On July 13, China’s tech media Jinse Finance has published an exclusive interview with the Co-founder & Chief Scientist of DxChain Wei Wang, talking about how public chain will improve the current market. Please refer down below for this interview.
The book Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy first introduced Blockchain 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. Blockchain 1.0 is currency, the deployment of cryptocurrencies in applications. Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, is called a crypto God.
Blockchain 2.0 is smart-contract, the entire slate of economic, market, and financial applications using the blockchain. Ethereum’s mastermind Vitalik Buterin is the world’s new rock star.
Now, the world is coming to Blockchain 3.0 where many new applications empowered by public chains are spawned in the field of culture, healthcare, and administration. However, while these applications are pushing blockchain technologies to the edge, they still struggle with issues like insufficient storage capacity and computational capability, and low throughput.
Public chain companies are battling it out tooth-and-nail for market opportunities in the high-growth blockchain industry. People wonder in a strongly competitive environment, how to break through the encirclement? Taking public chains’ defects into account, how should blockchain projects team up in a bid to override technical difficulties and complement each other? Which market situation — the bear market or the bull market — can help the development of blockchain projects? In response to the above essential issues, Golden Finance interviewed DxChain Founder Wei Wang. Below is the interview:
Chains-on-chain design: one master chain and two side chains
DxChain is a blockchain startup project based in Silicon Valley. In 2017, the DxChain team spent six months on its white paper. Its advantages in technology help the company raise funding this February despite a gloomy secondary market. The company since then has been fueling innovation in R&D, aiming to revamp the current market of public chain projects.
Wang tells Jinse Finance that “DxChain is a public chain project. Today’s public chain projects can’t solve all the problems in technology development. It could be a good choice for different chains cooperating and complementing each other. Real cooperation between two public chain projects lies in the technology while speculation does not make any substantial meaning.”
DxChain is a big data and machine learning public chain network which is powered by a computing-centric blockchain with a native protocol token. It introduces four significant innovations:
- Probable data computing and verification game;
- A new chains-on-chain design;
- Hadoop architecture to facilitate big data and machine learning;
- Business data exchange and data analytics requirements.
Wang gives a detailed explanation of this new “chains-on-chain” design, “The chains-on-chain structure consists of a master chain and two side chains. The master chain has immutability, and the side chain has elastic properties. In this new design, the master chain is responsible for maintaining transactions, and the side chain is responsible for storage and computation. The two side chain functions only in limited time, so they have to complete different tasks in a certain period. Block does not need to store expired data. Besides, we have also designed a chain-shortening algorithm to remove unused data and save block space. I believe that multi-chain is the best choice to solve performance problems.”
While DxChain’s chains-on-chain structure brings significant breakthroughs in storage and computation, teaming up with other blockchain developers is the much wiser choice to break the limitation of the blockchain entirely.
“High TPS” marries “high-performance storage and computation.”
In the last interview with Jinse Finance, Wang pointed out that “The new generation public chain projects must be able to solve storage and computation problem. It is also the only direction of blockchain technology.”
For now, DxChain focuses on storage and computation, but the number of transactions per second (TPS) is also a key criterion.
“Storage, computation, and TPS are the three major problems that hinder the current blockchain technology from achieving large-scale commercialization. We are committed to addressing the issues in blockchain storage and computation. Meanwhile, QuarkChain is dedicated to the speed of TPS. Both companies are serious about breaking technical bottlenecks but in different ways. Now, the cooperation between DxChain and QuarkChain can spark new technological breakthroughs.”
Wang says TPS determines the current public chains’ performance. “Bitcoin transacts about 7 TPS. Ethereum can only handle dozens of TPS. Aiming to increase the TPS, the first type of public chains is to change the consensus mechanism. For example, the hyperledger uses the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance method (PBFT) as a mechanism, and the EOS adopts the Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS).”
“The second method is to change the information transmission path and the network topology between nodes. For example, some public chains use the directed graph data (DAG) structure.”
“The third method uses the off-chain technology, such as Lightning Network and Thunder Network. The last method is on-chain parallel scale technology. One example is QuarkChain. From this point of view, QuarkChain solves the most practical problem, while DxChain addresses the issues derived from real-world problems.”
