Roundtable Dialogue: Listening to 5 Major Public Chains/Layer 2 Discuss Development Paths and Plans

Host: Liu Feng

Guests:

Herbert, Head of Dfinity China

Wilson, Head of Avalanche Asia Pacific

Cora, Head of Polygon China

Xiuqi, Head of Algorand Foundation Asia Pacific Market

Xiao Jie, Founder of Polkaworld

Liu Feng: I’m glad everyone can come together to discuss the topic of public chains. There’s no doubt that public chains were the hottest topic in 2021, and this year, the fastest-growing market capitalization must be public chain projects. Each public chain has done a lot this year, with many innovations, whether in the development of underlying technologies or in the development of upper-layer applications, and there are many noteworthy achievements.

Before we start our discussion, I would like to invite each guest to briefly introduce themselves in one or two sentences, so the audience can have a basic understanding of you.

Herbert: I am Herbert, the Head of the Asia region for the Dfinity Foundation. I entered this industry around 2017 when I was in Silicon Valley and became interested in Dfinity, attracted by their grand vision at the time. However, since the launch of the Dfinity mainnet was still a long way off, I later joined AWS, where I was responsible for the Amazon Web Services Startup Ecosystem in Greater China. About six months ago, I joined Dfinity and am now responsible for the entire ecosystem development in Asia.

Xiao Jie: Polkaworld is the official community of Polkadot in China, funded by Web3. I’m glad to be here today to discuss the topic of public chains with everyone.

Wilson: At the end of the year, various chains and enterprises are summarizing a lot. The trend of public chains this year is an inevitable trend, driven by the development of the entire crypto market, which has attracted many new users. From the perspective of Avalanche, it has been over a year since our mainnet launched last year, and the impact has been significant.

I have worked in traditional finance for over a decade, including securities, derivatives, futures, and fixed income, so I have experience in almost all areas.

Since entering this market in 2018, I have been attracted by the flexibility, space, development speed, and influence of this market. After joining Avalanche at the end of last year, I felt that the development of public chains offered me tremendous platform-level appeal. Throughout this year, my colleagues and I at headquarters have put in tremendous effort.

In terms of market development specifications in the Asia region, I have witnessed many market changes with various partners. I believe that once the market undergoes changes, it leads to more exciting processes.

Cora: I am Cora, the Head of Polygon in China. Before entering the crypto space, I returned from studying abroad and started my own international trading company.

I got involved in the crypto space in 2017, began to understand Bitcoin, and have been engaged in market community operations in this industry for over five years. Polygon changed its name this year; it was previously called Matic. I started paying attention to Matic in 2019 and bought Matic at the end of that year when I was not yet an employee. I am surprised by how much Matic has developed. I joined Polygon in late September this year, responsible for the operation and business development of Polygon in China.

Xiuqi: I am Xiuqi, currently the Head of the Asia Pacific market for Algorand. I just joined Algorand not long ago. I entered the blockchain industry in 2018 and previously worked in media for the government in Dubai, focusing on media and market direction.

Liu Feng: The public chain projects represented by the guests today have performed particularly well in 2021. So, I would like to ask the first question: Could each of you quickly share what you think is the most commendable and distinctive aspect of the ecosystem development in your respective public chain projects in 2021?

Herbert: Our Layer 1 blockchain is called the Internet Computer, or IC for short, and it went live in May this year. It has been almost six months since then. Personally, I am proud of several things: First, our network has never gone down. In my previous job at AWS, I often encountered outages, so I believe that for a network, an underlying infrastructure provider, maintaining stability without downtime is crucial.

We have withstood this test and have undergone several stress tests. In July and August, our ecosystem saw its first NFT issuance, which was unprecedented, and the network held up well. The second thing is that our foundation has established a forum for communication with developers, where almost 80% of community discussions occur.

For example, our DAO is currently discussing 25 future proposals, and we have had extensive discussions with developers on our forum, gathering a lot of feedback. We might have the largest R&D team in the industry, with nearly 200 people. This process is rare—such transparency and thorough communication with developers to gather feedback and even invite well-known developers from our community to participate in our weekly global meetings.

The foundation has this good mindset of co-building the ecosystem with everyone. The third point is that our Internet Computer has done well in terms of decentralization, with over 400 nodes globally. Although we have not yet launched in China, which is a significant focus for me, these 400+ nodes are operated by over 50 node operators.

