LOVE NEO Episode 10: Interview with NEO-NEXT
To better introduce the projects in NEO ecosystem and share the project progress with the community, NEO conducted a series of interviews with the core teams of various projects under the name of LOVE NEO. You can find the edited transcripts of the interview below.
Q
Let’s welcome the founder of ExChain, and also the co-founder of NEO-NEXT — Edison! Edison can you do a short introduction to yourself and say hi to our audience!
Edison
Hi, I am Edison. I am in charge with most of the things happening in the community. First start with we established NEXT community, the entire developer community became very passionate, and we all feel the sense of belonging.
Q
Let’s talk about the team of NEXT community and its products!
Edison
Actually, ourselves are an internet develop team, till now we have about 25 to 26 developers. In the early stage, we were doing some blockchain related peripheral products. In 2017 we joined immediately after we heard about it. From the product aspect, our community have made a series of products, also projects, developers are also formed small groups to make product they interested in making. We also have developed tool type products, like browser, built-in wallet, including some applications, such as the one record people stand somebody up, our friends form NEO might have used these apps before lol.
Q
Do you offer salary to people form the community?
Edison
Our community can be separated to two situations. One is people joined by volunteering, we usually offer some welfare, but not salary.
Q
Lol, is that because they have belief in NEO.
Edison
LOL yes, these group of people joined because NEXT community’s formally established. We still offer salary to the early stage staff, because they need to do some NEO product development, learn some NEO underlying technology, and also some very stringent KPI task for them. These have to pay salary for people to have motivation.
Q
Why did you guys pick NEO，this public chain?
Edison
Lol, this was an interesting story. The core is, in 2017 we have given up some Internet business, formally joined blockchian industry, by the time we planned to do our own project. The first problem we were facing is, which public chain we should pick. We found that, we did not have many choices, including some pretty nice public chain that have not been published yet. So, basically was an either-or question, Ethereum or NEO.
We feel like Ethereum is not suitable for our product and application scenarios. For example, in one of our little scenario, there will a lot of micropayments, at that time Ethereum does not fit our high frequent needs, but NEO does. Also, speed and instant confirmation will both be faster. However, at that time we didn’t have any connection. We were just trying to figure out stuff by ourselves, after that we think there wasn’t any wallet that can be put away on NEO, so we made one ourselves. And then we found the browser wasn’t working well, so we made one as well. From then, we started to get more serious about what we are doing. So, we picked NEO from the project aspect. We know NEO from 2017, we didn’t even have the Hangzhou community yet back then, just people gather together to do stuff. After NEO get soar, we all thing we have belief in NEO lol.
Q
You have just mentioned, you started to develop our product is because you think our browser does not work well. About your browser, I have talked about it with your team, after I heard about its information I think it is an awesome product, can you share something about it?
Edison
Lol, first of all, I didn’t say other browser is not working, but some of our buddies think it did not meet some requirements, so I made one by ourselves. Up to now, we basically have received a dozen emails from NEO communities, from developers and normal C end users. All of their recognition we have received, have brought us satisfaction. At that time our positioning for this browser was, facing our fans and similar users, make some visualization stuff better, at the same time made it easy to use for beginners. For example, our community have some beginners who don’t even know what it BTC, but can use NEO browser to check NEO assets easily. Also, we also embedded this into one of our wallet. We are doing some application, which can jump straight to the query, very convenience. From the reaction of developers and some NEO community users, our data is relatively stable don’t usually make mistakes, this is pretty important. Basically, our product has never made any mistake.
Q
As for the test net of main net, to draw the data takes a large quantity. Compare to other browser, how much speed do you think is faster than other browsers?
Edison
My Technology partner sometimes “show off” to me, he said it’s about a hundred times faster than all the browsers we contact with. Also, the amount of data is pretty large, it can be shown from the data synchronization, although the data is huge, but we still synchronous in a pretty decent speed.
Q
I kinda want to hear you make some complaints about NEO, is there anything you guys were complaining while using NEO?
Edison
From we first joined in the end of 2017, we have faced 2 main problems, but all can be solved. One is, blocks sometimes get stucked during synchronization。At that time, we only have one option “one button restart”. About this problem, we’ve thought about many doable solutions, but considering the financial reason, we didn’t do to make it happen. Me and peter were talking about this issue, if we have enough money, we will make our server everywhere else. We have written an automated program, which able to avoid this problem from happening. Consensus node would not have this problem. I believe NEO3.0 must not have this problem.
