From an analytical standpoint, the value of IP NFTs can be evaluated in a manner vastly different from that of PFP NFTs. Creators and buyers of IP NFTs can assess the economic and cultural value of the intellectual property in question, considering factors such as future royalty cash flows, the commercial value of secondary development, commercial licensing potential, and liquidity of the NFT itself.

The music industry presents an intriguing example of how IP NFTs have the potential to revolutionize traditional models. Historically, musicians have been exploited by record and audio-streaming companies such as Spotify, with little bargaining power to negotiate a fair deal. However, the emergence of NFTs can help level the playing field by facilitating direct funding of musicians through the sale of music NFTs. In this way, fans and NFT holders can become investors, thereby enabling musicians to bypass record companies and audio-streaming companies. Additionally, fans can assist with music content distribution and participate in content creation if desired.

Despite the tremendous potential of IP NFTs, their mass adoption will require bridging many links within the IP industry, integrating web2 and web3, legalizing smart contracts to be equal to legal contracts, and ensuring that NFTs represent corresponding intellectual property rights. This requires a concerted effort from NFT builders and the entire ecosystem, making IP NFT development a time-intensive process. However, the increasing recognition of the value of IP NFTs by users and more and more projects experimenting with linking NFTs with specific intellectual property suggest that mainstreaming is inevitable.

Furthermore, negotiations regarding the potential income-sharing model with musicians must also be considered, as the web3 legal framework for content creators is still in its infancy. Fortunately, a few service providers such as Euterpe are bridging the gap between web2 and web3, assisting content creators and holders in entering the web3 space, and providing ultimate copyright solutions for web3 content, including music and beyond. Euterpe also offers content creators and NFT holders solutions to deal with copyright registration, licensing, transaction, investigation, royalty collection, and dispute resolution.

In conclusion, IP NFTs are poised to revolutionize content creation across various industries, not limited to music. The tokenization of digital assets and real properties is a significant web3 trend, and IP NFTs offer an innovative economic model that can be applied to video, books, games, offline concerts, celebrity merchandise, patents, and trademarks. However, operational details such as the web3 legal framework for content creation and DAO governance for further development are still being refined.

In this article, we will use successful past games as examples to discuss the logic of in-game virtual assets & how to design a sustainable gaming economic system from different perspectives.

The values of in-game virtual assets follow the same logic as token prices on Layer 1 blockchains: they derive from the consensus of players. Therefore, the price of virtual props ultimately depends on how much and how many people are willing to pay for them.

Fundamentally, I argue that gaming economics is different from real-life economics. Because of the limited resources, people use economics to optimize the distribution of resources to create maximal utility for society.

An excellent in-game economic system must strictly control the player's effort-to-output ratio and carefully design the difficulty of obtaining virtual assets. Only if players accept these settings to speculate and play with each other, they can maximize the utility of the game.

After clarifying that the most important factor of the in-game economy is to limit the supply of virtual assets, let's analyze the structure of the in-game economic system. The in-game economic system has three basic elements: production, consumption, and market.

An excellent game producer will first design the demand side before the supply side of gaming economics. However, there are too many unpredictable factors. It is nearly impossible to design sustainable in-game economics in the long term under the influence of multiple parties.

To stabilize the in-game economic system, many "free-to-play" mobile games currently on the market have chosen to take a step back. The studios often play the role of "monopoly dealers" that act as the only channel for players to acquire new items to become better. However, this design is not good for players. Eliminating the trading link between players will directly lead to the rapid depreciation of in-game virtual assets.

Given the major feature of on-chain games is to leverage blockchain technology to confirm the ownership of players’ in-game assets and facilitate transactions, removing the inter-player transaction function would make the on-chain game lose its most important edge. Therefore, the current “free to play” mobile games model does not apply to on-chain games. Next, we will start with EVE Online and Fantasy Westward Journey games and analyze how they achieved a sustainable economic model.

EVE Online is a multiplayer online sandbox simulation game that was released in 2003 and developed by CCP Games. According to MMO-population, the current number of daily active users is 180,102 and the total number of users is 9,479,071.

EVE's is a true sandbox simulation game. As the game's economic system is created by the players, it better reflects player behavior and decision-making, and more closely simulates the real-world economic environment, making it more sustainable in the long run.

Fantasy Westward Journey is a turn-based MMORPG game that was released in 2003 and developed by NetEase. According to player votes and Baidu Index, the game still has around 500,000 active players today.

The team made two important design choices in its infrastructure layer: 1) Using point cards as an anchor to allow players to calibrate the value of in-game assets, and 2) Balancing the game to ensure that all players can earn profit throughout the game cycle.

So, how should the economic system be designed for blockchain games? Here are 4 suggestions:

1.Establish certain thresholds and restrictions for players: High-intensity production of game resources by gold farming studios can increase the production of virtual items (NFTs and tokens), which is destructive for online games.

Game providers should establish mechanisms like "point cards valued in in-game currency" and "step-by-step increasing fatigue value" to prevent players from unlimitedly producing in-game tokens and virtual items. Can control the inflation rate of in-game assets to a certain degree.

2. Stimulate player demand and create consumption scenarios: The core of the game economy system is demand. Game developers should lower the threshold for players to enter the game and create a rich social environment. Issue rare NFTs as high-level PVP rewards to stimulate demand.

Increase consumption by using mechanisms like gambling, taxes, synthesis, and item enhancement. Incorporate probability elements in item consumption, increasing cost for players to obtain perfect equipment, slowing down game content consumption, and recovering surplus resources.

3.Establish an official trading market: Since good asset liquidity is a major foundation for blockchain games, game developers should maximize this advantage by establishing and properly maintaining an official trading market for in-game items that are valued in in-game currency.

This actively promotes virtual item trading among players, which will not only increase the efficiency of player-to-player transactions but also monitor the market demand for various virtual items to ensure that the economy remains stable in future game updates.

4.Make every effort to improve the game content: The goal of the game economy system is not to expand production or allocate resources, but to make players feel interested. Fun is the premise of the game and interesting content makes players want to buy virtual items.

