Tencent's 5G open platform (5G.QQ.COM), relying on Tencent's eight major laboratories, unites operators, terminals and 12 major 5G scenario technology application developers to open up 5G and AI capabilities and industry solutions.
2020 is the first year of 5G commercial use. In March 2020, the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee held a meeting to emphasize speeding up the construction of new infrastructure such as 5G networks and data centers. The new infrastructure sector has become a new development outlet.
This year, my country’s 5G independent networking has initially achieved large-scale commercial use, covering cities above the prefecture level and key counties and cities across the country; 5G base stations have been opened in total; more than 700,000 5G base stations have been opened; 5G terminal connections have exceeded 200 million; the “5G﹢Industrial Internet” project More than 1,100.
2021 is the second year of commercial use of 5G. What new sparks will 5G and thousands of industries create?
To this end, Tencent's 5G ecological plan will launch a series of industry inventory in 2020, and is willing to use history as a mirror to move forward with everyone.
In the last issue, we reviewed the industrial policy of the blockchain industry in 2020: In
this issue, we will search for major technological innovation events in the blockchain industry in 2020. Please check it out.
Technology·Memorabilia
1. DeFi explosion verifies that the new model is feasible
1. DeFi triggers capital pursuit and enters an explosive period in the second half of the year
DeFi, or Decentralized Finance, refers to the use of open source software and decentralized networks to transform traditional financial products into services that do not require intermediaries. Since the concept was put forward to the present, in just two years, until the beginning of this year, it is still in a state of mode exploration. In the second half, DeFi officially entered an outbreak period.
In just a few months, the total amount of locked positions in DeFi has doubled. This is undoubtedly the result of a large amount of capital entering and chasing, and capital is always profit-seeking, and capital will only chase those that have enough value or potential. Products of. But why is DeFi so popular in the capital market? This is also due to the unique concept it brings.
2. DeFi has evolved into a new financial system
DeFi itself is a concept and architecture, which is equivalent to the application of blockchain technology in financial technology. DeFi's vision is that all assets can be tokenized and freely traded at any granularity in the global open market.
The development of DeFi begins with the establishment of an open source agreement, and then there will be an agreement-based product system. Its products and services will have the following characteristics: open source, interoperability, openness and tolerance, no permission and review, no trust, and transparency.
Users can access untrusted financial services and have autonomous control over personal wealth and data. Such financial instruments will be more open, and geography and environment will no longer be the only prerequisites.
Users of financial agreements also have unprecedented transparency in this regard. The same agreements will be arbitrated by smart contracts that are always executed as planned, thereby eliminating the risks of various counterparties in the system.
5. Why did DeFi explode this year
Looking back? DeFi's development process is actually basically the same as other traditional fields. After the concept was born, it continued to explore models and produced explosive applications, and capital was attracted. This is very important, because the emergence of popular applications is not only to attract capital's attention, but more importantly, the feasibility of the model has been proven and it has huge development potential.
In the ?DeFi field, we have to mention ?UniSwap, which is based on the Ethereum token exchange protocol. This is a decentralized transaction method, which is compatible with traditional cryptocurrency transactions and general decentralization. There are different ways of trading tokens. UniSwap is a set of contracts deployed on the Ethereum network, and all transactions are completed on the chain.
Like other DEXs, the system is not restricted by registration, authentication, withdrawal, etc., and tokens can be stored freely and withdrawn freely.
At the same time, compared with other DEX, its gas usage rate is higher, so the gas cost is lower; its counterparty is not other trading users, but trades through the token pool, and has an automatic market-making model. Calculate the transaction price.
UniSwap not only solves the security and management problems of centralized exchanges, but also solves the problem of insufficient liquidity of decentralized exchanges to a large extent. Its transaction volume once exceeded that of representative CeFi exchanges such as Coinbase. And occupies most of the lock-up space in the DeFi market, becoming an absolute giant in the DeFi market.
The first wave of the DeFi outbreak came from UniSwap's issuance of tokens, and major traditional central exchanges scrambled to issue the tokens first, just like the portal media era in order to preempt news. Although its currency issuance factors are diverse, it undoubtedly proves its appeal and the market's recognition of it.
6. DeFi may build a new ecology
Compared with the traditional model, DeFi is obviously different. It is a decentralized, highly credible and transparent model. The changes it brings are not limited to practical applications, but more of a change in the way of thinking.
Compared with the traditional model, DeFi can bring huge changes. It is this potential that attracts capital inflows.
We can imagine how DeFi will affect the financial industry. Just like open source changes software products, open source software and distributed networks are used to transform traditional financial products into trustless and transparent protocols. Unnecessary intermediaries can run.
Although DeFi has not yet developed to an ideal state, the development of any field may experience repeated iterations for several years or even longer. This is inseparable from the heat wave when it first emerged. It has attracted many eyeballs. Of course, it also has May be defeated in the process of challenging tradition.
Because DeFi was originally envisioned as a completely decentralized ecology, which is almost completely contrary to the current model, and the resistance between this is very huge.
