Vite Labs CEO Charles Liu: Building Truly Usable and Useful Blockchain
Jinse Finance Exclusive Interview
Winter is approaching. Compared to earlier this year, the pace of blockchain projects have slowed down. Most of the people who truly see that blockchain is the future are now realizing that progress takes time and lot of work is still needed on improving the underlying technology.
For Charles Liu, this is not the first time bear market he has experienced. In 2013, Charles entered the industry with his cryptocurrency exchange. As an early adopter, due to insufficient winter grain, he faded after a year and a half.
After four years, in April 2018, Charles re-entered the blockchain industry through the public blockchain project — Vite. This time, he facing a bear market with preparation. His strategy is more robust, and mentality is calm. Charles said that he actually enjoys the current quiet atmosphere. The team is able to work in peace, and have plenty of time to build up Vite’s competitive advantage and execute technical breakthroughs.
“Public chain projects need long iterations until it matures, and an impetuous environment is not beneficial for projects like Vite. Our team works late every night and everyday we see more progress — this makes me feel practical.” From Charles’ face, we didn’t sense any panic or anxiety about the bear market. Instead, there is an optimistic and calm demeanor.
On October 23, he posted on Weibo (the Chinese Twitter): “In order to activate the TestNet, Vite plans to burn all the ERC20 tokens held by our team, about 56.6% of the total amount.” This means that the Vite team will lock liquidity until the MainNet live. If the MainNet fails to go online, the team will not get any return. As a post-entrant, Vite’s courage is admirable, but can they really stand out from the competition in the public chain and achieve its goal?
At present, it is common to see public-chain projects claiming they have solved the problem of scalability of Ethereum network, and that they’ve already achieved millions of transactions per second. Are the public chain winners and losers already settled?
The Public Chain Is Still in the 0.1 Era
“In my opinion, this space is not crowded.” Liu Chunming told Jinse Finance, “At present, all public chains are still in the 0.1 era regardless of product feature, performance, technical solution, project maturity, or application. In light of this fact, public chains are still in its very early stage. Many well-known experts also hold this view.”
“At present, the blockchain technology still has a long way to go for real-world use cases. It is now equivalent to the dial-up Internet. If we think that the blockchain industry has matured, it is either self-deception or there is an ulterior motive.” Charles clearly expresses this point of view.
What are the elements required for mature chain? Charles and his team have been thinking about this for a long time. “Commonly speaking, the maturity of a public chain has to go through three stages of ‘think it out’, ‘make it’, and ‘use it’. The public chain is not a concept, but a product. Its development should consider a variety of factors.” Charles believes that the main development goal of a public chain should cover five aspects: performance, security, economy, scalability, and ease of use.
“There is no monopoly in the public chain industry yet. Everyone is at the starting line, and Vite has no exception. We don’t talk about who is running faster, or who has crossed an era.” Charles said, “After all, this exploration has just begun.”
Let the TestNet Get Tested
Talking about Vite’s recent actions, Charles introduced them to Jinse Finance, “These actions are to activate the Vite TestNet, making it more realistic for the future MainNet.” Charles said, “In many public chain projects, the TestNet is only for demonstration, not for real testing. When it comes to the MainNet, the problems were not fully exposed and resolved, making the network risky.”
Based on his experience at IT companies, Charles pointed out a more stable route: “In order for the TestNet to be fully tested, the value needs to be transmitted. We first sent the tokens we controlled to our TestNet, and then host super-node and mining campaign to encourage users to migrate token. Only by putting real money into it, everyone can take the TestNet seriously. If security risk or bug are discovered, everyone will be nervous and work hard to motivate the team. To improve the system, we solve potential problems early, and reduce the risk of future MainNet.”
Let the Blockchain Work
Having a large number of applications is necessary for a public chain, especially the popular application that can bring huge user scale. Therefore, while deep-cultivating technology, it is also the a very important task for the public chain to promote the application and build an ecosystem.
Charles divides the ecosystem construction of a public chain into two parts: “value system” and “application system”.
“At present, in blockchain, just-in-time and high-frequency scenarios are related to value, including value storage, transfer, exchange, etc.” Charles said, “Based on this, our path is to first build the value-chain of the ecosystem, such as the wallet, payment solution, asset issuance, cross-chain, decentralized exchange, etc. And next extend to broader applications.”
According to Charles, the Vite ecosystem is divided into two phases. The first one focuses on value-building, allowing assets to flow freely on the Vite network. The second phase is to through the smart contract function to attract more developers to build DApp on the Vite platform.
The Vite platform will be more friendly to DApp developers, reducing developers’ cost through better development languages, base libraries, SDKs, and applet engines.
“Recently, we have had contacts with a number of overseas government agencies, companies and universities, and they have shown a keen interest in decentralized applications developing on Vite. We are planning to work with them to promote applications in a wider range of areas.” Charles revealed to Jinse Finance.
When talking about the recent hot topics in the industry, which of the DApp and the public-chain platforms will be developed first, Charles believes that these two are interdependent, mutually reinforcing, and constantly iterative. “Just like walking on two legs, there is no need to argue which leg to move first.”
Team Is the Core
Vite released its TestNet in November. For a public chain project, releasing a test network means that project development is half done. Vite started in June, and according to the roadmap plan, the MainNet will be online in the beginning of 2020. The current progress is much faster than expected. It also proves the strength of technology and execution of the team. Speaking of this, Charles was confident: “We have the best team in this industry and we are the most competitive one. This is our core advantage. The main competition of the public chain is mainly technology, and the competition for technology is mainly the team.”
Regarding the future of the industry, Charles believes that “the blockchain will be the same as the development history of the Internet. From infrastructure to commercial applications, it will gradually mature and penetrate into all aspects of our world, bringing convenience to our daily lives.”
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