The first blockchain development competition came to an end and the "Blockchain Reference Architecture" was officially released

On May 16, the first China Blockchain Development Competition Results Release Conference was successfully held at the Hangzhou International Expo Center. The final list of winners of the Blockchain Development Competition was announced at the conference. At the same time, the first blockchain standard "Blockchain Reference Architecture" was also officially released.

Under the guidance of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the National Standardization Administration, and the Zhejiang Economic and Information Technology Commission, the competition was jointly organized by the China Electronics Technology Standardization Institute (Secretariat of the China Blockchain Technology and Industry Development Forum) and well-known companies in the industry such as Wanxiang and Ant Financial. According to the preliminary evaluation, a total of 45 shortlisted works were selected from the 58 participating schemes. After 14-15 days of closed on-site development, the final evaluation mainly verified the feasibility of the on-site entries, and scored them from the perspectives of technological advancement, application value, preliminary evaluation, and promotion level. Eleven expert judges jointly selected the special prize and the first, second, and third prizes, a total of ten winning works.

The first Blockchain Reference Architecture standard is released

Li Ming, director of the Blockchain Research Office of the China Electronics Standardization Institute, announced the release of the first "Blockchain Reference Architecture" standard on site. The "Standard" specifies the Blockchain Reference Architecture (BRA), including the following: the user view and functional view involved in the blockchain reference architecture; the roles, sub-roles and their activities included in the user view, as well as the relationship between the roles; the functional components and their specific functions included in the functional view, as well as the relationship between the functional components; and the relationship between the user view and the functional view.

The Blockchain Reference Architecture is an important basic standard in the blockchain field. It explains the user view and functional view of the blockchain, and provides detailed provisions for the main participants and core functional components of the blockchain. It systematically describes the blockchain ecosystem, helps the industry build a consensus on the blockchain, and has important guiding and reference value for various industries to select, develop and apply blockchain.

The standard drafting units include a number of enterprises and institutions active in the blockchain field. The China Electronics Technology Standardization Institute is the domestic technical coordination unit of the International Organization for Standardization ISO/TC 307 (Technical Committee on Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology).

In order to ensure the scientificity, rationality and feasibility of the standard content, a supporting testing and verification plan was developed, and the blockchain solutions of key participating companies such as LeTV Chain Information Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd., Beijing Ruizhuo Xito Technology Development Co., Ltd., Shanghai Distributed Information Technology Co., Ltd., ZhongAn Information Technology Service Co., Ltd., and Hangzhou QuChain Technology Co., Ltd. were tested and verified.

In addition, in order to promote the transformation of the standard from a group standard to a national standard, the forum submitted the application materials for the national standard of "Blockchain Reference Architecture" to the Standardization Administration of China in November 2016. In addition, the forum submitted the English version of the "Blockchain Reference Architecture" standard to ISO/TC 307 (Technical Committee for Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology), and introduced the "Blockchain Reference Architecture" standard to representatives of various countries at the first working meeting of ISO/TC 307 held in early April. In terms of international standardization, the forum will actively participate in the standardization work of the newly established reference architecture, classification and ontology research working group of ISO/TC 307 based on the results of the "Blockchain Reference Architecture" standard, and promote the transformation of my country's standardization results into international standards.

Blockchain investment and financing model: Traditional VC and ICO go hand in hand

At the press conference, guest representatives from Wanxiang Blockchain, Ping An Insurance, Distributed Capital, Wanda Network, Ant Blockchain and other companies also shared the current status of blockchain technology and applications, discussed blockchain investment opportunities and trends, as well as the opportunities and challenges facing the development of blockchain applications.

Xiao Feng, Vice Chairman of Wanxiang Holdings, introduced how to monetize assets on the blockchain at the meeting. Xiao Feng first mentioned that in the blockchain era, the meaning of "coin", one of the three meanings of currency, has changed to tokens. Blockchain has brought great changes to hardware. After achieving "online" and "on-chain", assets have become intelligent and digital. After assets are digitized, they can be financialized.

Financial deepening enables assets to obtain all-round liquidity. He mentioned that asset equityization means that ownership can be transferred as a whole; asset securitization means that ownership can be split and transferred, thus achieving high liquidity and convenient fundraising; and asset tokenization brings not only the split transfer of usage rights, but also higher liquidity, more convenient fundraising, and the complete "liquefaction" of assets, thus achieving all-round liquidity.

Xiao Feng said that the core of the sharing economy is to pay less attention to ownership and more attention to the right to use, and the foundation of the sharing economy is asset tokenization. The unit of value quantification of the right to use is the coin (token).

Based on tokens, he mentioned a unique financing method in the blockchain field - ICO (initial public token offering). Compared with the traditional IPO (initial public stock offering), IPO is based on ownership, while ICO is based on usage rights.

According to Xiao Feng, the total amount of ICO in the blockchain field in 2017 has exceeded the total investment of VC in the field, reaching 125 million US dollars. He believes that in the future, ICO may become a major channel for blockchain companies to raise funds, "Open source and shared projects can all use ICO to raise funds."

Yu Wenbo, executive director of Distributed Capital, is also optimistic about the ICO fundraising model. He said,

“Blockchain technology originated from the community, and to date, we have seen the huge role of the community in the advancement of blockchain technology: ICO provides an inherent incentive mechanism for developers in the open source community for the first time.”

Yu Wenbo mentioned that the current investment and financing model in the blockchain field is that ICO and traditional VC are running side by side. According to statistics from the Distributed Capital Research Institute, the traditional investment in the blockchain field in 2016 was US$496 million, while ICO reached US$236 million, nearly half of the traditional VC investment. In the past 12 months, the financing amount of ICO has exceeded the financing amount of traditional VC, which is 2.4 times that of traditional VC. (Different statistical methods, there are discrepancies with the above data)

However, despite the current optimism, Yu Wenbo pointed out that the potential risks faced by ICOs cannot be ignored, such as the risk of absconding with funds, the lack of auditing and custody of the digital assets raised; the risk of over-commitment, the failure of projects to fulfill their promises; the risk of overvaluation brought about by bubbles; excessive optimism among investors, with excessively high expectations for returns; and the risk of project management and control. In the subsequent development cycle after the investment is completed, it is difficult to follow up and control how the development progresses.

In terms of industry development trends, the guests generally believed that in the future we will see more combined applications of blockchain with big data, cloud computing, the Internet of Things and other technologies. More and more teams are starting from the industry rather than from blockchain. "The industry currently has these problems, which can be solved with blockchain. This is also different from most of the teams we saw two or three years ago." Du Yu, head of Wanxiang Blockchain Laboratory, said.

It is undeniable that there is still a lot of basic work to be done on blockchain itself and the combination of blockchain with other technologies. Under the guidance of blockchain standards, more applications in the future will be in the form of "+ blockchain" that integrates various new technologies.