The premise of setting up any economic system is that game developers need to improve the game content as much as possible, making players feel interested. Without interesting content, even the most exquisite economic system will not stimulate players' demand for virtual items.

Overall, the gaming market is growing at a rate of 8.7% and is expected to exceed $200 billion by 2023. Currently, blockchain games are still in a very early stage, but as more capital and industry talent enter the field. It is expected that in the near future, there will be higher-quality content and more sustainable economic systems in blockchain games. We are looking forward to how this will develop in the future.

In early 2022, there were discussions about the potential centralization of block building and the implications of MEV and block sequencing post-PBS (Proposer Builder Separation). I personally resonated with this concern and published an article on the risk of centralization. At the time, the community had mixed views on the issue, with some accepting the idea that Ethereum could have a decentralized validator network with a more centralized block builder, as outlined in the "Endgame Paper" by Vitalik Buterin. However, these concerns were eventually pushed to the back burner and faded from public discussion. The last SBC conference, though, brought these concerns back to the forefront, as Vitalik presented ways to decentralize block building (Jon Charbonneau wrote a great report on the pitch here). Since then, I've been considering potential designs for decentralized block builders and wanted to share my thoughts and the challenges that come with decentralizing block building.

How centralized is block building currently and why do we need to decentralize it?

Ethereum strives to be the most censorship-resistant, permissionless, and trustless blockchain and any sort of centralization factor could potentially harm those properties. I will lay out major concerns and will also explain why some matter and others don’t.

• Exclusive Orderflow: There have been active discussions by Flashbots and the community about how exclusive orderflow could potentially lead to a single block builder monopolizing winning bids and orderflow. The assumption is that a builder will provide incentives, such as MEV sharing, private transactions, and MEV backrun guarantees, to gather orderflow that others do not have access to, thereby producing higher-value blocks that consistently win the auction. However, I believe it would be too broad to categorize all types of incentives that result in exclusivity under one category of concerns, so I have split them into the following sub-categories: Exclusive Orderflow via MEV redistribution and via MEV backrun guarantee & private transactions. It's important to note that these sub-categories are not mutually exclusive and have different implications.

  • Via MEV redistribution: This concern will likely become less of an issue as more orderflow marketplaces launch in the coming years. As competition increases among marketplaces, they will need to offer more MEV rebates through orderflow auctions to attract users and their transactions. This competition will ultimately influence where users choose to submit their transactions.

  • Via private transaction & MEV backrun guarantee: These are optional features that may be preferred by some individuals. However, the use of this type of exclusive orderflow could lead to orderflow centralization if it were to grow on a larger scale. To mitigate this, a decentralized block builder that consistently proposes higher-value blocks would be beneficial.

• Censorship: Insufficient decentralization of the block builder could result in a subset of builders colluding and censoring transactions. While solutions like crList, Geth’s native block building option, and encrypted mempool aim to mitigate this risk, they also present challenges such as the partial enshrining of account abstraction, the need for infrastructure to enable state access by stateless validators, and security concerns around existing privacy-enabled technologies. To gain a deeper understanding of the current block building landscape, here are some stats on block production. Based on the block success rate of all builders in December 2022, the top 5 builders are the following:

  
  

  Table of average success rate of top five block builders

  The top three block builders collectively controlled 60% of the total number of successfully committed blocks in a given month, representing a significant amount of trust placed in their ability to not collude or censor transactions. To counteract this, implementing a framework to decentralize the block building process would raise the cost and barrier for collusion and censorship, resulting in a more trustless block production system.

• Centralization due to network effect: In imperfect market competition, it may be suggested that one builder would naturally outcompete others by constructing higher-value blocks and attract more orders without the need for direct incentives, resulting in centralization. However, this is not always the case in reality.

  
  

  Graph of block builder success rate

  This graph illustrates the block success rate over a period, both before and after The Merge. Notably, it can be seen that Flashbots (represented in dark blue) has decreased and reached an equilibrium point similar to that of other major block builders, rather than completely dominating block production. This contradicts the proposed centralization due to the network effect, and there may be several explanations for this observation.

• Competitors’ exclusive orderflow: Other competing builders may have exclusive orderflow (private transactions etc.) that allows the production of higher-value blocks.

• Orderflow congestion: Too many orders wanting to be included in the block via Flashbots results in latency competition. This may force users to put transactions across multiple builders to increase the chance of getting committed in a block, especially in times of high traffic. 

• OFAC compliance: Flashbots are OFAC compliant while some others aren’t. Users may decide to pick builders based on some regulatory concerns.

• Flashbots open-sourced the builder and relay code to invite more competition.

For the reasons above, I believe the builder centralisation by network effect was mitigated to a certain extent. However it still remains an issue as shown in the previous table, and I believe it is a problem that needs more attention and awareness in the community.

What do we decentralize?

The crucial aspect that requires decentralization is the authority over block production. Instead of entrusting a single entity with complete control over the construction of blocks, there should be a framework that allows for the participation of multiple entities or individuals in the process. Currently, there are two proposed approaches to achieve this, and it should be noted that these approaches are not mutually exclusive. 

• Proposer participation in block building

• Decentralize block builder via new architectures and algorithms that allow coopetitive block production (massive design space)

There are still ongoing discussions around technical feasibility and challenges around the proposed approaches, and I would like to discuss and share my thoughts here.  

Approach 1: Proposer participation in block production

There are currently several ways to enable proposer participation in block production as outlined here, but I believe that the Eigenlayer approach offers a cleaner solution. Before delving into the specifics of Eigenlayer, here is a brief overview: it is a set of smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain that allows ETH staked validators to opt-in to providing security for new services by imposing additional slashing conditions on their staked ETH. For a more comprehensive understanding, you can read here.

