jakiro
Introduction
From 2015 to 2025, the decade that Ethereum has gone through is also the decade that we have written together.From the spark ignited by the first few lines of code to the ecological network woven by thousands of applications today; from the lonely exploration of a few people to the side-by-side of millions, every breakthrough reflects the figure of explorers, and every move forward condenses the power of the community.
existThisAt a historic moment, Wanxiang Blockchain Laboratory will be held in Hongkou, ShanghaiEthereum’s ten years and glorious years theme party,Looking back on the glorious road that has been walked over the past ten years, colliding with new ideas about the future, so that the blueprint for the next decade will gradually become clearer as we get together.Due to the large number of participants in this event, it has been replaced to a new venue. Please pay attention to checking emails and text messages..
Before this party begins, we want to use the words that have accumulated industry thinking as a guide.Revisiting the preface written by Dr. Xiao Feng for “Point to Everything: Ethereum and Future Digital Finance” published by China Translation Press in 2022.Rereading this article on the occasion of Ethereum’s tenth anniversary is not only a way to sort out the future development of the industry, but also provides a mirror for anchoring the future direction..
On September 15, 2022, Ethereum will usher in another historical moment after its first white paper was published at the end of 2013 and its main network was launched in July 2015: “The Merge”.Ethereum’s consensus mechanism will be changed from Proof of Work (POW) to Proof of Stake (POS).”The Merge” will reduce Ethereum’s energy consumption by 99%, ETH issuance by 90%, and the cost of “fuel” (Gas) will approach zero after the merger of sharding and L2 (layer 2 protocol).While the network security and health are completely unaffected, “The Merge” will help Ethereum increase to 100,000/sec in the next three years, 10 million/sec in high performance and extremely flexible scalability in the next 10 years.This will further establish Ethereum’s status as a universal infrastructure for the metaverse.
“The Merge” is not only an important moment in the history of Ethereum’s development, but also a destined to be an important moment in the history of blockchain technology!After “The Merge”, Ethereum needs to restore normal transfer function and upgrade again in 6 months.This moment of upgrade again was named “Shanghai” by the Ethereum community!
In September 2016, after the first two global developer conferences were held in Berlin and London, the third developer conference of Ethereum (DEVCON2) was held at the Maoyue Hotel in North Bund, Shanghai.Among the nearly 1,000 participants (now Ethereum DEVCON is already a 10,000-person conference), 90% came from overseas to attend the conference.Listening to the speeches of global blockchain opinion leaders with one’s own ears has greatly promoted the popularity of blockchain technology in China.A Chinese science and technology media reporter who attended the meeting wrote on Weibo: When I stepped into the venue, I saw 90% of the participants being foreign faces, which made me think this was a meeting held in Europe and the United States.
This Ethereum Global Developer Conference, which was held in Shanghai, China, five years ago, which made people feel “time and space disorder”, was introduced and sponsored by Wanxiang Blockchain Laboratory.According to the Ethereum POW to POS process that started a few years ago, each key node is named after the city hosted by DEVCON.This is how Ethereum’s “Shanghai Moment” comes from.
In December 2014, at the “Sanya Finance International Forum” held by Caijing magazine, I organized a “Digital Currency Sub-Forum”, with speakers including former experts, bankers, digital currency practitioners in the field of financial supervision.My speech mainly revolves around Ethereum, which has been published for a year in white paper, and the keynote speakers focus on Bitcoin.This should be the first time in China to discuss digital currency topics represented by Bitcoin and Ethereum at a high-standard forum held by famous financial media.This of course attracted the attention of domestic blockchain and digital currency practitioners.
Just during lunch after the sub-forum, I received a request to add a WeChat friend.He said that when I saw my speech from the Internet media, I was sitting in a coffee shop at Incheon International Airport, South Korea, with Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, waiting for the plane to take off.In this way, I finally contacted Vitalik, and the introducer was Shen Bo.
Vitalik was carrying a cloth bag with a cat printed on his back and came to Shanghai in April 2015.This is not his first time in China.When I first met, I was very surprised that he could send WeChat messages in Chinese and use Chinese that were not very smooth for conversations, which was very good for a foreigner who had not specialized in Chinese.Vitalik’s Chinese level is different from other foreigners, and his writing ability is stronger than oral expression.He introduced to me his unique secret to learning Chinese: find any blockchain and digital currency materials translated into Chinese, including Bitcoin and Ethereum white papers, and then learn them in accordance with the original English version.Once, three of us took a taxi in New York. When he was listening to our Chinese chat, he would take out his mobile phone from time to time, check the Chinese-English dictionary, and then verify whether the words we mentioned in the conversation were the same as he understood.In 2016, at Shanghai Wanxiang Blockchain International Week, Vitalik’s speech PPT was written by himself in Chinese.