But just like the performance of the domestic blockchain industry, even if DeFi cannot be achieved 100%, it can still complete some decentralized applications on the basis of the existing model.
Whether it is to provide new ideas to solve existing problems, or implement on a small scale, and gradually expand, DeFi has fully demonstrated its own value and potential.
2. IPFS incentive layer goes online and enters the mode verification stage
IPFS's incentive layer, the Filecoin mainnet, finally went live, driving its economic system to finally enter the era of free circulation. After testing and discussion, the ecosystem built by IPFS has officially entered the stage of complete verification.
1. The Filecoin mainnet bounced multiple times and finally went live, and its performance was lower than expected
Filecoin, which was originally established in 2017, went online for the first time in June 2018, but the official launch date was delayed again and again, from July to August, and then to September, it was not finally completed until October 15.
However, as the incentive layer of the large project IPFS, the performance of the Filecoin mainnet was not satisfactory. After the mainnet was launched, the spot transaction was opened, and the short rise and then immediately fell. The decline was very obvious, mainly due to the urgent need to cash out a large number of currency holders. After its spot trading went online, it shipped quickly, causing dramatic price fluctuations.
Filecoin price trend (USD)
in 2020, in addition to investors, miners also launched strikes before and after the mainnet launch, hoping to adjust the unreasonable pledge mechanism. On October 17, a number of miners, including Zhiheyun, etc. Suspended, tens of thousands of mining machines stopped mining.
The next day, ?Filecoin's core member ?Molly said through the ?Slack community that the FIP-0004 proposal has been widely supported by the community and has accepted the proposal. The proposal will be updated on October 21 or 22-direct release 25% of the reward for the inventory miner block, and another 75% to maintain a 180-antenna release, so that the miner can realize part of the income early and ease the cash flow.
It may be that the delay is too long and the market's expectations are too high, leading to various disturbances before and after its mainnet launch. Filecoin made people look forward to it for two years, but it ultimately belongs to? IPFS, then? What is IPFS? ? What is the role of filecoin in it?
2. Filecoin is part of the IPFS ecosystem
How to understand IPFS? We first start with the HTTP we use every day. At the computer application layer, HTTP is based on TCP/IP, which transmits hypertext data from the server to the local browser, and then presents it to the user through rendering. There are two main modes of HTTP.
The first is the centralized mode. The Internet of some enterprises cannot be decentralized for business. There is only one central service group with all traffic on it. The load is heavy and the system is prone to collapse.
The other is the decentralized cluster mode. Each site is set up with service groups in different regions. The IDC computer room behind it allows the same service to be dispersed in a local area, thereby reducing the pressure on the central server.
However, both models have some problems. Either they are highly dependent on the central service group. Once a problem occurs, business operations will face the risk of stagnation, or once the centralized database is at risk, it will cause irreversible data loss.
Corresponding to this, IPFS wants to create a point-to-point network topology which is equivalent to subverting the connection relationship represented by HTTP. IPFS has the feature of content addressability, and generates a unique hash identifier through file content. Save space and operation and maintenance costs to a certain extent.
Generally, IPFS files do not all exist on one node. When the files are extracted, IPFS crawls all the node lists that store the files in parallel, and composes them into a complete file locally. At the same time, the crawling speed is faster than downloading the entire file. Distributed storage can effectively solve the risk of data loss and reduce the storage pressure of a single database.
Filecoin, which is part of the IPFS ecosystem, is equivalent to adding an incentive layer in order to increase the users of the technical system and increase the promotion of the technical system.
3. Whether Filecoin can seize the opportunity, it will take time to verify that
the goal of IPFS is the cloud storage market. This market has reached trillions of dollars. The continuous development of 5G and big data will make the entire market continue to increase by 20% every year. The rate of rapid growth above %. Based on the importance of technology and the huge market in the future, it is the Filecoin project that has received so much attention and has quickly become a highly valued project.
In the strict sense, IPFS is not a blockchain project, but it includes Filecoin, a blockchain sub-project, which shows that IPFS also values the value of blockchain technology as a whole, but it relies on blockchain technology for storage applications, which actually landed The effect has not yet reached the general level of DeFi.
Filecoin's leading role is also relatively limited. Whether it can seize the integration point of this blockchain and cloud storage market in the future depends on the continuous iteration of technology and application expansion.
3. ETH upgrade 2.0, enter the fourth stage
Since the inception of ETH, its long-term roadmap has set four stages, namely Frontier (frontier), Homestead (homestead), Metropolis (metropolis), and Serenity (serenity).
This is the final stage of ETH, the Serenity stage of ETH 2.0, which aims to enhance the scalability, security, and energy efficiency of the network without affecting the decentralization feature. According to its plan, ETH2.0 will be a new network system under a comprehensive revision and redesign. There are four main changes: the
consensus mechanism will be changed from PoW to PoS;
ETH 2.0 network has a beacon chain and 1024 shard chains;
The native token ETH will be destroyed, and ETH2.0 will use the new token BETH, which
will be exchanged at a 1:1 ratio; Staking will become one of the important functions of Ethereum 2.0 . Users will become validator nodes by staking 32BETH and receive BETH rewards. .