There is another thing have small stir in coin circle — storage injection vulnerability，this thing itself does not affect the project and the amount of token, but in the display to show, maybe somebody will put bug into your token, change the displayed numbers, but not the real number. This problem has solved in the later time. These two problems were pretty impressive to me.
Q
You have just held the Dapp competition last week, can you share something about the competition?
Edison
LOL, Dapp competition have caused a lot of headache to our colleagues Nicole. Our positioning is very clear. We want to discover some team, to developer Dapp base on NEO. Our positioning is nor very high; we are noting saying we want a perfect product. Our purpose is to go to all these university, to make people who don’t know NEO, get to know more about NEO and blockchain, and eventually participate in to do some experiment.
We held our off-line preach in 4 to 5 universities, like Hangzhou Dianzi University、Jiaotong University、Nottingham University、Ningbao University. We covered about 10 to 20 universities. Some of the preach have pretty good effect, the entire classroom was full of student, most of them were interested in blockchain, but also some of them don’t know NEO yet. We were mostly encouraging but not strike to the students, and give them chance to try and play. The number of registrations was pretty good, at the end Nicole handed me more than twenty project for screening. I think this thing was worth doing, it was the expansion to the market we have not covered before.
Q
You and your team have made the wallet plug-in NEO Line, it’s also the first batch of wallet plug-in for NEO, compare to the traditional wallet, what it the advantage for it?
Edison
For blockchain applications, this form of product is needed. Just like the train ticket I am getting right now, it’s impossible for me to pick the ticket and call the bank make the transection, we need a convenient third party authorization to transfer directly, to process the interaction like making payment. Therefore, the method like plug-in, is making the product easy to use. I think this is something necessary to exist on the way of develop blockchain. Also, we are making infrastructure, if the infrastructure we are making is easy to use, this will covenant lite for people to join us.
Q
There’s a lot of people in our community are talking about dAPI, do you think dAPI is necessary to exist? Because someone said the existence of dAPI might limit the development of some applications, so why do you think its existing?
Edison
Few days ago, me and my partner were chatting about this topic. His first reaction is also think there are certain limitations. From the early development point of view, it will be good to make a unified product standard between the community, because it can be efficiently push the entire community to growth. However, when we reached a certain stage, all these products have been very mature, after some of the application development team has been familiar with all these stuff, I think maybe this standard will no longer necessary. For example, we also like to figure out stuff ourselves, but recently we are changing according to the original standard, because we still have something that didn’t follow the original standard, now we have to change back to the standard. However, each infrastructure team will have some of their own direction, so the things we can do is to take the c end experience into account, make some of the functions which truly easy to use for our users, more mature and more unified.
Just want to make a joke, we plan to make NEO Line the scale of Ethereum wallet MetaMask. Firstly, we believe NEO in the next stage, NEO blockchain and NEO ecosystem will achieve this scale, because now we are valued the area of business applications and games, while the amount reached a critical point, it will grow in a fast speed. Secondly, we are only focus on a single point, every developer community has its own point they want to take care of. It’s impossible for us to involve all of it, but we hope that we can make one or two stable product, with relatively large user base. We also plan to do a NEO line mobile wallet. We are thinking about if the effect/feedback is good, then we will focus to do this product.
Q
As a community, like Ethereum, they also have a lot of wallet and browser, how’s the browser and wallet make profit?
Edison
To be honest, we are not making any profit right now, we have not thought about make profit yet. Maybe I can leave my wallet address down below, to see if someone want to give us some rewards, lol. This is a problem, because of our early architecture, we have some base capital, our community is also incubating, our team is also focus on doing some profitable products. Our situation right now is, we are using the money we made from the profitable products, to make our team to participate in the non-profitable projects, I believe our hard work will payback one day. If the user number raises, but you still don’t want to rewards some NEO, I can only try to get some money from the application. But I believe people in the community is still willing to do this, as long as the model I use is appropriate, as long as I am doing this right, the scale is enlarging, I think everything will be possible.
Q
To conclude, “ME, Edison, send me money！” LOL. We hope you enjoyed today’s Love NEO! Thank you Edison!
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