How does Conflux expand the application scenarios of public chains by successively entering fields such as people's livelihoods and copyright?

Source: Wenhui Daily

Original Title: "Over a Million Users and 2 Billion Transactions! What is Happening on the 'Shanghai Original' Third Generation Public Chain?"

Author: Shen Qiaosha

This month (Note: The original article was published on January 14 this year), the "first order" of global public chains in the livelihood sector has begun its application. The "Housing Rental Service Platform," jointly launched by the Shanghai Real Estate Brokerage Industry Association, Shanghai Tree Graph Blockchain Research Institute (Conflux), and Zero One Universe, has officially "put on chain" the information of hundreds of public rental housing units in Xuhui District.
A public chain is a blockchain that can be read by anyone in the world, allows transactions to be sent and effectively confirmed, and enables participation in the consensus process. Once activated, no one can stop it. Currently, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tree Graph represent the three generations of public chain technology globally. Under the premise of achieving similar performance and reliability, the Shanghai-original Tree Graph blockchain can process over 3,000 transactions per second and confirm transactions in 23 seconds, which is 428 times the performance of the Bitcoin system and 75 times that of the Ethereum system.
The "Housing Rental Service Platform" is just the tip of the iceberg of the "stories" happening daily on the Tree Graph public chain. Huaneng's "Carbon Ledger," Hunan TV's digital host… Over the past year, enterprises from different fields have been seeking cooperation with Tree Graph, marking the explosive application period for this third generation public chain.
This speed has exceeded the expectations of Long Fan, the president of the Shanghai Tree Graph Blockchain Research Institute, but it has not disrupted his work plan. Long Fan firmly believes that what the Tree Graph Blockchain Research Institute should do is to solve the most core issues in the blockchain technology field, to "lay the foundation, lay the tracks, and pull the wires" for this burgeoning new world—once these infrastructures are built, they will attract more and more applications, and in the future, this place will become bustling and vibrant.

From Public Rental Housing to Carbon Ledger, Blockchain Makes Complex Processes "Traceable"

Long Fan is very busy. Over the past two years, he has been like a migratory bird, constantly shuttling between Beijing, Shanghai, Hunan, and other places. If the previous years were the "popularization year" for blockchain, where everyone was still "testing" which fields could utilize this emerging technology, in the past year, a series of high-quality application cases have begun to emerge one after another.
In September 2020, after the Tree Graph Blockchain Research Institute settled in the Zhita on the Xuhui West Bank, it began to fully tackle the "Housing Rental Service Platform" project, deploying it on the Tree Graph public chain. Prior to this, there had been no precedent for a public chain application in the livelihood sector globally.
The housing rental sector faces multiple "pain points," such as the difficulty in verifying the authenticity of housing sources, the challenge of confirming rental rights with multiple intermediaries, and the difficulty in verifying rental income. For example, when a landlord entrusts both intermediary A and B to rent out a property, if A finds a tenant, the information may not be promptly synchronized to B, causing B to continue searching for tenants; there are also cases where a sub-landlord signs a long-term contract with a tenant for a property whose lease is about to expire… To solve these issues, the key is to break the information asymmetry.
Blockchain can significantly improve the transparency of data acquisition and sharing, and once data is on-chain, it cannot be tampered with. Tree Graph uses blockchain to give all participants in the rental chain a "credit value": landlords or intermediaries will provide tenants with a traceable QR code, which can be used to check which property is available for rent, the current rental situation, etc. After paying the rent, rental information will also be recorded on the chain. Through the blockchain-enabled rental platform, all records of participants serve as endorsements of their credit, while also providing convenience for community, street, and public security management.
Currently, the Housing Rental Service Platform mainly addresses rental services, but in the future, it can expand to related life services, such as maintenance, cleaning, and various living facility services, building a "metaverse living area for social individuals."
If the public rental housing in Xuhui is a new attempt to put complex data from multiple parties on-chain, then the "Carbon Ledger" launched by Zero One Universe in collaboration with Huaneng Clean Energy Technology Research Institute is a pioneering exploration of energy digital asset management. Zero One Universe is a data trust governance technology company incubated by the Tree Graph Blockchain Research Institute. Based on the scenarios provided by Huaneng, Zero One Universe developed a blockchain-based industrial control digital asset management system and will further collaborate with Huaneng to build a blockchain-based "next-generation clean energy industrial digital platform," achieving productization in the direction of corporate "carbon ledgers."
The so-called "Carbon Ledger" records the circumstances under which carbon emissions occur, as well as a series of issues related to data collection and certification, providing specialized management for key data assets in energy production, carbon assets, and supply chain digital assets. It is reported that this project is expected to provide industry standards for national carbon emissions, carbon trading, and carbon governance.

