Highlights from Hotbit interview with Metaverse DNA founder Eric Gu
On April 9th, after a successful 2-week voting round which led DNA by Metaverse to get listed on industry-leading exchange Hotbit, our founder Eric Gu got interviewed by Hotbit’s global community manager Daisy Lee. This was an exclusive live streaming event broadcasted to 10,300 members on Telegram where Mr. Gu provided in-depth information about DNA and answered questions submitted by the community.
Eric Gu is the Founder and CEO of the Metaverse Foundation and DNA, a Bitcoin Foundation Lifetime Member and an Angel investor for multiple projects, including Ethereum, TRON, Bitshares, Binance, etc. Eric has more than 20 years of cross border financial, government, and blockchain experience and previously served as a senior programmer and project manager for large enterprises and the Ontario government in Ontario, Canada.
Q: Hi, I am Daisy, global community manager at Hotbit. Please welcome Mr. Eric Gu! Firstly, congratulations to DNA, good performance on the second voting listing. Could you please tell us about your background and what brought you to the blockchain industry?
A: Good morning, it is a pleasure to be here.I am Eric Gu the founder of Metaverse. What drew me into the blockchain industry was bitcoin — just like anyone else — back in 2013. At first it seemed like an interesting concept, and about 40 hours of research later, I understood that bitcoin really is the future, and without any doubt, I jumped into this industry — and stayed there ever since.
In 2014 I founded my first crypto company ViewFin and in 2016 I created the Metaverse project (ETP) which is still running today. We upgraded many versions of Metaverse during 2017–2019, by adding digital identity, hybrid consensus mechanisms and oracles. After all this technical innovation, we thought about what will be the next evolution for a public blockchain? The answer was that we needed to increase the performance and we needed to add interoperability into the Metaverse public blockchain — and this is how the DNA project came to be.
Also back in 2014, I attended my first bitcoin conference in Miami where I got to meet Roger Ver and Daniel Larimer aka bitemaster, Charlie Shrem and many others. This was blockchain’s humble beginnings — and I was honored to meet a lot of the “big guys’’ then. We started the very first bitcoin meetups in Shanghai and co-founded Ant Shares (now called NEO) which I quit in 2017 to start Metaverse.
Q: Considering your technical background, what’s your opinion about blockchain technology? What made you finally choose the path of building a public chain?
I think Blockchain technology is the future. I’ve been studying the whole fintech industry and I believe it consists of the following elements: A.I, Blockchain, Cloud computing, Data technology (big data) and the Internet of things. Along with other technologies, blockchain is here to innovate and this is bound to happen in the near future, probably 3 to 5 years.
Under my watch, there are no such things as private chains; a real blockchain needs to be public. There are what we call permissioned chains like hyperledger where a group of big companies build blockchains together and in order to create an application on this permissioned chain you need to get permission from all these big companies. I don’t think this is a real blockchain, for me this technology needs to be open — like bitcoin, EOS, bitshares, ethereum or DNA, where anyone can build applications on top of the blockchain.
Additionally a public chain needs to be secure. DNA stands for Dualchain Network Architecture and it interacts with the ETP chain — which is built as a hybrid of PoS and PoW. We rely on the hybrid consensus of ETP chain making DNA very secure.
Q: At the beginning of 2020, we have encountered a lot of “Black Swan incidents”. However, Metaverse DNA has obtained the strategic investment from the world’s famous blockchain investment organization and ecosystem alliance Nova Club, which is known as one of the major joint investments of the blockchain industry. First, we would like to congratulate Mr. Gu for this investment. Could you please share some of your secrets with us on how did you manage to attract such investments for Metaverse?
A: Regarding the black swan, market turmoil in 2020, it has been a tough year. I think we’re lucky with DNA because we’re an online business and our team is very diversified in terms of geographic location. We have offices in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Toronto, Germany and we have developers in France and Spain so we already were working remotely and the so-called black swan doesn’t affect our technical development. In terms of marketing, we got hit hard, because we had planned to attend London, Toronto and San Francisco blockchain week where we were invited to speak, but unfortunately, all these events got canceled or postponed to the late second half of this year.
We focussed on building online and offline communities, since late 2019 and we had meetups in multiple big cities every weekend in 2020 across the globe. In China, I saw with my own eyes those enthusiastic fans of DNA in the hundreds in every city and we managed to get a following of 200k people there — I know it sounds pretty incredible, but I was there myself to witness and was very happy to see that. This is why our investors really like our project, because we have a huge community backing in China as well as in North America.
