Nervos co-founder Lu Guoning: The multi-chain concurrent Web3.0 world

According to BlockBeats, on October 30, Nervos co-founder Lu Guoning delivered a speech on cross-chain at the Web3 Conference. The full text is as follows:

Thank you, everyone. I am particularly worried about disappointing the host and everyone, because I don't want to talk about anything too hardcore. In the past week, I was in Shanghai, and there were a lot of people and a lot of activities at the very famous Shanghai Blockchain Week. So I talked to a lot of people these days, so my voice is not very good today, but what I want to talk about is very important. What is important is how we think about open source and openness. So what I want to share today is the multi-chain concurrent Web3.0 world.

Let me briefly introduce myself again. I am a veteran in the blockchain industry. I have joined the blockchain industry since 2014 and have done many things: exchanges, and now I am working on public chains.

Web3.0 is defined as creating a new decentralized Internet in my mind. Today is the Web3 conference. If I discuss with you what is the definition of Web3.0 and what is the definition of open Internet, there is no need. So in my mind, creating a new decentralized Internet world is what we want to do. Under this big framework, we have developed Nervos, and I am very happy to receive the invitation from the Web3 organizing committee to share with you here. At that time, I discussed with Dr. Jia, and I said, what should I talk about here? I will talk about whatever you think is appropriate. Dr. Jia said, you also use the Rust programming language for development, can you talk about Rust? I said yes, I will definitely talk about Rust.

First of all, the Rust programming language is not something from the blockchain world. The Rust programming language was not born for the blockchain. It is something outside the blockchain world, a larger technical world. All the most important infrastructure in our industry is built through the Rust language, which is very important. I would like to say that the highlight of the Rust language in the blockchain industry was about 4 years ago at this venue, which is the venue of the Hyatt Hotel where you are today. What happened 4 years ago? In mid-September 4 years ago, the Ethereum conference was held in Shanghai, at this venue. About a few hours before the opening of the venue that day, the Ethereum network suffered the most serious DoS attack in history at that time. That attack was the most severe attack encountered by the Ethereum community. In other words, hackers organized and premeditated a total attack on the network at this conference in Shanghai when all the core developers of Ethereum gathered in Shanghai.

I still remember that attack vividly, because I was the founder of imtoken at that time. We had already released the alpha version 1.0. I was holding a mobile wallet and was going to demonstrate it to many people on site. I was going to demonstrate the world's first mobile wallet at that time and demonstrate Ethereum transfers on site. As a result, after the network collapsed, my transfer became difficult to demonstrate and impossible to operate. I was very anxious, so I was very angry and looked at when the network would be restored. Some people may know what happened afterwards. There is a photo in the lounge very close to this venue, where the core technology developers of Ethereum gathered in that small conference room. Some of them were kneeling on the ground, and some were sitting on the sofa, holding computers and anxiously solving problems.

How was this problem solved? The client that survived was written in Rust, and the client was called Parity. This team is the same as the Substrate team and Polkadot team we know now. This is the story behind. At that time, the Parity team implemented an efficient Ethereum client in Rust, which can be said to have saved the network. If all mining pools had not quickly switched the client implemented in high-level languages ​​to the Parity client implemented in Rust, the network would have been defeated, forked, or really could not run again. There would be no result like Ethereum today, and the industry would not have developed to what it is today. So as a blockchain developer, we are grateful for the client implemented in Rust at that time, we are grateful for the Rust language in the world, and we are also grateful for everything that blockchain has brought us. So thank you open source community.

In order to give back to the contribution of Rust language, as a blockchain community, we also participate in many Rust conferences around the world. We also combine Rust language with blockchain and hold many offline activities around the world. Including the first Asian Rust Technology Conference we held in Beijing last year. Due to the epidemic this year, we did not prepare, but if there is no epidemic next year, we hope to continue and hope to continue to hold this conference together.

The second thing I want to share is that the future blockchain world will definitely be a multi-chain interconnected world.