"High Technical Capability" Boosts NFT Boom and Drives Blockchain Applications

At the beginning of 2021, Mike Winkelmann (nickname: Beeple) sold his NFT artwork "Everydays: The First 5000 Days" for a staggering $69 million, sparking unprecedented attention in the industry towards NFT crypto art. By the end of the year, artist Pak's NFT work "The Merge" sold for $92 million, breaking global NFT sales records. In no time, this "new species" that combines art and technology has attracted countless players.
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are digital assets verified using blockchain technology. They can assign a hash value to digital works through minting on the blockchain, permanently storing them on the blockchain. Due to the immutable nature of blockchain, digital works genuinely possess uniqueness, and their ownership is confirmed.
The explosive popularity of NFTs has prompted various industries and major players at home and abroad to take action. As one of the heavyweight players looking to enter the NFT space, Chanel sought cooperation with the Tree Graph Blockchain Research Institute. In fact, the combination of luxury goods and blockchain is becoming a trend, as blockchain technology is expected to eliminate "pain points" in luxury goods distribution and traceability, improving the market ecology. For application parties seeking breakthroughs, Tree Graph is almost the only choice for launching NFTs on a public chain in China.
The Tree Graph public chain was launched in October 2020 and has since processed over 2 billion transactions from more than a million users, peaking at over 2,000 transactions per second without any transaction congestion. Before its official launch, the Tree Graph public chain underwent four months of trial operation, during which its unique "tree structure algorithm" was thoroughly validated.
Long Fan admitted that although he did not anticipate that the booming NFT market would quickly "bring blockchain technology out of the circle" just a year later, he was already certain that this was an important field concerning the "second half" of the internet, and the completeness of the "infrastructure" would determine the prosperity of the future "superstructure."
Xiaohongshu, Mango TV, Oreo… In the past year, several leading enterprises have been or are planning to launch NFT products on the Tree Graph blockchain, which is very important for the development of the Tree Graph public chain. Long Fan stated that just like the early internet, blockchain technology also needs a large number of applications to drive it, and the young Tree Graph, compared to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other public chains, is weakest in terms of user numbers; the NFT boom will drive a large number of applications to flock to the Tree Graph public chain.

50% of Revenue Goes to Creators, Clarifying "Digital Copyright" Gives Rise to New Industry Play

