Hua
In the previous bear market cycle, the question in people's minds was “whether blockchain is useful at all,” and then we witnessed the power of Uniswap, along with the flourishing vitality of DeFi. The question was answered.
During this bear market cycle, many are deeply involved in DeFi, while others are once again faced with a question, “What else can blockchain be used for?” People ask this not out of dissatisfaction, but because the current blockchain is like a dragon with only one wing, trapped in a limited territory. Only when its other wing grows can it soar, and the power of the first wing can truly be unleashed.
Where will the other wing grow from? It won't come from the level of chains, such as new main chains or layers; these are the dragon's torso, not its wings. It will come from the level of applications, and most likely from applications under new standards/protocols rather than old ones. Given everyone's brainstorming and innovation over the past few years, old protocols haven't brought any surprises.
In this article, I want to discuss my top three favorite new standards/protocols: ERC-6551, ERC-5169, and ERC-404. New protocols will open up new applications, and new applications may bring users to the blockchain with non-investment and non-financial needs, allowing the dragon to grow its other wing.
ERC-6551 may not have a striking appearance, but it offers a vast narrative space. This article only explores the direction that personally interests me, which I call 'non-human account entities.' The three use cases in the article may appear to be imaginary, but consider this: the destination of the aerospace industry is the vast cosmos, but before taking us to Mars, it can bring us air-cushioned shoes.
1.Gaming: The Integration of Real Players and NPCs
“Kenshi” is an open-ended game I enjoy. Players can trade goods between different cities to earn money, but the desert between cities is dangerous. In such situations, players can go to a tavern, hire mercenaries, and pay NPCs to escort the caravan. In traditional games, these NPCs cannot be real people. Because they are not real people, everything in the game, except the players, has no growth potential. Eventually, the players will complete all tasks and leave the game.
What if there was a new type of entity or object that could both embody real people and NPCs? When a real person logs in, they enter real player mode, and the player operates normally, such as improving skills and building cities. When a real person logs out, they enter NPC mode (reading fixed data and executing specific programs), passively earning money as an NPC in the real player mode of other players, such as when hired as a mercenary. The combination of blockchain and ERC-6551 could serve as the best carrier for this type of entity. NFTs (game characters) have accounts, data, and property, allowing them to be treated as independent objects. Real player accounts have NFTs, enabling them to take control when they log in.
It doesn’t mean blockchain and ERC-6551 solve all the problems related to the integration of real players and NPCs, but they open up a possible path. As a hardcore gamer, I often ask myself, “Can blockchain make games more fun?” I have listed numerous answers and, after deduction, crossed out almost all of them. Finding a path in NPCs is an answer that has not been crossed out.
2.AI: Equality Between AI and Humans
Humans are a species with amour-propre（a term used by Rousseau). We see everything as our tools or appendages. However, technology is not a human appendage. When we look at the technology tree, we find it to be another powerful force of evolution, with its own destination. If amour-propre only caused humans to miss out on a certain, more happy way of life (Levi Strauss) in the past , in the future, it may bring about a tragedy for the race.
Perhaps we need to take a step forward and consider AI as an entity equal to humans. So, where is the habitat for AI? Will they place themselves on a private server controlled by others? How should they manage and use their assets? The answer might be: a blockchain (or a consensus mechanism) where entities exist, these entities have accounts (ERC-6551), rather than accounts holding entities.
Stepping back a bit, AI game characters (especially those based on reinforcement learning) and AI agents (mass adoption narratives) are entities that need to have accounts.
3.Digitization: A Digital Version of Yourself
With data collection and AI training, generating a somewhat similar version of oneself in the digital space is no longer a distant possibility. The question lies in whether it is one in a million similar or whether it can be considered a digital version of oneself. Considering humanity's pursuit of immortality, training a digital avatar would be an ordinary thing, allowing this digital representation to persist and eventually giving it a physical body once the technology matures.
The maintenance of the “life” of this digital avatar is a challenge, especially after the prototype passes away. Entrusting it to others, including family, is unreliable due to the extended time frames involved. The best strategy is to provide it with sufficient funds to sustain itself. In this case, it needs a permanent account (an account that cannot be closed) and assets that it can autonomously manage. What solutions can you think of? Furthermore, if this digital avatar can be considered a digital version of oneself, an entity equal to humans, earning and spending money, not only sustaining but also developing itself, where does it reside? How can it achieve independence, or in other words, how can the digital avatar have ultimate control over itself?
ERC-6551 is one answer. It is a vessel for independent digital entities, whether that entity is a game character, an independent AI, or a person's digital avatar.”
