Dialogue Saito: Blockchain needs better economic model design

The Polkadot parachain auctions are approaching, and many projects in the Polkadot ecosystem are receiving widespread attention from the market. Among them, Saito, as a project focused on Web3.0 infrastructure and a recipient of a foundation grant, has gained significant market interest due to its innovative design.

This time, Richard Parris, co-founder and CEO of Saito, shared insights in the Catcher Insight community based on the current state of Web3 development, the implementation path of Saito's solutions, and Richard's thoughts on the public chain landscape, hoping to inspire you.

Catcher: The whole industry is talking about Web3.0. What vision do you think Web3.0 will ultimately achieve? What infrastructure is still needed to build Web3.0?

Richard Parris: Many Web3 infrastructures will look very similar to what we have now, but the relationship between users and providers will be different. Currently, users have to give up a lot when registering for services, including providing their identity information.

Therefore, the first thing we need to pay attention to is that services should be fairer and more user-oriented. Companies will need to work hard to acquire and retain users, and users will have more autonomy in their usage.

However, what is exciting is that Web3 will also see many new business models, applications, and types of interactions. For example, the formation of DAOs can create new types of organizations, and DeFi is changing the landscape of finance.

What is most thrilling is that we do not know what the "killer app" will be. Some young people will create things we cannot currently imagine, and it will sweep the world.

To make this possible, we do not need new technologies or other iterative software methods. What we need to do is simply not to exclude other networks and resist the natural trends of monopoly and exclusivity.

Catcher: We understand that Saito is a user-oriented Web3 open network layer, but the official introduction lacks specific use cases and a comprehensive overview of the problems it solves. Please enlighten us.

Richard Parris: Saito is an open network layer that brings Web3 to users.** Applications on Saito can run without closed plugins, private APIs, and non-open infrastructure. Saito operates without owners while funding nodes that provide routing and user infrastructure for its network and other public blockchains. All of this is supported by the new blockchain underlying design, Saito consensus.

I have listed a few things that people might be interested in building on top of it: an IoT without centralized databases and trust providers; perfect privacy browsing; cross-chain bridges; decentralized Spotify, Netflix, YouTube, Douyin, WeChat; decentralized app stores.

Catcher: Please introduce the background of the Saito team and its development history.

Richard Parris: Since the early 2000s, David Lancashire and I have been in the tech circle in Beijing, where we met during the Bitcoin activities in Beijing in 2013-14 and became good friends.

David studied computer science, economics, and Chinese at the University of Toronto and UC Berkeley. I studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Melbourne.

In 2019, we launched a testnet and implemented the protocol based on what we learned.

In 2020, we launched the "Canary Network" to explore and build software on Saito. We built social, enterprise, and gaming features and have a growing community. The transaction volume of Saito Networks has also exceeded 11 million.

Importantly, as part of building games, we created an innovative game engine. We proposed to provide the open-source resources of the Web3 community to the Web3 Foundation and received a grant in November 2020.

Catcher: We see that Saito's partner Vishnu Korde believes that Saito will change the external perception of the blockchain field by creating a highly creative economic system to incentivize ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and Web3 projects. Specifically, how is Saito's ecological economic system designed? What are the application scenarios of the SAITO token?

Richard Parris: I will focus on incentives and ISPs to answer this question.

The Saito consensus mechanism collects user transaction fees and pays them to nodes, while these fees gradually decrease during the node consensus process.

This means you can run these nodes in Saito to do the most profitable things and attract as many users as possible. One way is to run quality services on nodes that many people like.

However, if you are an ISP, you can also incentivize users to pay you by bundling with free mobile internet services while enhancing their connectivity.

Catcher: From a technical perspective, what innovative technologies does Saito have to share? Where are their breakthroughs?

Richard Parris: The main view of Saito is that------blockchains do not need specialized technologies to move forward; the main thing is the design of the economic model. For example, when Bitcoin was invented, none of the technical parts of Bitcoin were new. Hash algorithms, blockchains, cryptography, and even the proof-of-work mechanism existed before Bitcoin.

Satoshi Nakamoto's PoW consensus is an invention that allows miners to compete with each other and increases mining rewards, enabling the creation of a self-sustaining system.

Saito is different; it is the first blockchain that pays for everything needed from the consensus mechanism, focusing on doing what the network needs, collecting transaction information from users and transferring it into blocks.

By doing this, it will be the first network that can truly scale and remain open without incurring large gas fees. This is because resources------the users' earnings---all go into the network, without being burned in mining, and there is no need to tax users to pay stakeholders.

Catcher: With the Polkadot mainnet launch approaching, what is the current development progress of Saito? What goals do you aim to achieve in the next one to two years?

Richard Parris: We are testing milestone projects, which involve adding support for the DOT series of cryptocurrencies in Saito.io.

We are very excited about the various online parachain project partners, and one of our main focuses in the coming years will be to support them in building excellent user-oriented tools and connecting them together.

Catcher: What challenges do you face in building a universal decentralized infrastructure? What is the potential for development in this market in the future?

Richard Parris: At least for us, the biggest challenge in this field may be dealing with solutions that merely push problems deeper or transform the important attributes of blockchain into speed and capacity.

The market will slowly determine which projects (like Saito) are genuinely solving problems and which are merely shifting them.

In terms of demand, it is enormous. We will see most services and tools on the network migrate to Web3, and this speed will be faster than we imagine. (It may seem slow when it happens, but looking back, it will be quick.)

Catcher: With the emergence of Ethereum Layer 2 protocols and the application ecosystems of public chains like Fantom and Solana, which have basically solved the pain points of high Ethereum gas fees and slow transaction speeds, and with the Polkadot mainnet yet to launch, what specific competitive advantages and opportunities do you think the Polkadot ecosystem has next?

Richard Parris: I believe Polkadot, Near, and ETH 2.0 are different instances of the same idea, which is ETH's "sharding" expansion. I think Polkadot's advantages in this area are: the modularity of Substrate makes parachains more diverse than sharding; it only moves smart contracts to the second layer; and the openness and breadth of the Polkadot community.

It is hard to say what role each member of these groups will play in the future, but I can say that the openness Polkadot has shown towards Saito's ideas and our collaboration on open infrastructure sets them apart.

Catcher: As more public chains emerge, how do you think the public chain market will develop in the future? What differences will there be from the current state?

Richard Parris: I think there will be various types in the future. Most new public chains support smart contracts and are competing in the DeFi space. DeFi is amazing, but for Web3, it is just a small part of the economy, much like finance is to traditional industries.

Few people expect Web3 beyond DeFi. As users begin to see what complete decentralization can do and enterprises start to get involved, things will change very quickly. This will soon crush those blockchains that are not yet prepared for the real volume of data. The existing uses of DeFi and blockchain are almost limited to relatively small financial transactions. When people start using blockchains for data, these will soon be realized.