What enabled you to work out Ruff Chain, Roy Li?

Ruff Chain
RuffChain
Published in
6 min readApr 20, 2018

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When talking about the name Roy Li, many people may not be familiar with it, but when his English name Roy Li is mentioned, many people will say, “Wow, it’s him!” . Roy Li is a well-known hacker, network security expert, IoT expert, and master’s supervisor in Fudan University, and now he has many new identities, such as “Boss of the Coin Circle”, the investment consultant for a certain project, and the founder of Ruff Chain.

Roy Li returned to China from studying in the United States in 2013 to start a business, and he once served as the youngest R&D director of the Nokia Symbian System in North America responsible for the R&D of the OVI development platform and the Symbian operating system. As a master of technology, he used to be active in answering questions and publishing articles on Zhihu where he had more than 100,000 fans, he was called by the netizens as the “Zhihu Great God”, and he was known by many people for his uninhibited speaking style on Zhihu. He could always capture current events and gave praise or criticism. In 2013, his Zhihu account was suspended due to an article involving movie characters. He even disclosed his experience as a trainee in South Korea, astonishing the netizens.

In 2014, Roy Li started to dedicate himself to the Internet of Things and making Ruff OS, the operating system for the Internet of Things. It is said that the reason for him to make Ruff was simple — he found the existing embedded development to be too difficult to use and understand and to be unfriendly. Therefore, his initial idea was to create an IoT operating system that developers could immediately use to achieve simple and efficient IoT application development.

Later, Ruff OS won the championship in the venture competition of the 2016 Tech Crunch. At that time, Ruff won great fame. Since then, most of Roy’s articles on his personnel official account had been related to the IoT, the popularization of the IoT and publicity of RUFF OS had also become the daily routine of Roy’s circle of friends. However, at the beginning of 2017, Roy completely ‘retreated’ from the We Media platform, and was no longer active on Zhihu. When he came out again, he already had a new identity as the “Boss of the Coin Circle”, and Ruff worked on a new project called the Ruff Chain on the Internet of Things.

(Roy Li Founder of Ruff)

There was an article on the We Media saying that Roy even gave up on his dream due to the Chain, which shows how important the Ruff Chain is to him.

Many people actually understand Ruff with a small story shared by Roy:”In an ancient village, the villagers who can swim swim to the other side of the river to collect food every day and then distribute it to everyone. Suddenly one day, one villager feels very tired and wants to build a bridge. However, the other villagers think it meaningless. Only after the bridge is built up, do the villagers find that the people who can’t swim can also cross the river, so that they can get more food and make the village more prosperous.” For the software development of intelligent hardware, the tedious embedded development is like “swimming across the river”, and what Roy tried to do was to build up a bridge with JavaScript, so that common developers can get “food”.

Before the release of the product, Andrew, 12 years old, used Ruff to write a program demo for a traffic light and successfully operated it. At that time, it had been two month since Ruff was officially launched. Later, Ruff also tried its hand at business scenarios: A software integrator had a software project involving the Internet of Things, but the project hadn’t progressed for several months due to the lack of the capability in embedded development. After the use of Ruff, the problem of software and hardware combination was rapidly solved by only two engineers, which greatly reduced costs, and nearly 90% of the budget was saved in the R&D of hardware alone.

Differentiated work is indeed a good proposal. Although Ruff is originally an IoT company, there are still many people who question the idea, that is, how to achieve a unified programming interface for all hardware? How to make the brands all over the world reach a consensus with you? Why can Ruff Chain stand out in numerous blockchain projects?

Facing people’s doubts about Ruff, Roy said with confidence that: Ruff is a universal operating system that is compatible with as many hardware and communication standards as possible in the world to form a unified programming interface and thus to divide the employees of the Internet of Things into two categories, in which one is the hardware integrators who integrate all kinds of scattered hardware into one, just like Huawei, Lenovo, and Xiaomi working on their mobile phone solutions, and the other category is the application developers who only need to write applications and software when facing business logic, without worrying about how the hardware is implemented. In this way, the problem of the high threshold for the development of the industry can be solved.

(The automatic irrigation of flowers and grass implemented with Ruff OS)

The first person who provided investment for Roy was Jiang Tao, founder of CSDN and founding partner of Geekfounders. After gaining the Angel Investment of RMB 3 million Yuan, Ruff also received a new round of financing of RMB 12 million Yuan by Greenwoods Investment. “The situation was similar at the time. Although people didn’t know how this stuff was applied in the Internet of Things, they all wanted to invest. Android was an operating system made in 2003. At that time, a few people could think of how it would be like today,” said Roy. It shows that Ruff has been favored by many professionals since the beginning. Indeed, the new technologies that can overturn the world must first be controversial. What’s more, Ruff has a real technology and strength, so the rosy future of Ruff cannot be denied in any case.

“The blockchain technology and digital currency formally entered the public several years ago, when a large number of sorts of currencies appeared frequently. The packaging of the blockchain technology had attracted a large number of retail investors to enter, and it was also one of the reasons for the formation of the Internet Bubble. Because tall trees catch much wind, until today when many people still stay in the currency circle to trade in ‘digital currency’, some experts have proposed the concept of the Blockchain 3.0, which has caused many people to get into the fog and to be confused about the situation.” What Roy said has directly pointed out the status of the blockchain industry at present. After that, he continued, “The Blockchain 3.0 is to solve the problems of the previous two generations. It no longer claims to be the digital currency, but it is developed to provide real and effective services for a certain industry. It is to gain recognition and benefit with its services, neither to make any impractical promises nor to carry out speculation. And it is an era that truly realizes the development implementation services and provides service value for the people!” ”

At present, there are still a large number of fans of Ruff Chain who are supporting the R&D and progress of the project, and they believe that Roy will make Ruff Chain be a success just like working on the IoT operating system.

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Ruff Chain
RuffChain

Decentralized open source blockchain architecture for high efficiency Internet of Things application development