A Note on My San Francisco Trip
I was hesitating about whether I should write this article as there is a chance it may offend some peers in this industry and, just to be clear, I sincerely hope it does not. But I decided to write this to clear my thoughts in order to better carry out our next phase of work.
To preface, before this trip, I spent a long time preparing and had generally high expectations. My true goal was to lay the foundation for Ontology in the US. Our community members may notice that I have shared this thought many times in the community and have even gone so far as to set targets for this workshop tour.
When I landed in San Francisco, the first message I got was from Silin Shang, co-founder of Huoxing Finance. He asked me a question:
From your perspective, which public chain with a Chinese background has the best performance in terms of overseas community and ecosystem?
To give background, Mr. Shang has always been a respected senior in the industry for me. He is a doer and has given me a lot of guidance and support. I replied, “At the moment, there isn’t an answer to that question.” My true meaning was that we might know after Ontology’s Global University Workshop tour in the United States has concluded. I gave this answer for two reasons: first, because you might say I have an excess of confidence in Ontology, and second, because, in my eyes, there isn’t a public chain with a so-called “Chinese background” that has fostered a bountiful community overseas. To clarify, I am not referring to any particular person or company, but simply analyzing the industry as a whole.
The Summit I Understood
Many readers may not view the word “summit” the same way I do. To explain my view, each industry has its own form of a summit. There may be only one heavy-weight summit over the course of a year compared to a number of small-to-medium summits. Each summit has a clear objective and the organizers of the summit usually take the following aspects into consideration: elite gathering, resource integration, clashing of opinions, and cooperative promotion.
After an industry is formed, there will be a number of summits. From a functional point of view, these summits can greatly expand the exposure of a particular industry. The people who participate in the summits are often early participants in the industry, such as project founders and industry pioneers. The people who initiate the summits and those who participate benefit most from it. They both share an initial goal which is relatively consistent. While promoting the industry to a wider audience, they promote their own ideas according to their own projects. Therefore, the quality of summits at the beginning stage of an industry is often very high, with many high-level participants. This could be observed in the Internet industry, traditional finance industry, travel and hotel industry, and blockchain industries.
However, slowly we are finding that changes take place in summits as an industry grows. We see some conferences get discontinued after several sessions, whereas others grow larger, but generally the overall frequency decreases. There are many reasons for this, take the rapid development of media platforms and industry iterations as an example.
In a similar way, some blockchain summits have also undergone some changes, and some have turned into events that, as the Chinese saying goes, “ have no apparent value but aren’t bad enough to be thrown away”. Often, the in-person situation is not the same as the situation posted on media platforms. As a general, a summit can be divided into several categories depending on whether they are organized by industry giants or leading media platforms and exchanges. You can usually guess the purpose of a summit by finding out who the organizer is.
The Summit I Saw
Looking at the San Francisco summit: 80% of the participants were small-to-medium projects and 20% were oligarchic projects. In this case, the two sides had almost no chance to communicate and reach a consensus. Most of the speakers who participated were KOLs in a vertical industry or related industries and most of the content shared could be viewed as general discussion. Looking at it from the perspective of a smaller project, this does not help your project and it doesn’t really promote the industry. Furthermore, when a speaker finishes his or her speech, only a small amount of footage is left for reference. Now stepping into the shoes of the wider token-holding audience that may not be in attendance, this once again is not all that helpful.
Another point to consider is the summit did not manage to catch much attention from the city itself. From the perspective of communication, the promotion and marketing of the summit could have been more effective. Speaking of this, I feel I should mention the Tron team. Through their advertising in the streets of San Francisco and the large food truck giving out free food to promote their project, they managed to boost the atmosphere of the summit.
It’s important to understand that the more popular and developed the venue of the summit is, the higher the costs of venue booking and catering will be. As a result, small-to-medium-sized projects have to invest huge sums of money as sponsorship fees to attend the summit. These fees may be taken from project development funds they exchanged by the issuance of digital currency. Imagine if they were to attend multiple summits each year; the amount of money that would be used to develop technology would be greatly reduced. If your project is not in the mainstream, it is likely you will face higher costs and more risks meaning the money put towards summits is all the more important. In my eyes, the costs of attending a summit are increasing while the benefits of participating are decreasing. This is because it’s getting harder and harder to join the conversation and create a dialogue with the core leaders of the industry. Without this, getting the right resources needed to join the industry mainstream is near impossible. Adding insult to injury, you will notice that 90% of the speakers and booth staff are not in a position to make decisions that might help your project anyway.
As a result of spending huge sums to attend and sponsor summits, small-to-medium-sized projects put themselves in dangerous financial positions, meaning they become more dependent on the ebbs and flows of the market to survive. But what happens when the next summit rolls around? It may lead to a situation where smaller projects cannot upgrade their technology as efficiently, resulting in more scammy projects. The truth is: summits are a platform for big players to flex their muscles, not a platform for small and medium-sized projects to earn a seat at the table.
How Should We Participate in a Summit?
Many projects may think that not participating in a summit makes it more difficult to build a market for your product. Personally, I disagree with this view. Gaining market share comes from a project playing to its strengths and fighting for a piece of the pie, rather than simply by riding the wave.
Take Ontology for example. While Ontology played a smaller role at the summit, we have been steadily developing our core technologies and core products, continuously providing tools that are easy-to-use and highly efficient for developers, with positive market performance in terms of its tokens. Because of this, participants came to our booth to get more information after they’d seen the latest news. Many community partners were attracted to the project, asking “What is Ontology?” and “What are you mainly working on?”. The key here is the Ontology team, including myself, were able to confidently demonstrate our technology and product, illustrating our vision, which I believe is the true value of participating in a summit.
In addition, because of the sheer number of summits, some well-known KOLs don’t even have time to update their presentations for their speeches. Truthfully, the arguments in the panel can be handled by Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. In saying all of this, the response of this event was generally positive with speakers from China receiving higher attention due to the recent news. The speech of Vitalik, which usually receives a lot of attention, seems to have avoided the public eye.
Therefore, the summit can be a mixed bag but, at this point, it may not be good for the development of the industry to a certain degree.
If we only judge the performance of the overseas user group and the ecosystem of public chains by the frequency of their participation in summits, I feel that we are bound to reach false conclusions.
Lastly, projects with a Chinese background should have their own core values. They should not switch constantly between overseas and domestic markets. This tends to make your most loyal investors feel lost and insecure in their investment. What Ontology is doing and will be doing is deepening the development of our technology, enlarging and strengthening our ecosystem, and further seizing the global market. This is not only because we already have a solid foundation in the Chinese market and occupy a leading position but because we believe that we will continue to accumulate strength, and perform well, standing out from the crowd when the next global market peak arrives.
To give more background on my state of mind, I began writing this in the middle of the night in San Francisco but by the time I looked outside, the sun had risen. The feeling of this technology-leading city inspired me to speak to you.
If you are reading this, I would like to say thank you for your time and support.
Have any thoughts about what you read? Want to tell us something? Contact us at contact@ont.io
Find Ontology elsewhere
Ontology website / Ontology GitHub / ONTO website / OWallet (GitHub)