I often emphasize that our primary task in the China region must be decentralization, so even if some of our products are launched later and at a slower pace, it is not because we cannot do it ourselves; we want community developers to do it. This trade-off has been tested at various levels. However, we do not know how to strike this balance. Over the past six months, we have been exploring and gathering opinions, and there is no standard answer. Everyone in the industry talks about decentralization, but it is challenging to determine where that line is drawn.

However, I believe that from being an industry observer at the beginning to joining the foundation a few months later, I have experienced many stories with developers, and I hope the foundation can continue to adhere to this path. I hope this can serve as a baseline for the industry, whether for Layer 1 or Layer 2.

Xiao Jie: From a data perspective, Polkadot should be considered the chain with the highest total value locked (TVL) on-chain this year. This can be understood as the total value of DOT staked on the public chain, not counting the TVL within the parachains. The total amount staked on Polkadot's Layer 0 relay chain should be the highest among all public chains.

Wilson: Avalanche gives me a very strong feeling of going from 0 to 1. When I first started promoting this project last year, almost no one around me knew about it. Additionally, everyone had a very shallow understanding of the entire public chain layer; people were just following trends and concepts.

However, from the perspective of technology, product, and platform development, it truly is a journey from 0 to 1. I personally experienced a very volatile market in 2018 and 2019, as well as a very sluggish market. Regardless of how the market develops, many technologies are still advancing, and many products are still being built.

First, after the mainnet launched last year, we established the Avalanche Bridge with Ethereum this year, which is fast, cost-effective, and provides a good user experience. I believe the core of the ecosystem needs to open a door for users to enter. Our Avalanche infrastructure is relatively complex, with Xchain, P Chain, and C Chain. Most applications are on the C Chain, and for users entering the C Chain early on, it can be very cumbersome, requiring 7-8 steps to get in. We have done a lot of work to integrate access to the C Chain, allowing users to go directly from exchanges to our ecosystem's application layer. We also promoted the Avalanche Rush project.

For users, we opened the door, and once they come in, we also need an incentive mechanism. We launched a reward of 10 million tokens (currently valued at 1 billion USD). So, our first step was to improve the underlying infrastructure, the second was to open our doors to let more users in, and the third was to provide more incentives for users.

The last point is the establishment of our ecosystem fund. We established a North American fund called Blizzard and an Asian fund called AVATAR. Through various levels of integration, we promote the development of the entire ecosystem. After more than a year of effort, we can see that the entire ecosystem has grown from 0 to 1, with a vast number of applications, users, and assets, and it is still in a growth state. Finally, we are also preparing for a hackathon. The next step we are opening up is the process from 1 to X.

We liken it to urban development. Building a new city starts with attracting investment, followed by talent recruitment and industry fund support. So attracting investment is about bringing projects in, talent recruitment is about bringing in a large number of users, and industry fund support is about incentivizing these users through investments or reward mechanisms. Therefore, I believe that from a fundamental logic perspective, it is the same.

Cora: A public chain inevitably has bugs. Although Polygon experienced such a bug this year, we handled it quite well. First, there was no panic regarding the coin price, and secondly, we took a series of measures, including a hard fork. The losses were also kept within a controllable range, allowing us to navigate through this situation smoothly.

Polygon's overall development this year began with the mainnet launch, followed by our announcement to build an ecosystem, and then the name change from Matic to Polygon. A few days ago, our agency WTMC compiled some ecosystem data, showing that Matic rose from a low of 0.01781 at the beginning of the year to a high of 2.92 this year, an increase of about 163 times.

In terms of project growth within the ecosystem, nearly 30 projects have increased by over 20 times. Well-known projects like Chainlink and others such as Sandbox and Uniswap have successively joined the Polygon ecosystem. As of now, we have over 3,000 projects in our ecosystem, and this growth rate is indeed a bit staggering.

In May, we launched the SDK, and in June, we launched Polygon Studio, where we set aside 100 million USD to support projects in this track, such as GameFi, SocialFi, and Metaverse. In August, we acquired Hermez, a European team working on ZK solutions, and in September, we partnered with one of the Big Four accounting firms, AnYong. In November, we launched Polygon Miden, and in December, we acquired Mir. Subsequently, our Twitter account surpassed one million followers.

The Chinese community Telegram group we established in April has now reached 23,000 members. Looking back at the entire year, our ecosystem has been continuously expanding, and our technical team has been strengthening. This year has indeed been an explosive year for Polygon.