In terms of how a builder currently interacts with a proposer during block production, the Proposer Builder Separation (PBS) system was implemented. In this system, a builder can submit a block to relayers who will then verify the block's correctness and relay it to a proposer. This system aims to prevent censorship by the proposer, as the content of the block is only revealed to the proposer once the highest bidding block is selected and the signed header of the corresponding block is relayed back to the relayer. The escrow, who is responsible for ensuring the data availability of the committed block, will then reveal the data (transactions) to the proposer, who then sends the block to the rest of the network. The following diagram illustrates the current process.

Diagram of current block building process by Eigenlayer

The Proposer Builder Separation (PBS) system increased the censorship-resistance of Ethereum by limiting the authority of validators to the proposal of higher-value blocks. Eigenlayer, however, proposes an MEV management framework called MEV+ that allows block proposers to include additional transactions on top of existing blocks. This is achieved through the imposition of additional slashing conditions. 

Currently, block proposers are subject to only one slashing condition which prohibits the simultaneous proposal of two blocks by the same proposer. With the MEV-Boost+ framework, proposers will also be subject to slashing if they modify or fail to include the committed "builder_part" of the block when proposing a new block with added "proposer_part" transactions. This effectively prevents proposers from attempting to modify or remove the block builder's transactions. The following diagram illustrates the MEV-Boost+.

Diagram of proposer participation in block production by Eigenlayer

This mechanism is also effective when used in conjunction with crList, which is a list of transactions that proposers must include in the block. This helps to reduce the potential for censorship of transactions at the builder level. While other solutions, such as pre-commitment to Merkle root or KZG commitment, have been proposed to allow proposer participation in block production, EigenLayer offers a simpler alternative that does not require additional computational resources from proposers and enables participation in block production simultaneously.

Overall, this approach is simple and enables further decentralization of block production by introducing proposers into the process, hence sharing the authority over the block with more entities. However, this approach is limited in impact as it fundamentally still relies on a centralized block builder and does not fully prevent censorship that arises from builder centralization. Hence we have the second approach.

Approach 2: Decentralizing Block Builder

Designing a decentralized block builder is a fascinating area of exploration and teams like Flashbots are already experimenting with different designs. When considering how to decentralize the builder, it is important to be aware of the following challenges:

• MEV-stealing: Builders may access the information from bundles submitted by searchers and steal searchers’ MEV. To prevent this, the privacy of the submitted bundles and transactions should be protected in design.

• Sub-optimal MEV: Decentralizing the builder should ideally be achieved while maintaining an optimal MEV. Some designs may introduce inefficiencies in block building due to decentralization and result in less MEV from the block, which in turn leads to less competitive blocks. But one can also argue that sub-optimal block production is acceptable as long as the decentralized builder attracts more orderflow than the rest.

• Competition against centralized builders: Decentralized builders need to be competitive against centralized builders in producing MEV. And decentralized builders’ goal would be to aggregate as much orderflow as possible to compete with the concentration of orderflow among centralized builders.

• Latency: Block production is time sensitive, and depending on the design, there could be a significant latency issue. 

• Jurisdictional coverage (censorship-resistance): Decentralized builders should be distributed across many jurisdictions so that they can resist jurisdictional censorship (like OFAC). Regulation is still a grey zone across most countries and would not want to risk the builder network being taken down by a single regulatory entity.

• And many more concerns that are design-specific.

With those challenges in mind, I would like to discuss proposed decentralized builder designs across the research community and dive into some potential issues around them. Currently, there are two main types of decentralized builders:

• Searcher-Aggregator model: Searchers submit bundles and aggregators will construct the block from them without knowing much/any information about the submitted bundles. 

• Slot auction model: Block space auction is conducted sequentially and the block is constructed progressively by multiple builders, hence no aggregator.

The following proposed designs are variations of either of the two types. 

Design 1: Searcher-Aggregator model with TEE/TPM

This approach requires an aggregator to use a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) or Trusted Platform Module (TPM) to ensure the privacy of the received bundles and thus preventing MEV stealing. For more information on the differences between TEE and TPM, check here. Following is an illustration of the design (TPM and TEE would be interchangeable in this context):

Diagram of TEE based block builder by Vitalik

Flashbots have released a progress report on their experience and learning from running Geth in SGX, a type of TEE developed by Intel. While there were numerous technical challenges, they have successfully run Geth using encrypted swap space in SGX with Gramine, one of the library OS designed for SGX, with 500GBs RAM, 1TB of SSD swap, and 64GBs of protected memory. Here are some key takeaways from this experimentation: 

• Running Geth within SGX is possible but is resource-intensive and time-consuming, requiring a large amount of memory and 3 hours of startup time for storing and encrypting the on-chain data.

• Encrypted swap space provides good performance, but may still be vulnerable to information leakage via side-channel attacks, covert-channel attacks, and other programming errors.  

• Needs to make a tradeoff between performance and resources. For example, a less resource-intensive approach will have poorer performance and potentially have a worse information leakage problem.

Additionally, here are other aspects to consider with the usage of SGX:

• There are ways to mitigate the information leakage problem but some approaches may result in reduced performance. It definitely requires more trials and errors to hone out the best-performing framework to run SGX without requiring too much resource.

• Complex setup + scarcity of SGX-compatible chips lead to a high barrier of entry. Cloud providers may provide accessibility to SGX and can be a temporary solution, but cloud operators would be a significant centralization factor over long term.

• Information leakage via SGX is still an issue. In case people discover additional exploitable vulnerabilities in SGX, aggregators should immediately perform their own TCB recovery (a process designed to re-instantiate the SGX environment) instead of waiting on response by Intel, which would likely take a long time.   

• Decentralized builders, in principle, should welcome and incentivize the aggregation of order flow, unlike centralized builders. The searcher-aggregator model, assuming zero information leakage, should have trust-minimized security, trusting that encryption and SGX work perfectly. However, it could have a heavily trusted liveness where there is only a small number of entities running the aggregator, which is possible given that bundles will naturally aggregate to the most successful aggregators. In this case, order flow/bundle concentration will not lead to a censorship issue, but possibly a liveness issue. 