Here I want to introduce a concept called interoperability 2.0. What is interoperability 2.0? We don't actually have a definition of 1.0. I want to give you a very simple explanation. What is 1.0? Imagine that some time ago, the most popular project in the blockchain was DeFi, and the most popular project in DeFi was liquidity mining. Liquidity mining put a model in front of everyone for the first time, an innovation called nesting dolls, that is, you can put your assets in one project, and you can also pledge the liquidity token of this asset in another project to get TokenB, and then superimpose TokenB on TokenC, killing two birds with one stone, killing three birds with one stone. The community calls this model the nesting doll model, which is the mixability and interoperability between smart contracts on a chain. We call this combination on a smart contract platform in a virtual machine on a chain interoperability 1.0. In 2.0, can we achieve mutual interoperability between blockchain chains, that is, chains can nest dolls between chains, and now we can actually do it.

When it comes to interoperability 2.0, I would like to review the pain points and problems caused by current interoperability.

First of all, from the customer's perspective, users come into contact with blockchain through wallets. Each chain has its own exclusive wallet. Some wallets can support many chains, but in a multi-chain wallet, users have different accounts and addresses for different wallets. On each chain, users have to learn and understand how to operate on this chain. If we want to cross these chains, do we have to make a new wallet for users to learn again? We don't want users to learn. Can users use their familiar wallets without changing their habits, and then they can easily enjoy the benefits of multi-chain connection and cross-chain. This is from the user's perspective.

From the developer's perspective, if the developer wants to serve all users, he will find that the users of the blockchain are divided on different chains. I want to serve the users of Ethereum and I want to serve the users of US. He needs to re-build his application on each chain, which is very costly. Can we make an application that can run on all chains? Or let all users on all chains become its users? How can we do it only once? Earlier, we had iPhone, and later we had Android. Developers had to make applications on Android and on Apple IoS. These development teams were doing the same functions on both sides at the same time, which was actually very expensive. Finally, we had WeChat, and WeChat had mini programs. In the mini program, we only needed to do it once, and both sides could be covered. Therefore, the number of mini program users has grown very fast. Now we don't want to make cross-platform applications anymore. We want to make mini program applications, one platform to serve all users, which is what developers want.

As for assets, the technology of cross-chain assets is very mature and has been studied by people. To be honest, the biggest problem is that efficiency and security are always irreconcilable. When you focus on efficiency, you can choose centralized cross-chain, witness cross-chain, and multi-signature cross-chain. When you need security, you need each other's SPV nodes between the two chains to do each other's light node verification, and the efficiency will become very slow and complicated. However, this compromise between efficiency and security is different in different scenarios. Can users simply have someone and infrastructure to help them do cross-chain in different scenarios, and they don't have to make any choices? With these pain points together, we are wondering if we can do it through technical means?

So we used the underlying platform functions to launch Interoperability 2.0. Interoperability 2.0 depends on a very unique feature of the Nervos platform. We made a very vivid analogy for it. The Nervos chain has a very special ability, which is that it is very good at learning foreign languages. Each chain has its own protocol, and each protocol is a foreign language to the protocol of another chain. The two chains can interoperate with each other and cross each other. That is, you need to find a third party who can speak the language of the two chains and then translate the language of one chain to the other chain. But if there is a person who is talented, he is born smart and learns 8 languages, and it is easy to learn more new languages. Then he can naturally help people from different countries to communicate better, and he will be the centralized translation between all people. If you have this ability, can you simulate the protocols of other chains at the bottom layer? This is the core capability of Nervos. Based on this capability, we can easily cross the assets of all chains. Developers do not need to create new applications on the upper layer. You can directly connect to Nervos without changing the protocol. After connecting, you can cross other assets and operate assets on other chains at the same time. We only need to develop once, and they can develop on whatever platform they like, and all platforms can get compatibility support.

We have not stepped out of the circle at this point. The real blockchain world is to help all users solve problems. The largest world outside the blockchain is the Internet. The Internet already has a lot of protocols and standards, and there are a lot of users behind each protocol and standard. If our blockchain understands Internet protocols, speaks the language of the Internet, and is compatible with Internet standards, we can quickly and conveniently provide all Internet users with an opportunity to access and use services. All Internet users have mobile phone numbers, and almost all Internet users have email addresses. With mobile phone numbers and email addresses, you have an entry and opportunity. We can easily turn Internet users into blockchain users. This is a bigger opportunity and a scenario we want to do. This is what we want to do, Internet Interoperability 2.0.

Finally, I would like to share a public account. We have already supported the Ethereum ecosystem. We can directly support the Ethereum ecosystem, Ethereum wallets, and Ethereum applications. We will do more in the next step. If you are interested, you can follow our public account and continue to follow us. Thank you again.