Xiuqi: Algorand's mainnet has been live for two years without any downtime. This year, Algorand has also accomplished a lot. The most significant achievement is that we officially launched decentralized governance this year.

The total supply of Algo is less than 10 billion. Currently, two-thirds are circulating in the market, while one-third is in the ecosystem fund. Starting this year, we officially handed over the decision-making power for the use of this fund to the community. Users holding Algo can participate in community governance voting. Each governance period lasts about three months, with four periods a year, and a governance period can last for two to three years. Our first governance period is this year, starting in October and ending voting at the end of December, with a locked amount of about 1.8 billion Algo. There are over 70,000 global governors participating, and these governors will share 6 million Algo at the end of December. This is currently the most decentralized governance in the public chain.

Algorand has also begun a series of deployments for ecosystem expansion, allocating 250 million Algo to establish a grant to incentivize our new projects. Currently, we have about 800 partners, which, while not a lot, is a tenfold increase in funded projects compared to last year, and we expect to continue accelerating this process next year. Additionally, there is a 150 million liquidity incentive program for DeFi projects to provide staking incentives.

For each track, Algorand will allocate some funds to support it. In November this year, we launched a university cooperation program called the Excellence Center Program, hoping to develop a diverse community of enthusiasts through collaboration with universities. In the first phase, we received 119 letters of intent from 45 countries, and official statistics show that there are about 10,000 Algorand developers.

Lastly, although Algorand's mainnet is in its third year, there is still continuous external funding entering Algorand. Last month, we received a 1.5 billion fund supported by executives from Citibank, along with many traditional financial funds entering our ecosystem. Continuous funding is also crucial for public chains.

Liu Feng: Next, let's talk about the issue of openness. The first question I want to discuss is about what I just heard; almost every friend mentioned the TVL data in their introduction to the development of their ecosystems. It seems that this data has become a fair measure of a public chain's ecosystem development. However, is this metric effective, or are there other metrics to measure the health of a public chain ecosystem? I would particularly like to hear everyone's insights.

Xiuqi: For Algorand, it is challenging to measure with TVL since Algorand started doing DeFi relatively late. If the incentives are sufficient, its development will be rapid. The rapid growth of leading DeFi projects will feed back into the public chain's coin price.

If we only return to the public chain as an underlying layer, I believe three points are crucial: first is stability, second is security, and the last is decentralization. These three points lean towards the core. Of course, there are other metrics such as execution speed, energy efficiency, and whether it is developer-friendly, etc. But I believe these cannot be solved perfectly.

Overall, a public chain should have relatively stable and secure technology, sustainable development, and a high degree of decentralization, which are essential for Web3 infrastructure.

In the past, Ethereum had a high market share, but from the current data, their market is slowly declining because all public chains are expanding this year, capturing Ethereum's market.

Currently, our public chain is still in a position to capture some incremental value from Ethereum. Many revolutionary Web3 applications and concepts have emerged from Ethereum, such as Crypto Kitty and Uniswap over the past two years. Therefore, in the short term, public chains cannot simply use TVL or the scale of their ecosystems to compete with Ethereum's ecosystem. However, each public chain is currently seeking its positioning and future development direction.

In the short term, it is crucial for us to understand whether these public chains can maintain good sustainable development in their positioning. For example, some public chains provide scalability for Ethereum, while others may focus on niche markets, and some are functional. Algorand, for instance, is a financial public chain, and this year it has added the concept of a green public chain. Our technical team's background is primarily in academia and industry, so resources will focus more on mainstream collaborations.

I personally prefer bottom-up trends in crypto, such as DAOs, domains, and metaverse projects that have emerged this year. However, we also see that some things need to be top-down, such as policies and trends outside of Web2, like the popular carbon footprint and environmental protection this year, as well as the development of infrastructure at the national level.

Algorand may serve as a hub connecting both new and old aspects, as it operates relatively stably and is very compliant, allowing it to collaborate with mainstream financial institutions and national governments. For example, El Salvador, which used Bitcoin as its official currency, has collaborated with us.

We are also more sensitive to international trends. Therefore, this year we have developed a green carbon-neutral chain and will have dedicated funds to support projects in collaboration with governments. Thus, we cannot only look at the application scale of the ecosystem but should also consider whether it can maintain healthy development within its positioning. For Algorand, there will be many future metrics for evaluation.