• If the number of entities running the aggregators is low, there could be insufficient geographical distribution leading to a skewed jurisdictional coverage, which will cause the network to be more vulnerable to the regulatory censorship.

While a TEE-based solution like SGX seems to be the more practical approach to builder decentralization right now, it still faces with many technical challenges that need to be overcome.

Design 2: Searcher-Aggregator model with Threshold Encryption and ZK-SNARK

This is another Searcher-Aggregator model where encryption is applied on the bundles instead of the aggregator. Here is a rough illustration: 

Diagram of TE and ZKP-based block builder

This design has the potential for collusion between aggregators and proposers. The threshold encryption ensures the privacy of the bundle only up to the point before computing the state root, and the aggregator, who computes the state root, requires access to transaction information or state updates. This access could enable MEV stealing by tracking down the corresponding transactions. The design eliminates the need for TEE/TPM, but it fails to prevent such collusion without adding additional complexity, such as requiring the proposer to commit to the block before decryption that allows computing the state root. Here are some concerns with such a design:

• Early commitment to the block by proposers could be achieved via re-staking infrastructure, like Eigenlayer, but would incur extra operational cost since the ETH stakers need to be sufficiently incentivized to opt-in to adding relevant slashing conditions.

• Proposers may miss out on higher-value blocks by committing to a block early.

• Added computational overhead and latency from generating ZK-SNARK and threshold encryption, making this model potentially unfeasible in practice.

• A question on who would be the qualified keyholders for the threshold encrypted bundles. If searchers hold the keys, attackers who pretend to be searchers can block the decryption and delay the block production. Conversely, aggregators cannot hold the keys as each of them is competing for block production and may be incentivized to obstruct other aggregators. This may require a third party that is neither a searcher nor an aggregator and introduces additional trust assumptions that may discount the trustless/trust-minimized property of being a decentralized builder.

• Same point on jurisdictional coverage as mentioned in the first design.

Design 3: Slot Auction model via chaotic iterative search

This design allows multiple block builders to participate in block production without needing an aggregator. Here is a rough illustration (excuse my drawing):

Diagram of slot auction based block builder

The proposed design aims to allow multiple block builders to participate in constructing a single block by partitioning the maximum gas of the block into n slots given x number of builders, where n = f(x) and n<MAX_THRESHOLD. Builders in the network start bidding for the partitioned block space, with the highest bidder filling that portion of the block. The first winner of the bid also becomes the generator of the block. The bidding continues for the remaining slots, with new bidders receiving the work-in-progress block and building upon it. The bidding cycle ends when there are no more bidders or the block is full. The builder who holds the block at the end commits it to the proposers. This design divides the traditional task of a single builder into smaller pieces by performing a MEV Auction (MEVA) at each slot and applying threshold encryption for privacy. The main advantage of this design is that it eliminates the need for a centralized aggregator and allows builders to be distributed globally, providing distributed jurisdictional coverage. However, here are potential challenges with this design:

• When to reveal the encrypted slot would determine how efficient the auction will be (closer the bidding price to the corresponding MEV, the more efficient the auction is, since the MEV would be the “real” price of the slot). If the encrypted slot N-1 is revealed before the auction of slot N, then the auction will be efficient because builders would be able to bid based on their expected MEV. However, this could have latency issues in practice where strictly sequential auction and decryption of the slots may take some time. Therefore, the other option is to let builders bid for the rights to build the block for all the slots beforehand, and decrypt the block sequentially as builders fill the slot. Since builders do not know the MEV for the slot prior to bidding (need to know the transactions in slot N-1 to determine the MEV for slot N), the auction will likely be inefficient, a builder may even accidentally overbid for the slot due to lack of realized MEV. Though, this problem could be mitigated via statistical analysis of the historical bidding price of the slots at the given position in the block.

• To prevent builders from modifying the transactions in previous slots, other builders have to act as witnesses and provide some form of fraud-proof.

• Centralized builders could steal some MEV as the slots are decrypted sequentially. If users submit orderflow only through this slot-auction-based builder network, MEV stealing would be less concerning, but if orderflow is submitted across both the centralized builder and this builder network, then MEV stealing could be problematic. 

• Malicious attackers, like a competing centralized builder, could disrupt the network by winning the bid and not building the block, hence temporarily halting the block production. And with enough such attackers, this builder network could become dysfunctional (unable to produce any block). There needs to be a mechanism to ban malicious builders from the network and have a backup plan on the unfilled slot.

Design 4: Sequential Slot Auction with proposer commitment

This is another approach that uses the slot auction model similar to the third design that does not have to rely on an aggregator. The main difference here is the enforcement of proposer commitment via Eigenlayer for each filled slot. Instead of committing the entire block to the proposer at the end, each slot will be committed by the proposer sequentially, and Eigenlayer could be used to avoid protocol-level changes to Ethereum. Since the proposer commitment comes right after the slot is revealed, there is less concern about the builder modifying transactions in the previous slots. However, most other issues mentioned for the third design would be applicable to this design as well, with the exception that the latency could be worse due to the additional sequential proposer commitment in the process.

Comments on the future of block building

Decentralization is a crucial aspect of blockchain technology, and it is important to ensure that block builders are also decentralized. In this article, we have discussed a few possible approaches for decentralizing block builders. However, this is still an open design space for the research community to explore and collaborate on.

Designing a decentralized block builder that is also competitive would require a lot of experimentation and testing. And it is already work-in-progress as teams like Flashbots explore the limit of SGX and other privacy-enabled technologies. However, realizing the full potential of these technologies would require even more innovation and research.

Overall, decentralizing block builders is an ongoing challenge that requires the collaboration and expertise of the wider research community beyond crypto. Through experimentation, testing, and innovation, we can work towards creating a decentralized and competitive block builder that enhances the censorship-resistance of the network.

Special thanks to Hasu and Justin Drake for their review and feedback!