Currently, on the Tree Graph blockchain, some established internet rules are being broken, and new play styles are emerging, with the application ecosystem thriving.
In recent years, industries such as short videos and live streaming have developed rapidly, and internet platforms continue to grow. The "China Internet Copyright Industry Development Report (2020)" shows that the market size of China's internet copyright industry exceeded 1.1 trillion yuan in 2020, a 23.6% increase from 2019. Digital content on the internet mainly involves four links: upstream partners, content producers, content platforms, and users, while content creators and their works often need to rely on commercial platforms for intellectual property protection. Due to the stronger bargaining power of platform parties, this has somewhat dampened the creative enthusiasm of content producers.
Liao Fang, assistant to the president of the Shanghai Tree Graph Blockchain Research Institute, stated that the decentralized distributed ledger of blockchain provides a trust mechanism among independent individuals, allowing content producers to publish their creations on the blockchain and achieve copyright confirmation, enabling large-scale content circulation, which will allow content producers to gain more revenue. Based on this concept, in August 2021, the "Light Paper Collector" NFT digital collection product display platform officially launched on the Tree Graph alliance chain (also known as "Light Paper Chain"). It will provide NFT certification and display services supported by the Tree Graph consensus algorithm for Alibaba auction ecosystem partners. The platform's biggest feature is that about half of the auction revenue goes to the creators, and through smart contracts, the subsequent circulation revenue of the collectibles is continuously returned to the creators, greatly incentivizing the creative enthusiasm of content producers.
"The value of NFTs is actually a form of identity recognition." In Long Fan's view, NFTs, which can effectively protect digital assets and greatly stimulate the potential value of IP, may be the "key" to entering the "metaverse" and could give rise to a new content industry. For example, Mango TV, which has a large amount of video resources, is exploring whether it can use digital assets to build a new virtual community to increase user stickiness; Xiaohongshu hopes to create a blockchain-based virtual display system; and those game characters that have already "passed away" (due to game shutdowns) may also gain "immortality" on the blockchain.

Tree Graph Research Institute: Our Job is to "Lay the Foundation"

In January 2020, the Shanghai Tree Graph Blockchain Research Institute was established in Shanghai. The institute was initiated by Long Fan, a professor at the University of Toronto, with Turing Award winner Yao Qizhi serving as chief scientist, gathering a group of young top scientists and world-class developer geeks. Nine months later, the first blockchain public chain system independently developed by China, "Tree Graph," was launched. This "Shanghai original" blockchain underlying operating system broke the monopoly of underlying code in European and American computer systems, allowing China to potentially seize a place in the international public chain technology rules.
As the core underlying technology of the metaverse, blockchain may be the fastest-developing technology in human history—having undergone iterations of technologies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Polkadot in less than 20 years, it has significantly changed our world.
Just as Huawei's development of 5G has increased network communication bandwidth, the Tree Graph blockchain is equivalent to the "5G" of public blockchain. It has solved the bottlenecks of consensus mechanisms and network transmission in public blockchain systems, achieving a performance improvement of two orders of magnitude, allowing it to process over 3,000 transactions per second while maintaining similar performance and reliability, with a user experience close to traditional centralized systems, sufficient to support large-scale blockchain applications.
Currently, the Tree Graph public chain community has gathered nearly a million users, becoming the third largest public chain community in the world, second only to Bitcoin and Ethereum, with more and more applications vying to settle in. Meanwhile, its core team remains focused on one thing—laying the foundation. In September 2021, the IEEE P3217 "Blockchain System Application Interface Specification" international standard was initiated at the Shanghai Tree Graph Blockchain Research Institute, allowing Tree Graph to be designated by IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) as the chair organization for this international standard working group, leading the formulation of this standard.
Long Fan stated that if the blockchain system is likened to a car, the industry is currently at a stage where there is no unified car model, and drivers (blockchain applications) need to change their "licenses" when navigating different chains. The standards being formulated will unify the car model, allowing drivers to "get started" with various models without needing to obtain a license.
At the same time, this young team, with an average age of 30, is also tackling challenges such as reducing blockchain storage costs, increasing system throughput while lowering hardware costs, enhancing transaction security, and reducing the risk of attacks. They walk around the office in Xuhui Riverside in T-shirts and slippers, daydreaming in the company's specially designed meditation room, while constantly sketching ideas to change the world in their minds. They hope that all users who come to this public chain called "Tree Graph" will be moved by the "beautiful environment, convenient transportation, and thoughtful services."
"As long as it involves multi-party cooperation and trust, blockchain can be tried." Long Fan said that the development of the next generation of blockchain technology has the whole world standing on the same starting line. The network ecology of Shanghai's blockchain centered around Tree Graph is beginning to take shape.