From 2017, Ethereum opened up the imagination of the blockchain industry, to the first year of the public chain in 2018, the release of 10,000 chains, and then to the disillusionment of the public chain in 2019, Ethereum is now the only one, and the industry is showing strong strength. Development trend.
As a veteran project that has taken root in the public chain field since 2017, NULS is both an insider and a witness. This time the chain catcher has cut into the hot issue of the launch of Ethereum 2.0 and chatted with Ran Xiaobo, director of the NULS Chinese community, about his views on current trends. Judgment, review of NULS' past development and future plans, hope to inspire you.
Author|Wang Dashu
01
Looking at the development of the public chain track from Ethereum 2.0
Chain catcher: Since 2017, the public chain structure has not been broken. How does NULS, as one of the few old public chains that still persist in defining the relationship between itself and Ethereum?
Ran Xiaobo: When the public chain track first became popular, everyone liked to talk about innovation, technology, and advantages, but in fact, ecological construction was the key to development. So far, Ethereum is undoubtedly the best. In order to gain a long-term foothold in the public chain field, many public chains are imitating the path of Ethereum in ecological development and making efforts. Therefore, NULS and even other public chains do not compete with Ethereum. Expand and innovate on the basis.
Chain catcher: Recently ETH2.0 is a hot topic in the industry. In fact, the essence of ETH2.0 is the transition from PoW to PoS. According to your judgment, what impact will this transition bring to the public chain structure and even the encryption economy?
Ran Xiaobo: There is not much impact in the short term. Large-scale assets are still on ETH1.0. Migrating to ETH2.0 is a process. Of course, this is good for Ethereum holders. They definitely hope that ETH2.0 will be launched as soon as possible to provide better space for ecological development.
Although the startup is fast, ecological migration is more difficult. With the slow development of version 2.0, it should have a greater impact on the public chain field, but it is difficult to say how big it is. At present, the biggest uncertainty factor is the huge group of miners. Once ETH1.0 and ETH2.0 are merged, POW miners will no longer be able to mine. It is likely that they will independently run an Ethereum 1.0 chain. Of course, the industry may have more problems to think about and solve.
Chain catcher: In the public chain field, from the Wanchain in 2018 to the massive disillusionment in 2019, to the current strongman Hengqiang, how did NULS survive the cruel environment?
Ran Xiaobo: Disillusionment? The public chain track passed away directly after the so-called first year of 2018.
Under this circumstance, it is really not easy for NULS to develop to this day, especially in the early days we almost didn't get financing, mainly because of community support and team exploration in income generation. In 2017, there were 50 members of the NULS team in China alone, and the overhead pressure was very high. From the perspective of increasing revenue and reducing expenditure, we could only reduce personnel slowly, but fortunately, NULS has a good governance mechanism to help us. Those who left the team The members later participated in the ecological construction in the form of community, so the burden began to lighten.
Chain catcher: Indeed, it is the first choice for many public chains. So since you have been in the industry, especially after experiencing a relatively cruel market cycle, are there still phenomena in the industry that you cannot understand?
Ran Xiaobo: Quite a lot. For example, in terms of investment logic, everyone is basically not the mentality of investing in products, but is driven by quick money. This makes entrepreneurs and technology research and development embarrassing, especially on the public chain track, when the market environment is good, DeFi fever will come to DeFi, it is difficult to settle down and polish the product, which is not good for the development of the industry.
02
Review of the past three years of NULS
Chain Catcher: This year happens to be the third anniversary of NULS. At the annual meeting, NULS detailed its past achievements, such as DApp contests and speeches held in more than 40 colleges and universities. But in fact, the blockchain industry has limited development in the past two years, so can you review the development of NULS in the past three years?
Ran Xiaobo: Mainly speaking from the three levels of technical architecture, community and market.
One is the construction of the underlying technical architecture. Looking back, there are many twists and turns. After the NULS mainnet was launched in mid-2018, there was no smart contract function. Therefore, the smart contract did not have programmability until December of that year, so we could start to develop the ecology. However, during the ecological process, the technical team was not satisfied with the underlying framework, so there was a plan to do version 2.0.