Additionally, if you look at our technological roadmap, we’re one of the most advanced blockchains there — we talk about interoperability, we talk about performance, we want to make DNA very fast — aiming to achieve 0.5 second per block. Blockchain is for two people to do transactions with each other without a third party and this all needs to happen rapidly.
Interoperability is also another important feature for public chains and a goal for DNA. Can you use ethereum smart contracts to move bitcoin, EOS or bitshares? Ethereum’s smart contract can only work in the ecosystem of Ether and that’s not OK. To me, everything in the fintech ecosystem needs to be interoperable. With a smart contract, you should be able to move bitcoin, ethereum and any erc20 token and DNA.
When investors look at our proposal they like it — and that’s why. The Nova group, invested into our project and we got good investment from institutional investors in the last month. I appreciate their support especially in such hard times with Covid19 touching so many countries and the market not doing well — it’s a vote of confidence to us.
In early 2020 we got listed on many cryptocurrency exchanges big and small like ZB, MXC, Hotbit, Biki, Bibox and we have plans to list on big exchanges like Binance, Huobi, Okcoin. Offline marketing is stopped because the events have been canceled, but we quickly moved online with AMAs in English and Chinese — so we’re keeping very active on the marketing side. On the tech side we work around the clock to make progress happen.
Q: During one of the media interviews, you once mentioned that Metaverse DNA, Cosmos and Polkadot are currently the three existing public chain projects that aim at making breakthroughs regarding the existing performance and scalability issues in public chains. However, instead of gearing towards the path of centralization like Cosmos or Polka, DNA chose the path of half centralization and half decentralization. Why?
A: Before, I thought that Cosmos and Polkadot were our competitors in terms of performance and interoperability features — but now I actually think otherwise. If you look at the Ethereum community now — they like to please the developer community; if you don’t know how to write solidity you feel alienated in the Ethereum community. Same thing happened with Polkadot where you feel like belonging in a developer community, rather than blockchain users.
With DNA, we think differently. We appeal to general users first, because they will become the end users of blockchain technology. This is how we managed to build a 200,000 members community across China, Canada and the US. Technology-wise, Cosmos and Polkadot delivered a lot of good contributions to the community just like Bitshares and Ethereum also contributed a lot . Being in this industry, a lot of the projects are open source. So you can actually borrow from each one, and DNA borrowed a lot of good technical ideas from all projects to build one strong, robust, secure and interoperable high-performance chain to give it to the end users to consume.
We’re still in the very early stage of the project, the token economy and governance can still change. The governance will be decentralized, but at the early age we as the founding team still have a lot to say until we deliver the project. Later on, DNA will have a democratically elected super nodes structure with 23 super nodes elected using DNA tokens.
On the marketing side and community building, DNA is doing a better job and I’m pretty confident then by the second half of the year we will be better then them. I still have lots of respect for Ethereum, who has 3–5 years of development and they are leading the Defi and NFT space right now. Of course, DNA will also enter that Defi and NFT space. One important feature of DNA will be a decentralized exchange — hopefully by summer time which will make it the most important Defi platform of this planet — fingers crossed!
Q: You have once shared with us that during 2020, Metaverse DNA is set to develop from every dimensions such as technology, community, market and real life application, and that Metaverse DNA is set to establish five key technologies by integrating Metaverse Dualchain with the strategy of “Talk and Work it Out”. Could you please tell me the progress of your development so far?
A: In 2017 I criticized some projects during the ICO boom, because a lot of projects were only talking and nothing got done. Metaverse was there since 2016 but we didn’t do much marketing back then and in 2017 we were already a technically sound project. We didn’t talk, we walked! We deliver on technology. That didn’t do very well for Metaverse, our token price didn’t go up — so at the end the lesson we learned is that we need to talk more — but also we need to work on it — and strike a balance. Not only that, we will talk first, show our roadmap and then deliver on it. This is what we did to advance the Metaverse ecosystem with the introduction of DNA. Many features will be delivered later this quarter and next quarter, keep pushing our roadmap forward with a goal of making this project the most important one in the industry.