Xiao Jie: Polkadot cannot be said to be TVL; it is about staking your DOT to maintain the security of the entire network. So if we talk about network security and decentralization, Polkadot should rank relatively high among public chains.

The staking on the Polkadot network is somewhat different from the conventional understanding of TVL; it is the value staked within this network to maintain security. Currently, over 600 million DOT are staked. So what are the indicators for public chains and measuring ecosystems? The development of the Polkadot public chain compared to the other public chains here is often criticized for its ecosystem. Polkadot itself is not a Layer 1 blockchain; it is a Layer 0 original protocol, which is more abstract and lower-level.

If people do not understand the relationship between Polkadot's relay chain and parachains, they can think of it as a Layer 0 original protocol. It connects to every parachain on Polkadot through parachain auctions. If simply understood, each chain is like an Ethereum, and its ecosystem cannot be measured or compared at the same level as current public chains.

To compare, we can only compare projects on the Layer 1 public chain of Polkadot. This year is considered the inaugural year for the Polkadot ecosystem because parachains have launched, and more applications will grow on parachains.

Developers accustomed to Ethereum can enter the Layer 1 parachain ecosystem to develop, and only then will this ecosystem gradually take shape. Although Polkadot's white paper has been around for five years, this year it has finally realized the content of the white paper.

In 2022, the entire ecosystem will slowly grow, and then it can capture value for Polkadot itself. Regarding security, performance, and decentralization, only after experiencing the optimization of XCMP in 2022 can there be comparative metrics. Currently, we can only say that Polkadot has achieved sufficient decentralization and security. In 2022, its focus will be on performance optimization, and similarly, its parachain ecosystem will gradually grow.

Herbert: To discuss how to measure the healthy development of a public chain from the perspective of the Internet Computer, there are three indicators. The first is speed, the second is storage cost, and the third is the diversity of Dapps.

Considering that we are an application network, it is crucial to think about how to run a network program stably and efficiently. This is even more important than the value of assets. Currently, we have two types of speed: the writing speed is within 2 seconds, and the reading speed is within 200 milliseconds.

Through our optimization, this speed has steadily decreased over the past six months, and we hope to reduce it to below 50ms within the next two to three years, at which point we can play games like Honor of Kings.

Only in this way can we provide enterprise-level services. The second storage cost can be seen as a decentralized Alibaba Cloud; it can provide not only smart contracts but also storage and computing power, all in a decentralized manner. Currently, storing 1GB costs 5 dollars a year, which is still very advantageous. As mentioned earlier, we have over 400 nodes globally, and as the number of nodes increases, our costs will continue to decrease. This is a significant convenience for developers, as they can accurately calculate the cost of building a network application.

The third is the diversity of Dapps. Of course, the ecosystem has quantity and depth, but diversity is also essential. We aim to disrupt the entire internet and hope to rewrite the pricing of the entire internet at its most fundamental level. Recently, something interesting happened; at the hackathon in October, the grand prize was awarded to a project that created an email system on our IC, which received a lot of attention from crypto funds in the industry. A few days ago, I also saw a project in our ecosystem that created a YouTube-like platform. This is something I have always wanted to do, as I believe YouTube is one of the most remarkable products of the Web 2.0 era.

We held a hackathon in China, and the grand prize went to a project from the Blockchain Laboratory of Zhejiang University, which moved Python to our blockchain. People can directly download our IC from Pip3 in the packaging manager, and Python can run directly on our IC. There are also people who have moved MATLAB to IC, and some from abroad have brought Java onto our platform, which are all quite interesting.

Wilson: First, I liken TVL to the GDP of an economy; its output is related to the activity level of the entire ecosystem or the total asset volume. The more assets your ecosystem has, the better it reflects the richness and activity level of that ecosystem. Other data can be fabricated, but real money (TVL) is hard to fake, so TVL can reflect the scale. Then, looking at an economic environment, there are several important indicators: first, the number of developers; second, the number of users; third, your transaction situation.

These three points mainly look at the relationship between the structural layer of the economy and its blood layer. For example, when you look at a city, what do you observe? Why did you buy a house in Shenzhen ten years ago? At that time, the population in Shenzhen might not have been that large, but with a large influx of people, housing prices rose. If Shenzhen did not have many potential enterprises to develop, would those incoming people be useful? No, so the growth of enterprises and the influx of users are mutually reinforcing, leading to rising land and housing prices.