Cross-chain bridges, especially between L1s, have been a popular topic over the past few years as crypto welcomed the alt-L1 race in 2020. The demand for a cheaper, faster, and more scalable blockchain soared together with the daring need for secure and reliable bridges across those chains. However, it soon becomes overwhelmingly clear to anyone that BRIDGES SUCK. With the semi-quarterly announcement of major bridge hacks shivering the spine of all who “bet” their liquidity on one or more of the trusted bridges, investment and liquidity provisions on bridges become highly risky activities with a low risk-adjusted return. So why am I still talking about bridges right now? At first, I was somewhat dismissive of the entire cross-chain thesis, hence the bridges themselves. However, I believe strongly in the future of L2s on Ethereum, and bridges seemed like an inevitable first step towards increasing access to and between L2s and mitigating the liquidity fragmentation issue around them. Only with sufficient interoperability and liquidity infrastructure will I foresee L2 space welcoming more builders to develop diverse applications/app-specific rollups on top (an exaggeration ofc). While I am looking forward to seeing the development of L2 interoperability space, I cannot and would not distinguish bridges between layers/chains on a technical level. Thus, for the sake of this article, I would focus on the discussion around the general bridge security model from the lens of trust minimization.

How is the bridge secured? An intro on trust-minimization

We should be fundamentally asking three questions when looking at bridge security: Who is verifying the system? How are they verifying? And how much does it cost to manipulate the system? Answering these questions reveals how secure and trustless the system is; note that trustless in this context would mean the inheritance of security from the underlying chains on which the bridge transactions are processed. As such, a trustless bridge should be permissionless (for decentralization) with an economically infeasible manipulation cost, which realistically should be as high as manipulating the underlying chains. However, creating such a bridge is an extremely difficult task. Most bridges to date make tradeoffs in varying degrees. The best they can do so far is trust-minimization with the exception of IBCs and other natively verified bridges whose security rests upon the chains themselves. To better understand the bridge ecosystem and those tradeoffs, let’s BriEfLy go over some of the security models we‘ve seen across bridges (if interested, there is a succinct overview here where I quoted some graphics).

Natively Verified Bridge: the kid that everyone does not even need to trust

Natively verified bridges run a light client of chain A on chain B and vice versa, hence the bridge security is inherited from the underlying chains and is arguably the most trust-minimized bridge design, meaning that the bridge is as secure as the two chains themselves (assume no bugs ofc). Some examples include IBC, TBTC, EOS Bridge, and Near Rainbow Bridge. The downside, however, is the low reusability, potential compatibility issues, and difficulty of maintenance. For example, Near has a signature system of Ed25519 which needs to be verified on Ethereum, but such type of signature cannot be pre-compiled and executed on EVM due to a lack of compatibility with EVM-native signature. Although many have attempted to submit EIPs to implement such external signature systems natively in EVM, most, if not all, are not approved for the reason mentioned here (essentially those signature systems only benefit a small group of people, like other ecosystems lol). Hence, the verification of the transaction signature cannot be done on-chain and has to rely on Optimistic verifiers with a challenge period (refer to the Optimistic bridge part later). Furthermore, the complexity associated with signature verification and the maintenance of such bridges reduces their reusability across other ecosystems (unless all are EVM compatible). Therefore, some natively verified bridges end up using an Optimistic model for security backdrop due to compatibility issues or are constrained within their own ecosystem, like Cosmos IBC.

Natively verified bridges generally have not been a popular choice for weaving different ecosystems together under one bridging architecture. This leads us to the most popular and widely deployed bridge type that excels at cross-ecosystem bridging – externally verified bridges.

Externally Verified Bridge: the kid that everyone has to trust with their balls

Externally verified bridges rely on 3rd party validators, like off-chain or 3rd chain, to verify the transactions on sender and receiver chains. This is the most popular type that is deployed across many ecosystems such as Ronin Bridge, LayerZero, Synapse, Anyswap, Biconomy, Celer, Axeler, and more. Among those bridges, their design could vary from a simpler Multi-Party Computation (MPC), more specifically multi-sig (note that MPC is an umbrella term), to Threshold Signature Scheme (TSS), aka a bit more sophisticated multi-sig. Most of the TSS/MPC is integrated with a third-party blockchain or oracle that has a high threshold for signature signing and relies on PoS or some forms of cryptoeconomic security (including insurance, bonding, and more).

While being widely popular for their simplicity and scalability, externally verified bridges are the least trust-minimized design. All of them rely on external parties instead of the underlying chains for security. For example, Across (technically an OP bridge but will explain later) and LayerZero rely on the security of oracles which typically run on PoS model with the staked oracle-native tokens. Similarly, Axelar and a few others run their own blockchains with a DPoS model that would require staked bridge-native tokens for security. As such, all of them are building their own layers of cryptoeconomic security instead of inheriting the underlying chain’s security. And since their cryptoeconomics are based on their protocol-native tokens, it would be dangerous to decentralize the network (aka making it permissionless) until their tokens hold an over-threshold amount of economic value that would be deemed economically infeasible for any attackers. This partially explains why many oracles and bridge validator networks to date have not been fully permissionless and decentralized yet. To some extent, I would even argue that building an externally verified bridge can be as resource intensive as building another L1; both need to align verifiers’ incentives, decentralize the verifier network, and accumulate crypotoeconomic values for security.

Although there are many challenges faced by externally verified bridges, they are by far the most widely used version of bridges. I believe there is a future where such trusted bridges would exist and prosper under certain assumptions despite the security risks (will elaborate later). For now, let’s also take a look at the more practical and optimistic attempt at trust-minimized bridges.

Optimistically Verified Bridge: the kid that everyone assumes to trust

Optimistic bridges verify the transaction by approving the transaction first and checking for any fraud later via off-chain verifiers during its challenge period. Since all transactions are approved on the assumption that they are valid, optimistic bridges only need at least 1-of-n verifier that flags any potential fraud instead of n-of-m verifiers in the case of externally verified bridges. Reduced trust assumption from a minimum of n honest nodes to one honest node grants optimistic bridges the trust-minimized security. The tradeoff here, however, is the requirement of a challenge period which could result in a latency of up to a few hours. To settle the bridge transactions instantly for a better user experience, optimistic bridges have to rely on some liquidity sources for “credit line”. And those liquidity layers are either built in natively or integrated with external bridge liquidity protocols such as Hopp and Connext.