This quarter we look to deliver the mainnet — the community can expect a fast and secure blockchain — next quarter will be including more features like the decentralized exchange, interoperable features and a virtual machine. Luckily we didn’t get too affected by covid crisis and we’re still on track. Be patient, and you’ll see great results very soon.
Q: After the “1024” incident, China is holding a positive attitude towards the applications of blockchain technology. However, “Where are the users” and “When will the real-life application be implemented” have always been the two major questions for public chains. As the representative of Chinese public chain, in your opinion, how will these two questions been solved in the next step? Where is the direction for further explorations?
A: As a public chain project, we’re borderless. We do have a Chinese team in Shanghai and China does support blockchain technology, but we realized quickly they tend to endorse permissioned ones first. Later on they might realize that all these assets, digital identities and smart contracts on permissioned chains won’t be talking to each other. All these chains would need to have interoperability between each other to transfer assets cross chains. That’s when they will realize they need a public chain like DNA with interoperability built into it.
I believe DNA will become a standard for interoperable protocols. All digital identities, digital assets and smart contracts will be able to use DNA to transfer cross chains. For all this to happen, this can take up to two years, and we’re already making progress on it. Additionally, the transaction fees on DNA are very low, less than a penny, so moving your assets across chains will be very cheap economically.
Q: From the competition of million TPS to the DAPP ecosystem to Defi, as the foundation of the overall ecosystem of blockchain, public chains have always been making various attempts under different new trends. Hence, how do we judge if a certain public chain is of good quality or not? Do we have any standards regarding the assessment and evaluation of any public chains?
A: Defi is a hot topic and a lot of public chains claim they can have millions of transactions per second. How is that possible? But for me the most important thing for blockchains to flourish is the number of DApps built on top of it. For example Ethereum is not very fast, but many Defi projects are built as DApps on Ethereum. Probably you heard about Maker DAO troubles last month, but this doesn’t hurt Ethereum because they have a lot more applications running on top of it. Same for EOS or Bitshares.
This is what Metaverse is working really hard to get to. As a public chain provider, we need to create the foundations to run these applications. Such as creating and issuing your own token. On Metaverse we have MST similar to Ethereum ERC20, which we released in 2017. Another important aspect is digital identity, which will replace private key and public key (nowadays represented by very long hashing alphabet letters, not user friendly) and this has also been built into the Metaverse chain. You also need the ability to write programs like smart contracts. Finally it needs to be fast enough (DNA .5 second blocks). Will DNA replace bitcoin? No. DNA is not designed as a cryptocurrency, for me is more like a token like Ethereum. Not intended for payment, its main purpose, just like Ether, DNA is a representation of the chain, and a way to pay for fees.
Talking about decentralized applications, our endeavor is to get as many as possible. Ethereum lets users create applications freely, but this causes problems. Because there are also low quality projects and there are projects being created before there are users on the platform. DNA has a different approach, we will be approaching good teams and ask them to build on DNA. Also, we have 23 super nodes which are like partners for DNA and they will also be talking to teams and help them to create applications in the DNA ecosystem. This way we can have thousands of DApps in a year.
For me the success of a public chain is not measured in its speed, but the size of the ecosystem which is measured by the number of applications built on it.
Q: According to the data of 2019, only 200 public chains survived out of 20,000 public chains, which means that during 2019, the survival rate of public chains was only 1%. Apparently, the data reveals a very cruel situation. Meanwhile, since 2019, the concept of cross-chain has also been very popular. Currently, there are already many proposals and gradual applications of cross-chain solutions available. According to your opinion, what kind of impacts would the current situation of cross-chain bring to the existing competition among public chains?
A: Every four years, there is a boom and bust in the industry. 2019 was a year of bust. 2020 is a year of recovery and I hope 2021 is a year of exhilaration. So whoever survives, like DNA, will be thriving next year.
I’m glad that the competitors are just giving technical solutions without building an interoperable standard. To me standards and protocols are even more important. DNA is spending a lot of effort on this front.
Q: It is understood that a lot of exchanges have listed public chains. What’s your opinion about this tendency? What suggestions do you have on this tendency?
A: If we take Binance for example — why would they want to launch binance on Ethereum and promote their ecosystem, when they have the possibility and resources to develop their own ecosystem? Many new projects now have the choice between using Ethereum or the Binance ecosystem when they launch. I’m not an expert in this front but this is how I see it: exchanges creating their own public chains are for applications that only want to use limited functionality of blockchains, like digitizing assets. The purpose of these companies is to develop their ecosystem, not providing the strongest infrastructure and standards. Unlike DNA who looks more into these aspects.