The same goes for on-chain activities. From a structural perspective, whether there are more developers and active development projects on-chain, and whether more people are coming in, these two aspects also relate to the third aspect: the number of transactions, which is very important. For example, during the pandemic, despite many people and enterprises in the city, the ecosystem stopped because there was no flow; there were no transactions. If you cannot go out shopping and businesses cannot interact, it leads to a lack of circulation, which can cause the ecosystem to die. Therefore, the number of transactions is a measure of how active the ecosystem is. Combining these three points will ultimately lead to growth in indicators.

Cora: I actually agree with Wilson. A few months ago, we also talked about TVL because it was growing rapidly, and the ecosystem was expanding quickly. For a public chain, seeing good data at least represents that a public chain is working hard to develop.

Although data is important, we believe it is not everything. A few days ago, it was reported that Luna had the highest TVL among all public chains, which means they are currently doing well. But what about later? We say that the crypto space develops too quickly; a day in crypto is like ten years in the real world. Therefore, I think we need to look at it from a broader perspective. Although there are over 300 million people holding digital assets globally, that is not a large number compared to the total global population, especially with China’s population.

Although we are in the blockchain space and have seen significant growth this year, with Bitcoin rising a lot, our scale is still not large enough. When we participate in activities, everyone feels that there is still a lot of growth potential in the future of the crypto space. As a public chain, we must solve three key issues: security, decentralization, and scalability.

First, we must ensure security. As mentioned earlier, issues like outages and bugs can create a sufficiently safe environment for developers in the ecosystem and investors in the public chain.

Next is decentralization and scalability. The reason Polygon chose to build a Layer 2 on the foundation of Ethereum is partly because our founding team was also early Ethereum developers, and we understand Ethereum well. We say that Ethereum is a modular blockchain that first ensures security and decentralization. Indeed, this year, the rapid development of DeFi and Dapps has led to increasing congestion on Ethereum, creating unprecedented demand for its block space.

Therefore, we believe that over time, people will understand Ethereum's security. Based on this public chain, we are building Layer 2 to reduce gas fees and improve overall transaction speed. Currently, I believe public chains are in an explosive phase, and the issues arising from this are performance bottlenecks. Therefore, Polygon is committed to maximizing scalability, including acquiring two solutions in the ZK field, and we are also trying to improve it further. Thank you, Liu Feng; that concludes my part.

Liu Feng: Next, we want to discuss the topic of EVM. Is it really that important for public chains? At least I can see several teams using EVM.

Wilson: I think for users, the most important thing is simplicity. For example, when you use WeChat Pay, you find it cumbersome to switch back and forth in different cities. Now, various public chains are like different cities; there are places like Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, as well as Tokyo or New York, but each city has its characteristics. Currently, users do not see the differences and advantages because it is too early.

However, if we first use a simple interface to connect everyone, it will be more convenient for users to switch without needing a separate standard connection. In an open ecosystem, the freedom of choice for users is also very important. I believe that in the early stages, the first step is to open a large traffic entrance and welcome everyone in an open manner. We (this chain) can solve problems that they (other chains) may not handle well, and while some quality projects can continue to thrive, it is also best to have a very smooth window into this ecosystem.

Therefore, I believe that future development will be homogenized; certain points will form a common standard, while others will form so-called differentiation, including categories of applications, projects, and users, as well as habits, gradually forming different cultures on various public chains. Because users have preferences.

So the two points I mentioned earlier, one is a consensus standard type, which will develop towards a simpler and more unified standard, while the other level, at the product or project level, will move towards differentiation.

Cora: We are indeed EVM-compatible because Ethereum, based on its consensus and developer base, currently has the strongest consensus and the most developers familiar with its language. For EVM, our first step is to build a Layer 2 on Ethereum, relying on Layer 1 Ethereum's security. The issue with Ethereum is that its developers have not focused on scalability, so we are here to address that.

To enhance developer friendliness and facilitate seamless integration for developers in the ecosystem to Polygon, we emphasize strong EVM compatibility, with similar address formats and everything. At the same time, we can also address the high gas fees and excessive congestion in the Ethereum ecosystem.

However, we are also uncertain whether EVM will remain dominant in the future, as this industry develops too quickly. Just last year, we were talking about DeFi, and now it has shifted to DAOs, with several trends in between. Therefore, we cannot say that Ethereum will always dominate from now on, but currently, after so many years, Ethereum's security and stability are the highest.