Last month, QuarkChain released its first-ever public testnet. According to its demo, the QuarkChain network consists of 6450 nodes, 50 clusters, 256 shards. One data node cannot store the whole network data, but only data in a shard. If you add thousands of TPS, it will cause an information explosion. If one node can store the whole network data, the data generated by consensus algorithms to achieve agreements between computers will instantly fill the node storage.
Therefore, it is necessary to distribute data in a multi-centric storage system, which is precisely what DxChain is trying to do. Now, DxChain is helping QuarkChain to provide a multi-centric storage solution. Now the two public chain projects join forces to provide a one-stop solution for developers.
DxChain will provide QuarkChain with capacities of data storage and computation. QuarkChain has a high demand for data storage and computation when it offers its developers with high-capacity transactions, while DxChain can provide a decentralized storage solution especially for the requirements of ledger storage.
Meanwhile, QuarkChain will help DxChain to improve the performance of side-chains. DxChain’s data chain and computation chain, which are also highly demanding for high throughput and low latency, can be complemented by QuarkChain’s technology of sharding.
Today QuarkChain has a community of 100,000 follows, and DxChain has over 160,000.
MVP is now available
On July 12, DxChain officially released its MVP, which showcases DxChain’s blockchain storage capability as promised. MVP, which stands for Minimum Viable Product, is a development technique in which a new product or website is developed with sufficient features to satisfy early adopters.
DxChain’s video demo did send a widespread shockwave across the blockchain community and received good feedback. Says Wang, “the test of storage chain is expected to complete by the end of this year. We are going to roll out the data storage chain and then work on the computation chain. We still focus our research and development efforts on the master chain and side chains. Considering DxChain is a large-scale project, it will not be like a lot. Like the project, there will be new developments in a few months. In the future, DxChain will release detailed technical reports.”
Local outreach and media exposure
Over the past few months, DxChain has actively shared and exchanged its knowledge and insights among communities by joining different events. On June 24, DxChain CEO Allen Zhang, along with QuarkChain and Celer executives, were invited to join a local meet-up in San Francisco. On June 27, DxChain team attended a media conference hosted by Node Capital during the two-day Silicon Valley Blockchain Week. On June 27–28, Wang gave a talk at the Global Blockchain Technology Expo.
These event attendances brought DxChain a significant growth in media exposure while signed that the new-generation public chains projects are today’s upstarts.
Blockchain is meaningless without high performance.
The madness in the age of the Internet has long passed. The Internet has gone through a huge transition from one-way communication to user participation in an information system, and from PC to mobile and cloud. Today, the full-fledged Internet technology has seamlessly reached into every corner of our lives. Meanwhile, 20 years after the rise of the Internet, blockchain technology has gradually grown up and promised a bright future. In fact, the analogy between blockchain and Internet has long been a heated discussion across the world.
Wang believes that the Internet of value, which is coming with blockchain, will not immediately override the Internet of information.
“The two will coexist for a long time, but the blockchain will take out some of the current Internet work from the traditional Internet. Data will no longer be easily changed frequently. Also, blockchain technology is well-suited for multi-centric services.”
Finance, e-commerce, insurance, public utilities, and other fields can become the testbeds for blockchain technology which will gradually change the status quo of these industries. “Once storage and computation problems are solved, we can resolve any problems with business logic. The most used application of blockchain technology in the financial sector is generally believed to be money remittance, while the money lending business is connected with blockchains. E-commerce will also be reshaped thanks to blockchain technology. The integration of blockchain technology in the insurance and public utility sector will make the flow of funds more transparent. The fundraising can be used for investment.”
However, although blockchain has started to impact different industries and many practitioners hail “using blockchain technology to empower industries,” whether blockchain can push different sectors to the next level remains an unsolved puzzle that still needs more verification.
Wang believes that to empower the real economy truly, it is necessary to first improve the performance of the blockchain, particularly storage and computation capability. “The current blockchain cannot meet the standards of large-scale data storage and general-purpose type of computing. Therefore, it still takes time to empower the industry.
Warren Buffett, known as the “god of stocks” in China, once said, “only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” Blockchain is no exception.
The bull market and blockchain madness in 2017 left many blockchain projects lost in cryptocurrencies’ runaway valuation. Then the 2018 market demonstrates a bearish trend and shorts in exchange. The majority of tokens and small cryptocurrencies fell in value.
However, Wang is still optimistic about the future of blockchain. “The projects survived from the bear market are of the best. The bull market will come in one and two years when we have real blockchain applications.”