The basic logic of NULS 2.0 is to make development more flexible by introducing the design of a microservice framework, so that global developers can independently develop a module and do a good job of designing the agreement between each module. However, during the development of NULS 2.0, we missed a golden period of ecological development. In 2018-2019, other public chains are desperately developing the public chain ecology. Looking back, if you don’t do NULS 2.0, there may be a lot more NULS ecological projects, but without NULS 2.0, you will lose a good foundation and flexibility, so it is worth it.
The framework of NULS 2.0 is very flexible. Users can build their own chains by using the core product ChainBox and chain factories. At present, there are already two good commercial application scenarios built on NULS, and the data is not bad. At the same time, there are more than a dozen projects that build their own chains through the NULS basic framework, and then some companies and universities develop products on NULS, so short During the period, the results are still quite a lot.
The second is at the market level. As we all know, from 2018 to the first half of 2020, it is actually a bear market in the crypto market. Since 2017, the market value and ranking of NULS have developed from shortcomings. The team deeply realized this problem and made a reconsideration : this is NULS In the early stage of development, the earliest NULS allocation mechanism was to airdrop 40% of the total tokens to the community, but the team itself, including the team itself, did not participate in the capital operation of the market and missed the opportunity.
The third is the community level. NULS has built the NIP governance framework and the NULS governance platform. Now 5 members of the board are the NULS core team and 6 are from the community members. They operate entirely through the governance platform. The current chain community fund management All are completely transparent in the community, and follow the process 100%. It is considered to be gradually moving towards community governance. Of course, it is not yet successful, but I think this is a good start. Because under this mechanism, NULS's ambassador customer service has promoted NULS and contributed to NULS in various places around the world.
On the whole, the progress in these three areas is still qualified. We will also pay attention to the shortcomings in capital operation and think carefully about cooperation with some large institutions.
Chain Catcher: I understand. I just talked about ecological construction. I learned that NULS actually spent a lot of time and money on ecological construction, but the outside world seems to have limited progress. What are your thoughts on this?
Ran Xiaobo: Our team and community have a very open attitude towards ecological support. Our support for ecological projects includes not only community publicity, but also partnering with partners and support through the SCO Foundation. The reason for the limited development in this situation is that NULS has its influence. At the same time, the fundamentals such as market value and community size are still very small, which is difficult to compare with the head public chain.
Take Polkadot’s Web3 Foundation as an example. Their support for ecological projects actually cost a lot of money. The project team still cares most about financial support. In contrast, NULS has not done enough, and made a bold assumption. If NULS currently ranks in the top 20 by market value, our POCM and SCO will definitely be able to attract a lot of outstanding projects, and we can also give them greater support and make progress together with them.
Chain Catcher: The review is still very pertinent and candid. In addition, I am curious about whether the community will complain when the price of NULS is not going up.
Ran Xiaobo: In general, the community is still mostly investors. Naturally, there are complaints about the relatively low return on investment of NULS. However, everyone agrees with the concept of NULS very much. I usually put a lot of energy into communicating with the community. Share why I am optimistic and insist on doing NULS; on the one hand, I was a half banker before, so I shared how to do financial planning and asset allocation to the community.
Chain Catcher: When a community member asks why you are optimistic about NULS, how do you generally respond?
Ran Xiaobo: When investing in the primary market, the most important thing is to look at people. I have participated in many zero-return projects. It is still difficult to understand, but I am optimistic about the development of the industry. So to sum up, I think that when investing in the blockchain industry, it is better to believe in yourself than to believe in others, and to hope that others are not as good as hard iron.
From the establishment of the NULS project to the present, I know very well what the team is doing and what the future plans are. I have a bottom line about these. I will also communicate these truthfully with community members, so it can be said that the community can fully understand NULS and naturally build a sense of trust.
03
Talk about the 2021 plan and the cross-chain road of NerveNetwork
Chain Catcher: Building trust is very important, and the development plan also takes the lead of community members. Now 2020 is coming to an end, can you talk about NULS's clear actions and plans in 2021?