Q: Just as you previously mentioned, Metaverse DNA will launch its own decentralized exchange. Obviously, the competition between centralized exchanges and decentralized exchanges is unavoidable. According to your opinion, how should centralized exchanges including Hotbit face the competition and challenge?
A: Unlike centralized exchanges, decentralized exchange the users will manage their own assets. Also it will enable users to do smaller amount transactions, which are not possible on centralized exchanges that require KYC and lots of steps. There’s this idea of helping the unbanked, or simply just supporting small transactions (like 1 dollar for example) and I don’t think an exchange like Hotbit could maintain users like that. On the flip side, I met big “whales’’, who own 100,000 bitcoins and can only withdraw 1000 btc a day. Imagine! This is the other extreme — very small or very large amounts of tradings is the strength of decentralized exchanges.
Dex face different regulations in terms of KYC and AML and the exchange doesn’t dictate what projects can list their tokens. Centralized and Dex are targeting different customers, I don’t see much competition there. For DNA we will have a cool feature, where you create your asset and people can pay for it in DNA — almost like an ICO process — then with endorsement from supernodes you could list your token on our decentralized exchanges. That’s a cool feature.
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COMMUNITY QUESTIONS
There are three nodes in DNA, Super, Regular, Child. How are these nodes supporting DNA ? Is there any plan to add more nodes?
There are 3 TYPES of nodes in DNA, not three nodes. First of all we have 23 Super Nodes, the block producers and main governing. At the beginning the founding team has a lot of say in the project but then the governance will be transferred to supernodes. Then we have regular nodes and child nodes. Regular nodes will host a full node, meaning they will host all the data of DNA. At this stage we’re looking at 529 regular nodes and many child nodes beneath them.
Supernodes have many obligations such as producing blocks and voting on big decisions. A lot of privileges as well, they get block rewards and have a say on the direction of the project. Later on we will have a decentralized exchange, I hope these supernodes can act as investment bankers on the decentralized exchange. Those are some of the privileges and obligations of super nodes. We started supernodes elections at dnavote.com — we just finished the 6th round of supernodes election. Being early in the game as a super node means you get pretty attractive block rewards at this moment, just like early nodes were getting in Bitcoin.
Regular nodes are rewarded for hosting the full data of DNA and get a smaller block reward.
Why does DNA have two chains?
Metaverse started in 2016 and by February 2017 we already had a mainnet. At that moment we were able to create our own erc-20 type tokens, called MST on the mainchain. In 2018 we enabled the functionality of digital identity (avatars) and people could create avatars on Metaverse chain. That was the first blockchain to enable creation of digital assets and digital identities. In 2018, we added PoS (proof-of-stake) to the existing PoW consensus, making it a hybrid consensus mechanism. Then we thought.. Are we done? Is it the perfect public chain? Or is there anything else we could do to make it better?
The answer is yes, of course. We don’t have enough DApps running on Metaverse, and for this it needs to be faster and process transactions faster. It also needed to be interoperable with Ethereum, Bitcoin, EOS or Bitshares. We didn’t want our smart contracts to operate in a closed ecosystem. With DNA our vision is to enable them to work cross-chains.
Then comes speed and security. For example, Bitcoin has 10,000 different full nodes and Ether maybe 20,000.The more nodes you have the slower the network. But on the other hand, the more nodes you have the more secure the network is.
This is a dilemma. How to solve it? Some projects increase or decrease the number of nodes. EOS for example has smaller blocks because they have smaller amounts of nodes — but is that secure? The balance of Metaverse, is to use two chains to solve the problem.
One chain to solve the security problem, one to solve the performance issue. Additionally adding DNA, gave us the opportunity to create the interoperability protocol to communicate with public and permissioned chains.
Please also tell us about My ETP Wallet which is related to DNA?
I am very proud of My ETP Wallet, you can download a mobile version or use a web application. It is a decentralized wallet where you manage your own digital assets. It can host ETP tokens and DNA or any tokens that are created on DNA or ETP chains will be able to show up there. It is a wallet for the Metaverse ecosystem. You can also create there your digital identity and later on we will add the feature to hold bitcoin and Ether as well.
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