Journey to the East — A Sneak Peak into the Chinese Blockchain Ecosystem and Learnings from our Tezos Meetups
At Cryptium Labs, we believe that for any public blockchain to succeed, including Tezos, there needs to be a healthy and diverse community that fosters a sustainable growth of the ecosystem. As expressed on “A Letter to Current and Future Delegators” and “Our Commitment to the Growth of a Diverse and Sustainable Blockchain Community”, our efforts in community development have been towards building a strong delegator set, as well as bringing down the barriers to knowledge for non English-speaking communities.
Given that Chinese is the most spoken language in the world and the potential size of the Chinese-speaking blockchain community, we thought it would be reckless to ignore and always wondered why we, and most projects in the blockchain industry, knew so little about them. How does the blockchain landscape look since September 2017's ICO ban? What kind of projects are based in China? Do people know about Proof-of-Stake? Do people know about Tezos and other Proof-of-Stake projects?
Following our plans to develop the Chinese-speaking community and our intent to find answers to our questions, Adrian Brink, Christopher Goes, and I embarked on our journey to the East. With this story, we want to give the reader a sneak peek into how the blockchain landscape looks like in that corner of the world.
Shanghai (上海)
With a population of more than 24 million within the municipality, Shanghai is known for being the financial centre of Mainland China and, every year during September, hosting thousands of attendees of Global Blockchain Summit from around the world. This year, researchers from UC Berkeley, MIT and Stanford, and leaders of prominent projects, such as Interchain Foundation’s Cosmos, Polkadot or dfinity-network have given talks, be it on consensus, Proof-of-Stake, scalability, interoperability or privacy research.
Shanghai is not just a city for conferences, it is the home base of Wanxiang Blockchain Labs, the Wanxiang Holdings’ non-profit arm that organises GBS, hackathons and other blockchain-related events. Wanxiang is known as one of the major bodies for financial support and incubator of Chinese blockchain initiatives.
Regardless of being known for financial activities, the city is also home to the core developers of the IRISnet, a blockchain project that leverages Tendermint’s BFT consensus, as well as Cosmos’ variant of Proof-of-Stake. The Iris Network serves as the infrastructure and platform for iServices, fostering decentralised applications that are built by teams located within this geographical area. As a Proof-of-Stake network, the project has launched its own competition to incentivise validating nodes to participate, named the Game of Genesis.
Beijing (北京)
As opposed to Shanghai, Beijing is often referred as the technological centre of Mainland China. There are many blockchain projects based in the capital, but during our brief stay, we only met Block Squared, an events and community development company; Tokenview, a multi-blockchain block explorer; MIX Labs, a blockchain research center; and Wetez, one of the few Tezos-focused projects in China that built wallet and is a baker.
Hangzhou (杭州)
In comparison to Shanghai or Beijing, there are not as many projects based in Hanzhou. We were lucky enough to be invited to Chengdu hotpot by the Nervos Network’s team. Nervos is a recent project, building its own blockchain with a re-designed architecture with the goal of solving scalability, led by not-so-new founders in the Blockchain industry. Among the founding team, there is Jan Xie, former core developer and researcher of Ethereum, focused on scalability topics, and co-founder of Cryptape & Ethfans; Terry Tai, who co-founded Yunbi, a cryptocurrency exchange; and Daniel Lv, former CTO of imToken and Yunbi.
Tezos Meetups
Right after GBS was over, we hosted our first Tezos meetup in China, with the help of Block Squared. The event was held at People Squared, a chain of co-working spaces present in Mainland China’s major cities. The agenda we prepared for the event had two parts: the first one with lecture-like talks and the second one was hands-on sessions addressed to developers. Talks were given in English and were supported by slides, which were written in both English and Chinese, translated by the HiBlock team, a technical community development team also based out of Beijing.
The Agenda
The slides used for all the meetups can be found in our GitHub. The topics we covered were:
- Introduction to Cryptium Labs and the three pillars at the core of our team: Validation, setting up secure and available validation services for many networks; development/research, building open-source tooling for networks, both for other validators and application developers and conducting research into e.g. how to improve security in PoS networks; and community, distill what’s most important from the previous and communicate it in an easy to understand and accessible way.
- Introduction to blockchain and consensus, which covered explanations on what a state machine is, what a distributed ledger is and what is interesting for, double-spend problem, the origins of Byzantine Fault Tolerance, Proof-of-Authority, Proof-of-Work, and Proof-of-Stake.
- Variants of Proof-of-Stake, which introduced and compared basic features of Delegated PoS (EOS), Liquid PoS (Tezos), Bonded PoS (Cosmos), and Nominated PoS (Polkadot).
- Introduction to Tezos: Brief history of the project, basics of the protocol, the economics, ecosystem and existing tools.
The workshop covered two main topics:
- Understanding the different parts of the Tezos software stack, installing and running Tezos, create key pairs and receiving funds, delegating funds to a baker. It included a live demo and guidance to the basic command line tools and wallets such as the tezos-client, Cryptonomic’s Galleon, and TezBox Wallet. Participants who managed to install and run Tezos would receive 1 XTZ and be taught how to delegate it.
- Your first Michelson smart contract and how to deploy it. The smart contract included a small bounty for whoever was able to understand it:
code {
CAR;
IMPLICIT_ACCOUNT;
DIP {UNIT};
PUSH mutez 1000;
UNIT;
TRANSFER_TOKENS;
DIP {NIL operation};
CONS;
PAIR
};parameter key_hash;
storage unit;
In Shanghai, most of the attendees were business-oriented, in exception of a few students, developers and the Forbole team, a project based in Hong Kong that is also interested in becoming a Tezos baker. In Beijing we were lucky enough to meet Wetez, one of the few Tezos-focused projects in China that built wallet and is a baker. Tokenview was another project in our audience, which is a multi-blockchain block explorer.
As experiment, in the Beijing edition we tried a roundtable: gather interested participants in a circle and start a chain of questions aiming to foster discussions. Finally, the meetup in Hangzhou was held in a café near the Zhejiang university, where the talks were adapted to the participants’ knowledge level and Q&A sessions were longer.
Hong Kong (香港) & Tezos Asia Leadership Summit
A detour to Hong Kong was a spontaneous decision after we were reached out by Tezos Southeast Asia, one day via WeChat, without previously knowing about it nor the organisation team behind this event. Tezos community organisations based in Asia were invited. The purpose was to meet and discuss how we can develop further the Tezos community in Asia and how each of the organisations can cooperate. Besides us, the attendees were Tezos Southeast Asia (based in Singapore), Tezos Korea, Tezos Japan, Tezos China, and the Tezos Foundation.
Learnings & Moving Forward
After 3 weeks in Mainland China and Hong Kong, we learned that the Chinese-speaking community was not yet as aware of blockchain from the technological perspective, the attention still being on investment and its financial applications. There was a general lack of understanding of Proof-of-Stake, and from the four variants we presented during our meetups, EOS with DPoS was by far the most known project. Regardless of Tezos being the first reasonable PoS blockchain in production, there were very few people who knew about the project.
After our experience and interactions with multiple projects, especially after meeting all the community development teams in Hong Kong, we decided to reshape our community development strategy and focus on writing technical content, providing workshops and lectures oriented to developers and researchers. Just as we told Southeast Asia, Korea, Japan, and China, we welcome any input for the topic and contents of future articles, presentations and workshops.
