a transaction, the payee, the sender, and the transaction amount should be hidden. These three parts correspond to different technologies.
First of all, for the hidden payee, we must use a technology called stealth address. We also have to do some innovations for this technology, because the traditional stealth address requires the payee to constantly scan the transactions in all the chains to see which one is the one. But we are here to do innovation.
Secondly, for hidden senders, this is a technology that will use ring signatures. There is a problem with ring signatures. That is, the size of the signature is directly proportional to how many individuals are mixed in. If there are only three or five people, then the signature size is Fortunately, but if you mix in one hundred or one thousand people, then the signature may be very large, there is no way to transmit in the P2P network, so here we have made a constant size, no matter how many people come in, the last signature Size will not be affected.
Finally, how to hide the amount of transactions in the middle, for which we will use their latest relatively new technology called bulllet proofs. We have also had some exchanges with the Stanford team of their technology experts on how to implement this technology.
Reporter:
The Internet of Things is one of the hottest blocks in the blockchain in recent years. There are many competitors in this field, such as the internationally renowned IOTA, the domestic chain of things, the chain of information, the six-domain chain, the only chain, and Wharton. Chains, etc. Do you have any understanding of these projects? Do you mind if you compare IoTeX with these projects?
Raullen Chai:
IoTeX Co-founder I still have some understanding of IOTA and ITC, because I personally know some people from ITC, as far as domestic I know Ruff project. I think this is the case,
“Internet of Things + Blockchain” is actually a very big cake. Now that there are so many teams doing research in this area, there are so many funds and people can come in. In fact, this just confirms this point. When everyone comes in, it does not really mean who is going to beat them. Instead, they are exploring the different possibilities of this matter. The direction of each team and the idea of making products are completely different.
Our project is actually not the same as the starting point of these projects such as IOTA, ITC, and Ruff. What we think is how to apply the distributed features of the blockchain to the IoT industry, so that we can develop some of the above on our platform. Very good IoT Dapp. So I think that these teams and projects in the blockchain are not exactly a competition relationship, but more of a process of cooperation, joint exploration, and problem solving.
Reporter:
I noticed at the bottom of your official website that there are very many well-known funds or institutions investing in you. Is it convenient to make an introduction?
Raullen Chai
IoTeX Co-founder We actually have our own principles when choosing investors. The investors or investment institutions we choose can be roughly divided into three categories: The first category is institutions that have a profound layout or profound understanding of the blockchain industry. We are very willing to discuss with them how to jointly advance the blockchain industry and move forward. The second category is institutions with industrial resources. We cooperate with them. In fact, we hope more to get some of their resources or guidance in the industry. The third category is rich in community resources around the world. Some funds.