The 22 Year-old Tech Entrepreneur from Taiwan Develops SELF’s Blockchain Protocol ERC 860
I Want Everyone to Know Taiwan’s Talent
Jeff is a graduate from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). At the young age of 22, Jeff is currently the founder and CEO of Turing Chain and the VP of blockchain technology at New York blockchain company Blackbird.AI. In June, his blockchain paper on “ERC 860” competed with other contestants from Europe and America and was awarded “Best Paper” in the ACM MobiSys CryBlock 2018 conference. As Jeff will be developing SELF’s Ethereum Dapp as a blockchain consultant, this protocol will also be used in the SELF project.
Jeff has numerous accolades under his belt, including runner-up for Hong Kong’s 2017 Microsoft Imagine Cup, commonly referred to as the “Software Olympics,” Korea’s 2018 UpTown business competition, and more than a dozen other international awards. Jeff is also the first student from HKUST to intern at Silicon Valley, having also worked at JPMorgan in Hong Kong to develop the core algorithm of Natural Language Processing. In addition, he was invited this year to the Ethereum community to share insight on the technology, and co-published with many Hong Kong investment banks and financial giants at the Blockchain Technology Conference HK.
With such experience across borders and across disciplines, Jeff says with a smile: “Taiwan has a strong pool of talent. I joined SELF hoping to remind everyone the value of Taiwanese talent through this unprecedented project”. SELF is representing a new generation: a generation not bound by boundaries, a generation with unique characteristics as displayed in Jeff himself, his vision reminds us that blockchain was created to dissolve boundaries. As a globalized market exists beyond national borders, resources are seen to circulate all over. So as long as there is a common principle and belief, resources can be used to create value.
ERC 860, a Blockchain Agreement Co-created by Taiwan
The “ERC 860: Custodian-Client Contract Standard” was developed jointly by Jeff and other team members, and is one of the few ERC agreements supported by academic papers in the blockchain world. ERC 860 is a more flexible and secure agreement compared to ERC 721. This novel agreement will be implemented for the first time with the SELF project.
So what is ERC 860? What role does ERC 860 play in the grand scope of SELF’s plan?
ERC stands for “Ethereum Request for Comments,” and it allows Ethereum developers to publicly solicit opinions when writing smart contracts. In other words, this sets standards or protocols to follow. The code behind ERCs is a serial number, representing the number obtained at the time of the agreement. So the ERC 860 that Jeff developed is “ERC Smart Contract Agreement №860.”
In the SELF proposal, the most important ones to issue our digital asset (SELF) are ERC 20, ERC 721, and ERC 860. ERC 20 ensures that SELF can be stored, circulated, and traded through wallets and exchanges that support such an agreement. ERC 721 sets the architecture and procedure to allow SELF users to redeem 100 SELF for a single movie ticket voucher. Lastly, ERC 860 will be used to develop a character card game tied to SELFPICK’s film The Last Thieves, allowing SELF users to have character cards that gradually evolve based on their consumption behavior. Put simply, ERC 20 is used for the SELF digital asset itself, ERC 721 is used for the SELF movie ticket, and ERC 860 is used for the SELF character card game.
To further explain, ERC 20 is an agreement specifically for “establishing financial functions,” setting digital assets as “currency.” It is considered the most mainstream digital asset standard specification on the Ethereum chain. The digital asset currency in ERC 20 is like a quarter taken out of your pocket, for each has virtually the same value and shape. This enables exchange between the two, thus classifying these ERC 20-compliant digital assets as “Fungible Tokens.”
However, among the digital assets, some are not simply imitations of real-life currency. This is where ERC 721 comes in, bringing in the concept of “Non-Fungible Tokens.” What this means is that each digital asset is unique and pertains to usages and products no longer limited to financial parameters. For example, the trendy crypto-game at the end of 2017 “Cryptokitties” was developed with ERC 721, selling all kinds of cats that are unique from one another, be it different ownership, fur, pupil color, tail, expression, or even hidden genes. Similarly, in the SELF proposal, every movie ticket is unique in the show time, the theater number, and seat number. As all vouchers will be different, the ERC 721 agreement will be applied.
What Makes ERC 860 Different from ERC 20 and ERC 721?
First off, ERC 860 is a protocol that deals with the hierarchy between smart contracts rather than defining the internal structure of smart contracts (eg, ERC 20, ERC 721). As such, the architecture of ERC 860 defines the affiliation and interactivity between two levels of a smart contract — the Custodian Contract and the Client Contract, together becoming one bi-layered hierarchy. It is also an agreement that can be applied to Non-Fungible Tokens, potentially implemented to the construction of digital tickets and high-priced goods (such as jewelry grading certificates).
When Jeff developed the ERC 860 agreement, the original intention was to solve a security problem regarding smart contracts. By making the Custodian Contract act as a manager or guardian, it would mean a mother Custodian Contract could control several individual Client Contracts. The information on each Client contract is split into two states — a confidential part (Private State) and a publicly disclosed part that the Custodian Contract can control or edit (Shared State). Therefore only the Client Contract ID and address publicly disclosed. From a security standpoint, each smart contract has a considerable degree of independence, and a hacker cannot fully attack everything at once. Even if the mother Custodian Contract was attacked, the hacker would obtain no ownership of each Client Contract, improving security by means of Downstream Risk Diversification. In regards to the SELF proposal, this Client Contract refers to the character card owned by each SELF holder. Similar to baseball cards, in the future these character cards can be collected and traded. Recently, the “Hyperion” card on Ethereum reached a record bidding price of 137 ETH, equivalent to almost $2 million NTD.
Just as ERC 721 deals with the uniqueness of Non-Fungible Tokens, ERC 860 is innovative in the way it reinvents the Struct of the ERC 721 smart contract. The Struct that ERC 721 is composed of can only carry attributes or information, and can’t accept interactions outside the main contract. Therefore, with “Cryptokitties,” players can only collect, breed, and buy virtual cats. These cats do not take on new attributes because ERC 721 is wholly rigid. However, since ERC 860 is a two-tiered design with Custodian Contracts and Client Contracts as independent smart contracts, the agreement Client Contract needs is not limited by the Custodian Contract, allowing ERC 20 or other standards to be compatible with ERC 860 so as long as they meet the Custodian Contract requirements. This makes ERC 860 much more flexible, innovative, and adaptable a standard. In the case of the SELF proposal, this feature allows the SELF holder’s character card to change according to their consumption behavior: all kinds of consumption combinations will result in different settings, evolving the character kind into one of four roles in The Last Thieves: Entrepreneur, Capitalist, Market Speculator, or Power-holder.
“I believe blockchain is a great opportunity for Taiwan to transform it’s existing industries given it’s advantages with hardware and software development!” Jeff says, “ The SELF project will bring about huge changes we should all look forward to.”
SELF pre-sale countdown: https://www.self.games/
SELF official website：https://selftoken.co/