We say that a good underlying infrastructure can provide developers with a vast imaginative space, and it has been proven that many genius developers have emerged from the Ethereum ecosystem. However, the current issue is that the influx of projects has led to excessive congestion in the ecosystem, high gas fees, and decreased speed.

I believe that the safest approach right now is to provide them with a scalability solution. I think Layer 2 is still in a very early stage, which is why we have seen Metis and Arbitrum perform very well in recent days. Therefore, I believe that in the future, for example, Algorand's AVM will also have great development potential, and many people may use AVM. However, at this stage, using EVM is the most comfortable state.

Xiuqi: This year, we launched our own virtual machine, AVM, which is faster, more energy-efficient, and cheaper than EVM since it was developed this year. However, in terms of the current scale of the ecosystem, these advantages are not very useful.

But let me first talk about the advantages. First, it can be written in Python. When we initially developed this virtual machine, we chose Python because it is widely used, and there are many existing tools, allowing developers to use familiar tools to write applications. At the same time, we also have a compatibility library that converts Python code into code that Algorand can directly recognize.

From the perspective of version iteration, our AVM is also faster and more efficient; it will not fork and will continuously adapt to the demands of the times and current environment, allowing for sustainable development. Additionally, the costs are relatively low, and gas fees are not that high. It can basically provide everything that EVM can offer. Returning to the ecosystem scale, the competition for application growth this year is fierce, making EVM compatibility particularly important. Many project teams are quite familiar with EVM.

As for whether Algorand will integrate EVM in the future, I currently do not know. I have seen people ask whether integrating EVM means ultimately working for the Ethereum ecosystem. This statement may be somewhat absolute, but users in the crypto space have high native social stickiness. In the long run, it is essential to cultivate users and projects that have loyalty to their ecosystem. First, we need to have a loyal fan base, and then see if we can attract fans from other ecosystems.

From a broader perspective, Ethereum has always been a leader in smart contracts, but we should also believe that the future development of public chains should be diversified and phased. It is undeniable that EVM is very attractive; it is vast and vibrant, but if the mainstream product trends in the market change in the future, or if there are compliance issues, there will be significant variables. The entire development is still in its early stages, and I believe that other non-EVM public chains, including Algorand, will also have their opportunities.

Xiao Jie: EVM was written by Gavin in 2015. He accepted an interview where he mentioned that EVM is indeed the current standard. Polkadot will also be compatible with EVM, but he believes that Wasm is the future. I also want to discuss from different angles. This year, I find it quite miraculous that EVM may be the third consensus in our industry after BTC consensus and smart contract consensus.

Since BSC began to be compatible with EVM, many public chains have also started to do so. The first aspect is that the ecosystem developed by Ethereum is currently unmatched by any other public chain. For new public chains that need to grow their ecosystems quickly, a convenient way is to be compatible with EVM, copying all the developers, gameplay, and applications from Ethereum to their own public chains, which is the fastest way to develop.

The second aspect is that these public chains that are compatible with EVM are not merely taking shortcuts; they have also made many optimizations and improvements on Ethereum's EVM, which have indeed reduced gas fees. This benefits both developers and improves user experience. Therefore, we need to view the current state of all public chains trying to implement EVM from two perspectives. For Polkadot itself, EVM is the current standard, while Kevin believes that Wasm is the future.

Currently, we see that five parachains have launched in the Polkadot ecosystem. Why has Moonbeam seen such high user growth compared to other parachains? Because it is fully compatible with Ethereum EVM. They have recognized this trend; being compatible with Ethereum allows them to build their ecosystem, enabling good NFTs, DeFi, and teams from Ethereum to be directly transferred to the Polkadot ecosystem.

Thus, there will be chains in the Polkadot ecosystem that are fully compatible with EVM, but there are also those that do EVM+ like Acala, which will make some optimizations and incorporate elements from the current EVM situation along with optimizations from subchains. It may sound like an upgrade to EVM, making it more user-friendly for developers, but my understanding is that it may have certain thresholds, filtering out some users compared to Moonbeam's no-threshold approach.