At a glance, optimistic bridges have a better trust-minimized security design than what externally verified bridges possess, but that comes with one caveat; “heavily-trusted” liveness. I made up this word and would appreciate any suggestion for a better term, but basically what it means is that the liveness of bridges is trusted on the assumption that there aren’t any malicious entities. In other words, if there is a single malicious verifier, all the bridging transactions could be censored and the bridge stops working. If there is no adequate dispute mechanism when a verifier flags suspicious bridging transactions, the bridge will be vulnerable to censorship attacks. Such attacks simply rewind all the bridging transactions, and they shift the loss of funds from the bridging layer to the liquidity/settlement layer that is built on top of them, such as Connext and Hop. Currently, most of the verifiers, like watchers on Nomad, are permissioned, hence centralized. But if they want to sustainably scale and decentralize their optimistic bridges, a dispute mechanism needs to be introduced, and there are a few ways so far that have been proposed or implemented by projects. Across, an “optimistic” bridge uses UMA’s optimistic oracle for its dispute mechanism. However, Across has negated the trust-minimized property of being an optimistic bridge by using the optimistic oracle whose dispute mechanism is governed cryptoeconomically; Across needs UMA token to vote during the dispute process, so technically someone can buy up UMA token to meddle with the voting if given enough incentives. Others have suggested ways to economically disincentivize the censorship/over-flagging without relying on cryptoeconomic security of the bridge-native tokens. However, such a model would be susceptible to attacks as long as the potential value capture surpasses the cost of collusion. And that value capture does not have to come directly from stealing the bridged assets. It can also come through other means, such as profiting from deliberate market manipulation of the associated tokens.

As described above, optimistic bridges still have fundamental issues that have to be resolved to be truly trust-minimized. But in the meantime, there is another type of bridge that attempts to crack the code for trust-minimization using SUPER-DUPER well-known/hyped cryptographic proof: THE ZKSNARRRRRK.

Zero Knowledge Verified Bridge: THAT kid in the math class who everyone trusts for math

zkBridge verifies the transaction using zkSNARK, which is succinct non-interactive proof of knowledge (more details found here). The proof would allow a light client on the sender chain to prove to the light client on the destination chain that the bridge transactions are in fact committed to a new block by validating the block header and the state transition of the sender chains. There are off-chain provers who would generate and relay the proof validating the block header with the bridging transactions, which is then verified on the destination chain by verifiers (verifiers have no knowledge about the specific transaction signature). Because the verification and generation of such zkSNARK will be pseudo-deterministic (some may be deterministic), the security of the chains rests on the correctness of the proof which would be near impossible to tamper with. Hence, zkBridge is theoretically the most trust-minimized bridge model besides natively verified bridges.

Just like other bridges, however, there are also tradeoffs/challenges for zkBridges. First, they are computationally resource-intensive. While zkBridges are trust-minimized on the security and liveness of the bridges due to the minimum requirement of one honest prover, the performance heavily depends on the computational resources (potentially determined by the number of provers). Generating proofs with minimal latency would require parallel computation with highly efficient proof circuits. This leads to the second issue: the high cost. Aggregating computational resources require zkBridges to provide enough prover incentives to sustainably scale and decentralize the underlying computation; it is also far from trust-minimized if most of the provers are running on AWS (acceptable at its early stage). In addition to the incentive cost, there is also a high on-chain verification cost of the zkSNARK which has to be minimized by reducing the proof size. All of the aforementioned costs should be lessened to make zkBridges more affordable and usable. There are some attempts at cost reduction, such as minimization of proof size through recursive proofs and batching of block headers. But most of them are yet to be deployed in production. Lastly, and perhaps one of the bigger challenges, is zkBridge’s complexity compared to other types of bridges. Light client implementation for the on-chain verification of the zkSNARK would resemble some of the natively verified bridges (though much more scalable in design as zkBridges do not perform signature verification), such as Near Rainbow bridge, where the higher implementation and maintenance difficulties may result in additional operational costs as well as a higher chance of bugs. This leads to another interesting aspect of bridge security that may be overlooked by many: human errors.

Trust-minimization faced with execution risk & human errors (Why does trust-minimization matter?)

I have talked a lot about security design for bridges and how they are trust-minimized or not, but if we look at the causes of major bridge hacks that happened over the past years, we notice that most hacks are caused by human errors. Some are private key leakages through phishing attacks and negligence, while others are smart contract bugs and smart contract logic vulnerabilities. This begs the question of how we should consider bridge security in consideration of the execution risk and the security design. For example, there could be a perfect bridge design that is trust-minimized, decentralized, cost-efficient, and scalable but has a highly complex architecture, like some of the natively verified bridges. And even if the bridge is built, there are non-negligible risks of smart contracts and logic bugs associated with the inherent complexity. Such execution risks have driven many people to build bridges with simpler designs that can be managed easily, which tend to be externally verified bridges. This is another form of tradeoff that some teams are making; essentially saying that instead of building a complex bridge that has the best security design in theory, why not build a simple bridge with a manageable security design? Put it in another term, why build even more complex bridges, like some trust-minimized bridges, when existing bridges already have so many execution issues? To answer this question, we have to put the entire history of crypto and its future in perspective.