During the more than a month of living in Shanghai, Vitalik lived at Shen Bo’s house.He has no extravagant desires for life, and even has almost no demands other than food and clothing. His only hobby may be his favorite.I went to Hong Kong on a business trip. While visiting a bookstore, I found a photo album about cats published by a well-known photographer and brought it back to Shanghai, and gave it to Vitalik.The photography collection is very heavy. He is home to all over the world. I guess he can’t carry this photography collection with him even though he is happy.In 2015, Vitalik stayed in Shanghai for more than 3 months.This photo collection may bring some comfort to his life in Shanghai.
We often meet to discuss the topics of blockchain and Ethereum. Of course, the focus must be on how Wanxiang Company cooperates with Ethereum to promote the research and development and application of blockchain technology in China..One morning in April 2015, Vitalik came to Wanxiang Building, his expression was a little tired, and it was obvious that he did not have a good rest last night.Shen Bo pulled me aside and told me that the Ethereum community held a nightly meeting last night, and the focus of the meeting was that someone saw the cash retention status on the Ethereum Foundation’s account, and doubted whether there was enough funds to support the Ethereum main network online.
Vitalik, 20, is clearly facing pressure from community developers.This basic technical facility with the potential to change the world should receive strong support from all parties.Intuition tells me that this may be an opportunity given to Wanxiang and me by God. If we can actively fund the development of Ethereum at this critical moment, we can become participants in this milestone project, and secondly, we can use this focus to implement Wanxiang’s blockchain strategic planning..
So, I proposed to Vitalik to fund $500,000 to the Ethereum Foundation in the name of “Vanxiang Blockchain Lab”.If necessary, we can continue to fund the next year to help eliminate the doubts of developers, so that developers can work hard and provide the best help for the Ethereum main network to be launched as scheduled.
The Ethereum Foundation is a non-profit legal entity registered in Switzerland, so lawyers from both parties helped draft the donation agreement. The Ethereum Foundation accepts this donation and will also give the agreed amount of ETH to the donor from the Ethereum Coin (ETH) unlocked by the foundation after the main network is online.Given that the “Wanxiang Blockchain Laboratory” is still in the registration process and in order to comply with foreign exchange management regulations, the funds are paid by overseas companies within the Wanxiang system, but the blockchain cooperation matters are designated to be established as the upcoming “Wanxiang Blockchain Laboratory” to be responsible for the implementation.
After the dust settled, Vitalik announced in writing to the community that the Ethereum Foundation received donations from an institution background in China and the agency’s commitment to the Ethereum Foundation’s continued support.In this way, the developer community’s concerns about Ethereum’s cash flow in the next few months have calmed down.In hindsight, these worries are actually unnecessary.But at that time, facing such a global project known as “world Internet computer”, especially such a huge project led by a technical geek in his 20s, it was normal for someone to shout “How long can it last?”
This incident also marks the official launch of Wanxiang’s strategic deployment and work process in blockchain.In the second half of 2015, Wanxiang Blockchain Laboratory was established, the first Wanxiang Blockchain Global Summit was held, Asia’s first distributed capital specializing in investing in blockchain was established (Wanxiang Company is a single limited partner), Wanxiang Blockchain Laboratory released the “Blockchain Entrepreneurship Project Funding Plan” to the world, Wanxiang Blockchain Laboratory series was published, Wanxiang Blockchain Laboratory jointly organized blockchain training classes with blockchain technology experts in China, etc.
In mid-October 2015, the first Wanxiang Blockchain Global Summit, based on blockchain technology and promoting the popularization of blockchain technology in China, was held in Shanghai..Ten thousandWe will take full advantage of the resources of the Ethereum community to widely solicit cutting-edge blockchain topics around the world, invite global blockchain experts, and mobilize domestic blockchain practitioners to participate.Under the call and invitation of Vitalik, many world-class blockchain practitioners were present, representing the highest level of global blockchain technology at that time.The first summit was held for two days, the first day was a public forum and the second day was an invitation-based closed-door discussion.The summit activities received strong support and wide praise from the domestic industry.An domestic industry pioneer company came to attend the summit. Due to the space limitations of the closed-door discussion venue, these eight colleagues were not fully invited. They came to me directly and strongly asked to attend all 6 closed-door discussion meetings.This enthusiasm moved me very much.