In theory, they have made some optimizations, but it will take a longer period to cultivate developers. Therefore, the Polkadot ecosystem has EVM, EVM+, and the future direction of Patract focusing on Wasm. The development of the Polkadot ecosystem is phased; the original protocol of the relay chain itself will not do these things but will support projects in the ecosystem to do so, first by being compatible, then upgrading, and finally developing Wasm.

Herbert: Everyone has talked about the many changes in this industry, but we at Dfinity have never forgotten our original intention. Our network is called the Internet Computer. We have our own VM and do not use Ethereum's EVM. However, we have just passed 25 proposals, among which the most anticipated is that within a few months, we will achieve interaction with Ethereum. Here, we refer to integration, not a bridge.

Through Chain Technology, we can complete a signature on our Internet Computer, and through this cryptographic technology, all smart contracts on Ethereum will recognize our signature. Conversely, since all our smart contracts operate within a container, we will run all Ethereum nodes within this container, achieving two-way interaction between Ethereum and the Internet Computer. This means that smart contracts can be fully interconnected, and assets can flow freely between the two, which we will complete in the coming months.

Once this step is completed, we will create an environment on IC that allows EVM to run directly. This will be very friendly for developers.

After all, from 2015 to now, most developers have grown up in the Ethereum ecosystem, including many of our engineers and leaders at Dfinity who come from the Ethereum system. This trend will continue. We hope to make the technology stack more friendly for Ethereum developers through technological upgrades.

Last month, when we were in Miami, an artist created a set of NFTs. His smart contract was on Ethereum, but his digital assets were on our chain, showcasing a particularly creative new form. With our complete integration with Ethereum, whether in NFTs, SocialFi, or GameFi, we will see more similar situations arise.

Liu Feng: Finally, let’s ask one last question. Please summarize in one sentence what the most important product in your public chain ecosystem will be next year.

Herbert: We are most looking forward to a cross-chain signature, which is a product upgrade. If completed, we will first achieve integration with Bitcoin, allowing smart contracts to run on Bitcoin, and then we will complete the integration with Ethereum through Chain Technology to achieve cross-chain signatures.

Xiao Jie: If Polkadot can implement the XCMP protocol, it will be a great product. If this is realized, it will enable interaction among all parachains in the Polkadot ecosystem, and I hope it will run smoothly next year. Additionally, from the perspective of parachains, DeFi will likely lead the way.

Wilson: I will mention what I look forward to. The underlying technologies we have developed are quite good, but we currently have room for improvement in our wallet, which only has a web version.

The second aspect is the development of the ecosystem. From two perspectives, first is connectivity. Although we are EVM-compatible, the bridge we have established is still not smooth enough, and I believe it will be more seamless next year. The second is the potential for project-level explosions because once the platform is well-connected and mechanisms are in place, there should be more than tenfold growth in applications.

When the foundation of the entire ecosystem is well laid, we look forward to an explosive period for the ecosystem.

I believe that next year, all sectors will continue to show a spiral growth effect and interlinking effects. You can also pay attention to the number of USDC; USDT is a more convenient entry point for many retail investors, while USDC is an entry point for many institutions, making it more compliant. Therefore, as the number of USDC increases, it represents institutional entry, and next year, there will continue to be institutional investments in this market, further solidifying the foundation of the ecosystem. The so-called speculative funds will hover around various hot sectors, and I believe next year will still be a period of spiral growth.

Cora: I believe Polygon will continue to develop technically, focusing on ZK development, likely maintaining the same pace as this year. This year saw the launch of SDK and Miden, and next year may bring breakthroughs in new technologies. A noteworthy product is our partnership with Opera, which will release a wallet next year. Polygon aims to become a more decentralized project, and we are still trying to solve the three core issues: security, decentralization, and scalability.

Moreover, there are now more SocialFi and Metaverse projects applying for Polygon grants, and their project quality is higher than before, whether in terms of team resources or project quality. I believe that next year, high-quality projects in SocialFi and Gaming will perform well, and I am very much looking forward to it.

Xiuqi: Next year, Algorand's ecosystem projects will definitely experience a wave of growth. Some things may be late but will arrive, such as the DeFi projects we primarily support, as well as NFT and gaming, which will certainly drive a wave of explosive growth for the entire ecosystem, which everyone is looking forward to.

On the technical side, Algorand is expected to launch a new technology called state proofs early next year, which will provide post-quantum-level security and enhance Algorand's interoperability with other chains. After all, Algorand is still a relatively closed ecosystem, so interoperability will be very important.