2. The core features of the new ETH2.0 mechanism
The consensus mechanism is changed to PoS
Ethereum 1.0. The consensus mechanism is Proof of Work, or PoW. PoW relies on miners to use electricity to drive physical mining machine calculations to generate the Ethereum blockchain. PoS does not rely on miners and electricity, but on verification nodes (virtual miners) and ETH deposits to generate blocks.
Sharding Chain Expansion Sharding
chain is a capacity expansion mechanism that can greatly improve the throughput of the Ethereum blockchain. The sharding chain will "split" the Ethereum blockchain and distribute data processing responsibilities to many nodes, allowing transactions to be processed in parallel. The most direct thing is to improve the processing capacity of ETH which was only 14TPS.
In the short term, there will be
dual-chain coexistence ETH2.0, which will not be realized at once, but will be divided into three stages, namely stage 0, stage 1, and stage 2, which are in parallel progress.
Among them, Phase 0 is dominated by the beacon chain, which has officially started at 20 o'clock on December 1st; Phase 1 is dominated by sharding, which mainly involves writing data in the sharding chain while achieving validity and consensus; 2 System integration will begin, and the new virtual machine (eWASM) supports the execution of accounts, contracts, and states.
Although only when Eth2.0 completes the delivery of the shard chain (expected in 2021), the beacon chain can play its core role, but when the beacon chain using the PoS mechanism is started, the current Eth1.0 chain using the PoW mechanism It will continue to operate for at least three years, that is, the old and new chains will operate simultaneously in the next few years.
Use a new token BETH
Beacon ETH (BETH) is a new asset that can only be used on the beacon chain. It is generated in two ways:
as a reward for verifying the beacon chain (after stage 1, there is also a reward for verifying shards);
any ETH1 user can use 1 ETH to buy 1 BETH through the ETH contract.
The conversion from existing ETH to BETH can only be one-way, and the role of BETH will be gradually manifested with the construction of the beacon chain. This process may take up to 2-3 years.
3. The new mechanism of ETH2.0 also faces new challenges
The foregoing explains several important changes in ETH2.0, among which changing the consensus mechanism has prolonged the life of its own ecology, and partially solved the ecology of PoW with only single mining. The sharding expansion solves the problem that its processing capacity cannot meet the commercial requirements, and greatly reduces transaction costs.
We must also pay attention to the fact that the new mechanism also brings new problems.
The possible impact of ETH and BETH on the market
After changing the consensus mechanism, in order to become a validator of the beacon chain, users can pledge 32 ETH in one direction on the beacon chain, which is converted into BETH 1:1.
Although the minimum standard is that 16,384 validators need to deposit 524,288 ETH into the deposit contract, the pledge amount is close to 900,000 ETH as of December 1st, and the pledge yield has dropped from the highest 21.6% to around 17%. , This rate of return will continue to decline as the amount of pledge increases.
This mechanism is similar to the new A-share launch a few years ago. The pledged funds are used to draw numbers, and the funds that have not been won after the winning is confirmed. The pledge and thawing of the new funds may have a certain impact on the liquidity of the market, thereby affecting the entire market. The volatility, especially when some well-known companies are newly listed, this effect is very obvious.
Although the pledge cycle of ETH may take 1 or 2 years, the liquidity of ETH will decrease in the short term. In the future, after a large amount of BETH is thawed, it may be possible to withdraw profits. Once there is a run, it will cause significant market fluctuations. This is again the official And new problems that investors must face.
The impact
of the change of the consensus mechanism on the ecological participants is also the change of the consensus mechanism. The interests of mining machine manufacturers, mining pools, and miners in the existing PoW system will inevitably be impacted. Then, whether to change into the PoS system or directly exit , There is still a period of buffering, and ETH officials also need to consider how to retain participants in the ecosystem.
Can the sharding model stand the test
In phase 1, 64 fragments will be added to the beacon chain, and bidirectional interaction between the chains will be realized. At the same time, the designer conceived a series of interaction and management mechanisms. Whether this series of mechanisms can be implemented smoothly will not be verified until then. If the actual situation is not ideal, the duration of Phase 1 may double.
Fourth, 2021 blockchain technology development outlook
1. Blockchain technology brings not only a simple Internet technology or architecture, but also a new model and a new way of thinking. Conditional applications may be more convenient. The blockchain technology is implemented.
2. Blockchain technology brings not only a simple Internet technology or architecture, but also a new model and a new way of thinking. Conditional applications may be more convenient. The blockchain technology is implemented.
3. The development of blockchain technology is inseparable from the practice of landing applications. Excellent landing practice projects can not only attract market attention, attract capital support, but also enhance the confidence of practitioners and promote the wider application of blockchain technology.