Ran Xiaobo: Our next plan is mainly divided into two aspects.
On the one hand, we will gradually use NerveNetwork and NULS to work closely to attract high-quality assets in the market such as Ethereum. Of course, in terms of long-term development, we will provide support at the bottom to develop a decentralized trading platform.
The first is a matching decentralized exchange, the agreement is designed on the NULS underlying framework; the second is done in the NULS smart contract, similar to Uniswap's algorithm-based decentralized exchange; the third is a dedicated As an NFT trading platform, we will develop the NFT asset project as one of the clear plans, such as putting artworks and physical assets on the chain, and negotiating with the corresponding partners.
On the other hand, we will provide the infrastructure for ecological development and upgrade the community-incubated wallet Nabox, including plug-in wallets and mobile apps. It not only supports the NULS blockchain, but also supports high-quality assets such as Ethereum and Binance Chain.
Chain Catcher: Can you briefly introduce NerveNetwork (Nerve for short)?
Ran Xiaobo: NerveNetwork is a cross-chain project. The goal is to build a decentralized digital asset service network, break the value island of the blockchain, provide more complete underlying support for the DeFi application ecosystem, and allow digital assets to be held People enjoy truly safe, free and transparent DeFi application services.
On the one hand, for those assets that do not have smart contract capabilities, such as BTC, Nerve can be used to cross-chain to Ethereum or NULS and other chains with smart contracts and application scenarios, thereby driving the generation of more application scenarios, essentially similar to Extension of Layer2.
On the other hand, for a public chain with a large scale of assets like Ethereum, there has always been a situation where the transfer fee is too high. Take USDT as an example. Currently, users who transfer USDT through TRON do not charge a fee or only charge a very low fee. In the long run, everyone has become accustomed to using TRON to complete transfers between exchanges, so they don’t use Ethereum.
Therefore, the demand for some application payment, settlement and other services on Nerve is still quite large. There are many centralized exchanges and wallets that do not have asset management capabilities in this regard. Nerve can provide underlying support for some wallets to achieve rapid multiplication. asset Management.
Chain Catcher: Compared with other cross-chains, how is Nerve different?
Ran Xiaobo: Nerve uses the original POCBFT consensus mechanism. Under this mechanism, the block generation speed is maintained at about 1-3S on average, and the efficiency is greatly improved, which can provide great convenience for asset cross-chain transfer. In addition, Nerve's cross-chain is implemented based on heterogeneous chain smart contracts or multi-signature accounts. 15 virtual bank nodes ensure the security of smart contract assets on the heterogeneous chain, and handle asset cross-chain in and out transactions.
Chain Catcher: How will Nerve empower NULS next?
Ran Xiaobo: Frankly speaking, NULS, like most other public chains, has the problems of insufficient ecological development and small asset scale. As a cross-chain, Nerve can integrate mainstream market assets into the NULS ecology, thereby empowering the ecological development of NULS. At this level, Binance Smart Chain has done a good job. While accessing many assets, it has attracted many developers to make applications on it with its brand effect.
At present, Nerve has opened up multiple public chain networks, and at the same time has built NerveDEX, flash swaps, options and other applications in its own cross-chain ecology, which have been widely welcomed and recognized by users. In addition, the total assets of Nerve's mainnet have reached 170 million U.S. dollars, and the node pledge funds have exceeded 20 million U.S. dollars. Among them, BNB, HT, OKB and other platform coins are pledged. The NVT pledge rate of its tokens has reached 44%.
Chain Catcher: The last question, what is the most thought about problem recently?
Ran Xiaobo: Recently, I am thinking about the development trend and trend of blockchain driven by the policies of various countries in the next three to five years. The current domestic blockchain technology is most likely to be based on supporting alliance chains. Next, some companies should get financing to build their own blockchain underlying framework, and then derive a pure blockchain based on this. For application scenarios, NULS should also continue to maintain its global market layout and expansion.
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