Looking back at 2018 — ASCH founder Qingfeng Shan

Published in

AschPlatform

9 min readJan 29, 2019

At 8:00 PM on January 10, 2019, ASCH founder Qingfeng Shan answered questions and communicated with the community through a live broadcast session. The following is the summarized and translated transcript of Qingfeng’s live broadcast.

Overall, the development of ASCH in 2018 is not very satisfying. ASCH made many new attempts and also many mistakes. In general, ASCH has not met our expectations last year. We have concluded the following mistakes:

1. Strategic missteps

ASCH spent a lot of time and resources on developing new technology. However, we now found it is more appropriate to do micro innovation, or something that the market has already proven.

In my opinion, from 2009 to 2018, the whole industry is still in 1.0 stage of blockchain. Everyone is doing POC (proof of concept), and almost no mature products can be launched or be practical. The only one that can be considered mature may be the digital currency market. People can trade, mine, issue token, build exchanges, manipulate market value, and even reap investors. This is a mess, and all zero-sum games.

We failed to see the nature of current status of the game, which led to strategic mistakes. What we always want to do and insist on is to create value through technological innovation. But it is for sure a long way to go, and the results so far haven’t been as good as you might expect from the ASCH.

2. Unclear product positioning

Side-chain is a good technology, but the business model is not yet mature. We are open source, so it is hard to make profit. In terms of resources, we have no obvious advantage over big companies like IBM.

Compared with smart contract, side-chain is heavier for developers. Even if we tried really hard to reduce development costs for developers, it is still difficult for them to operate and maintain. In addition, there is no proven business model for blockchain at present, which makes it difficult to implement the side-chain technology. We need more time to explore.

3. Partners

As you can see, we have welcomed many different partners over the past year. A few partners did help, but some wasted our prime time and some made us suffer losses.

4. Mistakenly pursue absolute decentralization

Old community members should know that ASCH had been pursuing fully decentralization. The pursuit of decentralization is totally fine, but we found it is difficult at this stage. We always need ASCH Team to lead while pursuing decentralization, which makes management much more difficult and complicated.

We’ve been advised to be fully open and run by the community. At this stage, it is difficult to let ASCH solely depend on its own brand influence and operate autonomously. At present, it may be a better choice to be led by ASCH Team, which can improve the efficiency of management. We are the main contributor to ASCH, and we have been sincerely working on this project. We hope that the community will take more responsibility on assistance and supervision.

5. Lack of business awareness

As an engineer, I focused more on the research and development of technology, lacking some business awareness and management experience. I have learned a lot in the past year, and will certainly make some changes and more efforts in management aspect.

I would also like to say sorry to the investors who lost money on ASCH. We made some strategic mistakes by not seeing the game clearly. There is nothing wrong with what we believe, but we are not smart enough on business and finance. Our original intention is just to create value for everyone with blockchain. We never seek profits by manipulating the market. However, we don’t do it doesnt mean other people wont take advantage of it. We’ll be more thoughtful later.

The following are some questions that we have been asked recently.

Q1: How long will the team’s fund last?

We have no problem to survive for the bear market, now we are still maintaining a complete team, with all positions occupied. XAS is not going to zero. I can guarantee that.

Q2: Is ASCH going to develop new public blockchain? like what BM is doing?

ASCH is the only public blockchain we are developing at this moment. We will neither develop other public chains nor issue other tokens until we are satisfied with ASCH. One of the most important criteria for satisfaction is really generating profit, and we don’t like zero-sum games.

BM is smart and skilled. We will learn his technology skills, but not the business style.

However, since we need to feed the team, we will explore some profitable businesses around the ASCH ecosystem.

Q3: How is the cooperation going for ASCH and BITMAIN?

If you read the news, you should know that Bitmain is also having a hard time lately. They’re downsizing and a little overwhelmed. We have signed a strategic investment agreement of 50 million RMB with Bitmain, but the investment is only implemented by one-third, and the latter two-thirds are temporarily suspended, which is not likely to be implemented anymore. We received the notice at the end of December. However, there is still a possibility for future collaboration. The business cooperation plan we had on the investment agreement is to introduce BCH into the ASCH as an important liquid currency and fuel currency.

This is the latest cooperation situation between ASCH and Bitmain. We will keep you updated if there is any new progress.

4. What do you think about the price of XAS?

We have not manipulated the price of XAS in more than two years since ASCH’s launch in August 2016. Of course, it can also be understood that we did not do a good job in market value management, which is a very big mistake.

We are also very concerned about the price of XAS, but we did not prioritize it. We spent a lot of time looking for capital and market cap management teams in 2018. But it is a pity that most of their requirements are too rigor, and ASCH has some limitations, some objective conditions are difficult to meet. ASCH is an old project, and it is very risky to manage market value compared with new projects. ASCH’s control rate is very low, the need for starting capital is also high. There are also some market making teams suggested us to lower the market cap first and reap ‘bloody’ chips, and it will be easier to do market cap management. We hesitate for a long time, there are really criteria we cannot meet, and there are also things that we are not willing to do. The best time to do market value management should be in July or August of 2017. At that time, we also missed the best time to cooperate with capitals. At present, we have not given up looking for capital, so whether there is capital or not, once we make progress, we will do a better job in market value management.