Over the past few years, crypto has received numerous publicities across the world and has ignited the hearts of many who believe in the future of decentralization. However, in comparison to the rest of the economy, crypto is still nascent and most people in crypto are still early adopters and innovators. As more and more web2 and the mainstream public adopt crypto and use blockchain applications, there will be value accumulation (an increase of TVL) to the bridges and other infrastructures that support those applications. Although there hasn’t been a single major bridge that experienced a cryptoeconomic attack, or at least not that I am aware of, the growth of crypto overall and disproportionate value accrual to a few major bluechip tokens (L1 tokens like ETH & BTC) would create more incentives for well-resourced hackers, such as nation-state or large entities, to cryptoeconomically attack the trusted bridges whose staked tokens have comparatively less value accrual. Even worse, there could simply be a malicious entity who wanna see the world burn or indirectly profit from costly attacks, disregarding the entire assumptions by cryptoeconomic security (where attackers will not want to lose more than what they gain). Therefore, the pursuit of technically superior and perhaps complex bridges that have trust-minimized security future-proof the healthy and safe growth of the crypto industry beyond mass adoption. And I believe that is the reason why bridge should pursue a trust-minimized security model even when facing such execution risks, and leave the cryptoeconomic securities to the underlying L1s who can better capture the values. This is also another reason why some may understandably consider building and investing in bridges to be a “public good”; it is hard to build a bridge that withstands the test of time.

Any future for trusted bridges?

While I stand with my view that a trust-minimized bridge with meticulous execution by the team would be able to take the crown in the bridging world over the long term, or at least I hope it would, I also see the importance of early-mover advantages and BD effort in creating the ecosystem on top of the existing bridges, such as Stargate by LayerZero. One could even argue that building a bridge is like building an ecosystem where tech is only part of the equation. Analogous to the L1 and L2 competitions, whoever builds the strongest ecosystem with the most technically innovative community tends to take the crown in the race. Perhaps, there could be a future where the same scenario plays out for bridge competition as well. And as long as the trusted bridges maintain their reputation and the trust of the community, they would remain dominant. For now, I expect that trusted bridges would dominate the space for the short term as more trust-minimized bridges mature over a longer term. But if we stretch the timeline long enough, I believe the anti-network effect will become stronger for those trusted bridges that rely on cryptoeconomic security due to reasons mentioned previously (an increase in usage leads to increased assets on bridges hence increased rewards for cryptoeconomic attacks). Therefore, slightly contrary to what Vitalik has famously mentioned in his reddit post, I foresee the anti-network effect to appear on trusted bridges first before reaching L1s, where hackers would be more incentivised to cryptoeconomically attack the bridge layer where the cost of collusion is lower.

What is the takeaway from all this?

Most bridges to date are still unsafe, especially against well-resourced and smart hackers who know how to extract values beyond the TVL on those bridges. Most of the externally verified bridges, the trusted ones, rely on the assumption that hackers do not want to lose money when attacking a bridge, hence the cryptoeconomic security. However, there are ways in which hackers could extract profit beyond the TVL sitting on the bridges as I mentioned previously, and there will be more ways to indirectly profit from hacks as different entities with different intentions come into the crypto space. While I acknowledge a path in which trusted bridges remain dominant for years to come, truly trust-minimized bridges, such as zkBridge or IBCs, will be the future-proof bridges that have the best chance of surviving the wrath of ruthless hackers for the long term. Lastly, be safe and let us pray to the god of trust-minimization that one day we all can step on a cheap and decentralized trust-minimized bridge.

Filecoin and arweave are the two famous storage protocols out there in the market. Filecoin has a huge miner network of 18 EB and hundreds of miners lending storage to the market. Whereas, Arweave is mostly known for its permanent storage ability and has been able to build a decent community due to smart contract ability which Filecoin misses at the moment but will soon have with FVM launching early next year. Lighthouse is meant to play an important role with a perpetual storage proposition similar to Arweave but doing it at a cheaper price and providing users with regular verifiable storage proofs which arweave does not provide.

Decentralized storage is the backbone of web3 due to its tamper-proof, verifiable and censorship resistant nature. It’s hard to imagine a NFT project being here long term without the decentralized storage system like IPFS.

2. Although logically storing docs and files in a decentralized way is a fancy and convenient way; few people adopt decentralized storage. What is your view about that?

I think both Filecoin and Arweave have been able to amass more storage than ever before. Filecoin is growing at an exponential rate storing currently over 25 PB of data, though Arweave has been slow to pick up due to high cost of permanent storage but has recently been able to bring in a decent amount of data. Lighthouse making long term storage cheaper and verifiable than arweave boosts that proposition. The right set of tools and interface needs to be there for mass adoption. This is what we are doing at Lighthouse too, with our SDK not just providing the ability to store on dWeb but also do things like encryption, access control, spin up custom dedicated gateways to instantly retrieve files. I think as web3 grows, decentralized storage is going to scale to a scale never seen before, even capturing market share of web2 products.

3. As a part of the Filecoin ecosystem, what is your relationship with Filecoin? How do you regard the Filecoin ecosystem?

Lighthouse brings perpetual storage ability to Filecoin. Filecoin being the number 1 storage protocol in the market right now makes Lighthouse open to a big number of projects, partners and supporters. We have partnered with Filecoin on various hackathons previously and the Filecoin team has supported Lighthouse on all fronts. They even published a blog on Lighthouse recently -

https://filecoin.io/blog/posts/lighthouse-makes-permanent-storage-on-filecoin-easy-and-affordable/

Filecoin ecosystem is growing a lot and we see it everywhere right now. Even during bear markets, I noticed more storage miners joining the Filecoin network. Talking to various stakeholders, I sense a long term vision and optimism for Filecoin aligned.

4. Could you introduce the mechanism to make sure Lighthouse could store files till perpetuity? What's your targeted customer? Do you have any case to prove your solution is usable and efficient?

Lighthouse protocol has a smart contract-based endowment pool whose job is to pay for the users' files till perpetuity. When a user pays for a file, some part of that amount goes directly to store the data on miners whereas the remaining amount goes back to the endowment pool. All files stored through the lighthouse protocol contribute the buffer amount to this common endowment pool which later releases funds to keep paying for the users' file till perpetuity.This endowment pool grows over time using various mechanisms like staking, farming, etc. The accrued fees also goes back to the endowment pool.

Our target customers are web3 projects who want to store their files and data long term and could range anywhere from NFT marketplaces to gaming, metaverse, projects and even enterprises wanting to data privately on the dWeb. Aiverse team and many other projects recently integrated Lighthouse for storing digital assets and access control functionality. We have been seeing more week on week downloads on our sdk and even hundreds of users on Files Dapp.