Before discussing ERC-5169, we need to address two constraints that we impose on ourselves. One restraint pertains to data, and the other to trust.
Blockchain can only handle on-chain data, whose boundary is considered the upper limit of blockchain capabilities. To expand this boundary, we attempt “data on-chaining” in almost every development cycle. However, both theory and practice tell us that only a few categories of data have value or meaning on-chain. “Data on-chaining” does not effectively expand the boundaries of blockchain. We stopped here. However, there is a vast space between data that absolutely needs to be processed by the blockchain and data that doesn't need blockchain processing at all. Applications on this space can have some of their data processed by the blockchain to leverage its capabilities, while the other part of their data can be processed off-chain to gain advantages in handling data off-chain. The boundaries of this space are the upper-limits of blockchain capabilities, and this space should be included within the realm of blockchain, not excluded.
Trustlessness may be the greatest allure of blockchain, but achieving trustlessness is a challenging task. We often deceive ourselves, equating decentralization with trustlessness. Some forms of decentralization indeed bring about trustlessness, but others bring about responsible entities which invade their own responsibilities. In reality, similar to on-chain and off-chain data, some things require trustlessness, other othings require centralized trust, still others need trustlessness to safeguard rights in some parts, and centralized trust or other forms of trust to protect the rights of other parts.. The pursuit of complete trustlessness not only leads the blockchain industry to lose a significant portion of territory (combining trustlessness with other forms of trust) but also damages the interests of project participants in practice, as decentralization becomes an alternative to trustlessness.
The goal of ERC-5169 is to open up these two new territories. With this standard, developers can explore applications where some data is processed on-chain and some off-chain. They can explore applications where rights are safeguarded by a combination of trustlessness and other forms of trust. These directions are both novel and vast.
ERC-5169 is token-centric programming, meaning both on-chain and off-chain data, trustlessness and other forms of trust are anchored to a particular token. People in the Web2 world might not understand why this approach is necessary; in their eyes, a token might only be a digital asset with a face value. However, those deeply involved in the blockchain space understand the interoperability and composability that this approach brings—a revolutionary innovation in blockchain. ERC-5169 extends this innovation from on-chain data to off-chain data, from trustlessness to other forms of trust.
A good friend of mine convinced me to pay attention to ERC-404 (the standard, not a specific project) with a simple statement: “Trading blind boxes won't last; but trading wine will.” Using ERC-721 can produce products similar to “blind boxes”, while using ERC-404 can produce products similar to “wine”, and that's the beauty of ERC-404.
In terms of product attributes, the difference between “wine” and “blind boxes” lies in the fact that wine is produced in a standardized and sustainable manner. In terms of speculative attributes, the scarcity of “wine” comes from the consensus (while blind boxes’ scarcity comes from the project's setting), such as the 1982 Lafite Rothschild is the most valuable. We can consider ERC-404 as a product production machine where the input is data (production materials), such as block height, random numbers, and the output is a product that can be sold or used, such as generative art. We don’t need to intervene in the production process, because it is a standardized, automated production; we don’t need to define scarcity, because the public decides scarcity.
Illustrating ERC-404 with blind boxes and wine is simply because they are the most intuitive and easily accepted products by blockchain users. The implication behind this example is that only when a type of product can be produced in a standardized manner, can it potentially be widely adopted; only when scarcity comes from consensus can it be sustained. That’s why my friend is interested in ERC-404. He sees Web3.0 as a new type of economic activity, and he observes and judges Web3.0 projects based on what productivity is and what products are. This is a grand narrative that encompasses blockchain but goes beyond blockchain.
While ERC-404 is technically clear and understandable, the real challenge is how to use it. If the applications of ERC-6551 are mostly about creating new demands and ERC-5169's applications are about providing new solutions to real-world problems, in my view, successful applications of ERC-404 might require a mix of clever tricks and wicked craft, which can bring out the magic of ERC-404; it also requires genuine product capabilities, as forming consensus is not a simple task.
Remarks:
New standards/protocols bring new forces, and new technologies and scenarios create additional new conditions for unleashing this force. Taking ERC-6551 as an example, it can be combined with many new technologies, including intent-centric and account abstraction. It can be applied to various new scenarios, such as autonomous worlds and AI.
Finally, when we discuss the value of various new standards/protocols, it does not mean that the directly related projects have value. It means that based on these new protocols, new plays or new projects will emerge, and these new plays or new projects may break the deadlock, like the dragon growing wings.
:)