Over the past two years, we have seen many projects go up and down, some even turn to zero. There are also smart projects that see the nature of the business and seize the opportunity to make a lot of fiat in a bull market and then have strong resources to keep a large team working. But I think the blockchain industry is just in its infancy, and there are still a lot of opportunities in the future.

We also have a strong team and technical talents that have been honing in the blockchain field for more than a year. There is definitely a place for ASCH in the future, which I have never doubted.

5. Did ASCH lay off employees in the bear market？

We’ve had layoffs, and half pay cuts for everyone who stays. People we have now are both determined, telanted, and willing to grow with ASCH.

6. As an old public blockchain project, what do you think about others DApp ecosystem, like EOS, TRON, etc. ？

I have to admit that they are doing better on DApp ecosystem than ASCH right now. We had insufficient resources and unclear product positioning before, so we did not seize the opportunity.

However, as you can see, these popular projects are just doing small innovations on basis of Ethereum. TRON has completely transplanted the EVM technology of Ethereum. They’ve done a lot of optimizations and performance improvements, like built-in exchanges and improved developer tools. However, these popular DApps are mostly gambling or capital games, and manipulating fake volume has become a common thing. In my opinion, the blockchain application in the real sense has not been implemented. The current products are just the first few steps on the road. Of course, our team has learned a lot from the current market, we will soon deliver ASCH V1.5 and some other new products.

7. Is there a developer program?

The side-chain technology we were making is very heavy for current blockchain developers, and it is also difficult to motivate and promote, just like Fabric, it is nearly impossible for them to do incentive programs. We will release smart contract system on ASCH v1.5, and we will also start doing developer incentive plan after that.

8. When is the ASCH 2.0 white paper coming out？

ASCH version 1.5 will probably be released around the end of February 2019. The 2.0 white paper should be released by the end of March. Testnet will be tested for at least a month.

9. What is the plan for CCTime (XCT)?

We will redevelop CCTime based on the ASCH version 1.5 smart contract.

10. 101 delegates system has been paused for more than half a year, when will it start again？

We have discussed about the new node/delegate plan and determined the main direction and ideas already. We may not be able to release all the nodes in one time. It will not be like a financial product or a “business mutual flatter alliance”. Most node regulations on the market today fall into these two categories and I think it does not contribute substantially to the project.

We want to be able to exchange XAS for truly valuable resources. They need to recognize ASCH’s vision and long-term value, and the most important thing is to be able to take responsibility.

11. What is new for V1.5？

There are three points I want to introduce for now:

It has a brand new permissionless smart contract system that supports Typescript for writing smart contracts. Currently, there are no Typescript virtual machines in the market. Before we go live, we will release a full set of design concepts, technical principles, and detailed tutorials.
We have designed a new resource leasing mechanism that allows you to use the basic functions on ASCH and smart contract invokes without service charge by pledging XAS.
We will release our Chrome extension AschPay. AschPay can be used as a mini wallet or as an entrance to every ASCH DApps. All smart contract DApps don’t need to develop a login/register program. AschPay is both secure for users and convenient for developers.

12. Is ASCH’s cross-chain truly realized?

We have been improving the anti-cheating mechanism across the chain, and different anti-cheating mechanisms are needed in different scenarios. Cross-chain was originally a report given by Vitalik to R3, which was neither verified by the market nor examined by theories. We have been experimenting with anti-cheating mechanisms in different scenarios, some of which require that it needs a multi-signature to ensure security; Some of them require collateral, that is, gateway witnesses to pledge assets to keep them from cheating. And the smart contract we are developing is also to coordinate the cross-chain, otherwise the asset crossed over has nowhere to use. Therefore, we have also made some change on the Roadmap, we will develop some important functions in advance, such as smart contract and resource leasing mechanism. We will start a trial run of cross-chain functionality with smart contracts in version 1.5.

13. Where does additionally issued XAS go? How do you deal with the additional XAS?

At present, additional tokens are kept in the joint Council account. There are five keys in this joint account, which is mainly managed by ASCH team. You can check the account through the online wallet at anytime. In the future, if we operate jointly with the community, we can manage it together with the community. This part of the token is mainly used for the recruitment of future super partners, developer incentive plans, and for operating costs, etc.

14. What is the planning for the bear market and the year of 2019?

Firstly, we will keep seeking capital cooperation. Secondly, we will always insist on our original intention. The reason we started this project is to truly create value with blockchain, not earning money from users through zero-sum games. Thirdly, we will stop spending too much effort trying to be a pathfinder, the cutting-edge technology is suitable for big companies with the great resources and money. We will do things that have been proven by the market, and do innovation on top of it.

The blockchain is still in its early stages, and it changes a lot from day to day. We will not do too long term planning, quarterly planning may be a better choice.

Hope this live session gives ASCH community a better idea what is going on and what we are going to do next. We are happy to have people believe in blockchain and ASCH. Thank you!