It was not until early January 2016 that the first blockchain hackathon was held in Shanghai that Wanxiang’s first phase of action plan in the blockchain field ended perfectly.The first blockchain hackathon was held by Wanxiang and Deloitte. At the same time, the Ethereum Foundation sent three technical experts as guidance and judges, and Vitalik also visited the scene in person.More than 120 contestants from all over the world formed a group of three or five, forming teams on the spot and performing on the spot.One of the members of the group that won the first prize was a high school student who came to China from Italy to participate in the competition at his own expense.After a 48-hour intense competition, the high school student asked us if we could accept him to join Wanxiang Blockchain Lab full-time. After some hard advice, we finally got him on the return flight.One year later, we began to regret it because he finally participated in the launch of a blockchain startup project in Europe and took on the technical core role of this popular project.The boy’s worries should be clear!Thinking of Vitalik’s early days in his 20s, it makes people sigh: In the blockchain industry, young people are particularly terrifying!
In May 2016, our group of nine people set off from Pudong Airport, and the first stop was the San Francisco Bay Area, then went to New York to attend the “Consensus Conference”, detoured by London, and then returned to Shanghai.This is a European and American blockchain expedition tour planned with Vitalik, who meets us in San Francisco.We visited many big names along the way, learned a lot of new ideas along the way, and watched a lot of good projects along the way.Another purpose of this trip to Europe and the United States is to discover several mysterious speakers for the second Wanxiang Blockchain Summit.We had lunch with Nick Szabo, the “father of smart contracts” at a restaurant in Mountain View, Silicon Valley, and invited him to Shanghai to attend the blockchain summit that year..Nick was very cautious and it was already a lot of trouble to ask him to meet him.After two years of invitation, he finally participated in the 3rd Wanxiang Blockchain Global Summit in 2017.
In late September 2016, the second Wanxiang Blockchain Global Summit arrived as scheduled.However, this summit has expanded into the “Blockchain International Week”.The first three days of the International Week are the second Ethereum Global Developers Conference (according to the practice of computer system development, the first developer conference is named DEVCON0, and this time it is DEVCON2, which should be considered the third time), the fourth day is the blockchain project roadshow (Demo Day), and the 5th to 6th day is the global summit.It is precisely because of Wanxiang’s commitment to funding the Ethereum community in 2015 that the Blockchain Global Summit was expanded into an international week.At that time, in addition to the $500,000 donated, Wanxiang also promised to continue to support Ethereum development as needed in 2016.After the Ethereum main network was successfully launched, the Ethereum Foundation obviously did not have the urgent need for this aspect.But Wanxiang cannot turn his promise into a “blank check”.So we propose that if this Ethereum Global Developer Conference is held in China, Wanxiang Blockchain Lab will sponsor all the fees, and any ticket revenue and sponsorship revenue generated during this period will belong to the Ethereum Foundation.”Shanghai Blockchain International Week” was born.
On September 15, 2022, Ethereum’s “The Merge” is about to arrive.I seem to see the prospect of a blockchain protocol stack that will gather around Ethereum.In the 1980s, the Internet was also complicated and had different protocols, and was later unified into the TCP/IP protocol stack by the market. The more underlying the basic protocol, the more unified it was into the world’s only standard protocol, such as IP protocol, TCP protocol, and HTTP protocol.When it comes to the application layer, Internet protocols have begun to diversify. For example, there may be more than a hundred protocols in the application layer.The current multi-chain phenomenon of blockchain is similar to that of the era when Internet protocols were not yet unified.The market’s demand for seamless interconnection will definitely promote the integration of the blockchain protocol stack.Only Ethereum currently consciously or unintentionally constructs a blockchain protocol stack. On the one hand, from L0 (distributed communication, distributed storage, distributed computing) to L1, to L2, and even L3… On the other hand, after “The Merge”, Ethereum can also provide support for large-scale applications in terms of performance and scalability.According to the Ethereum Foundation, within 10 years, Ethereum will be able to reach 10 million transactions per second (TPS).According to my personal observation, analogy to the development process of Internet protocols, in the next few years, blockchain protocols will gradually be pushed into a unified protocol stack by the power of the market; and other public chains outside Ethereum may become sub-chains, side chains, or shards or partitions of Ethereum, thereby achieving an ideal world of interconnected blockchain worlds in the world of blockchain..
Now, at this critical moment of the development of Ethereum and even blockchain, the Chinese version of “Point to Everything: Ethereum and Future Digital Finance” published by China Translation Press can be said to be of great significance!
I would like to use the little memories of Ethereum in the “Shanghai Moment” as a background supplement to this book.