5.What is a roadmap for Lighthouse? What is your progress so far and what will you do next?

We are building an ecosystem of projects who can leverage the perpetual storage and access control ability of Lighthouse to take web3 to the next level. Many more projects (double digits) have committed to use Lighthouse and we will see more integrations go through soon in coming months. We will also soon announce the date for our testnet and mainnet release that will see our smart contracts going live on chain with the endowment pool functionality which is at the core of Lighthouse. We do have a vision for and taking steps towards making Lighthouse protocol self sustainable and profitable long term with value accrual for stakeholders.

To learn more about Lighthouse, visit the official website, read through the documentation or jump in on Github. You can also join the community on Discord, Twitter, Telegram, or LinkedIn

Maximal Extractable Value - also known as Miner Extractable Value or MEV - is the ability to capture profit from optimizing the transaction sequence when constructing a block, and most MEV is captured by miners and searchers who have been profiting from MEV activities throughout the bear and bull of the crypto cycles. MEV arises fundamentally from information asymmetries in the market. To alleviate the information asymmetries and reduce the negative externalities of MEV, numerous innovations have come up, among which were Flashbots.

Cumulative extracted EVM

To this date, over $650M of MEV were extracted through Flashbots, and that figure is still growing. However, the following graph shows that MEV is still a miners’ game as they extract nearly two-thirds of the entire MEV profit.

Visual representation of MEV landscape

Numerous problems exist with MEV for the current Ethereum ecosystem. With its upcoming upgrade, those problems will carry over and even introduce new problems. In this article, I will explore the MEV problems for pre and post-merge Ethereum (I will be using post-merge synonymously as post-Splurge for simplicity) and seek potential solutions to address those issues. Before diving into it, I will first go over how MEV is currently extracted. 

1. How MEV is extracted? Flashbots and Miners?

As previously mentioned, MEV is currently extracted mostly by miners and searchers (from flashbots). Those two work differently in design, which I will dive into later, but both find MEV opportunities from a pool of pending transactions, known as the mempool. They insert their transactions in the right places to achieve their intended MEV extractions. Here are some of the popular MEV techniques: arbitraging, liquidation, frontrunning, sandwich attack, and backrunning. Most of them have varying levels of impact on the usability of Ethereum. Some may even pose an existential risk, which will be discussed later. 

1.1 Brief explanation of how MEV work for Flashbots?

Diagram for flashbots infra

There are three main components for Flashbots: searchers, relayers, and miners. Searchers are essentially the ones that submit transactions for reasons such as arbitrage, liquidation, frontrunning, privacy, MEV protection and more. Relayers are the middleware between the miners and searchers that validate the bundled transactions received from searchers and push them to Flashbots miners. Relayers are crucial as they provide flexibility around the handling of the transaction bundles, such as bundle merging, and prevents DOS threat to miners. Miners run mev-geth, which is a flashbots-specific geth that uses first-price sealed-bid auction for ordering, and participation as a miner for flashbots is permissioned and mainly operated still by trusted entities.

1.2 Brief explanation of how MEV work for non-flashbots miners

Regular miners, on the other hand, have access to transactions in mempool, which aggregates non-committed transactions waiting to be processed. Some may also accept private transactions directly from users without going through mempool, which is fairly common - over 85% of MEV is extracted using private transactions sent to miners and 50% of it is from flahsbots. Miners sequence those transactions in the order of gas fee and also insert their own transactions in between as the MEV opportunities arise.

2. What are the problems with the current MEV landscape?

Some MEVs, especially malicious ones, can erode the network usability due to PGA and miner control. Those issues typically appear in the forms of high gas fees, failed transactions, and network congestions.

As previously mentioned, there are different MEV techniques, such as arbitrage, liquidation, frontrunning, backrunning, sandwich attack etc. While some may be benign, like arbitrage and liquidation, others may be malicious (although not always), such as sandwich attacks and frontrunning. Malicious MEV techniques incur additional costs on the users instead of making the market more efficient and may even cause network congestion as miners compete for MEV. Hence, the usability of the network will be discounted as users experience higher slippage, higher gas fee from constant bidding, and delayed transaction processing.

Besides network usability, some MEV techniques could cause existential risk to the network. Time-bandit attack involves forking of the chain to reorder transactions in the Nth block (previous block). Miners perform time-bandit attack when the economic incentive from MEV across the blocks surpasses the block rewards from mining the N+1 block. This will cause major instability for the blockchain as the top miners, who typically have over 10% of the entire hashrate of the network, pull off such forks to attempt extracting cross-block MEV. Since those attacks can be only performed by large miners, such as F2Pool (23.94% of hashrate) and Ethermine (12.57% of hashrate) etc. (theoretically needs 10+% of the hashrate to have a chance at pulling it off), this shows the centralization risk associated with the concentration of the mining power to a single entity and the extent of control that miners have over the entire network.\

[Visualization of MEV earners by revenue
](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.15930.pdf)

Miner control of the transaction ordering also leads to another major problem: transaction censorship. The concept is simple: miners simply do not include victim transactions in the blocks. Censorship may seem harmless at first, but it can cause a catastrophic impact on dApps in certain situations. Let’s say an algostable coin needs to repeg by selling a large volume of treasury assets, but what happens if there was a coordinated attack with miners to censor the selling of treasury assets? Such censorship would artificially induce death spirals for the targeted pegged assets or any assets that need to be rebalanced. While those attacks may not pose an existential threat to the network, they can cause a massive drawdown for the onchain ecosystem.

All the problems I mentioned above are not limited to the Ethereum mainnet. Rollups would also suffer from such malicious MEV techniques as long as they have sequencers whose transactions are publicly viewable, except for privacy-concerned rollups where the transactions are encrypted before committing the block. Since appropriate sequencing is a crucial component for the stability of the network, even more so for rollups, many have proposed and discussed some possible solutions. This is still an actively researched area, but I will introduce a couple of proposals that seem to have gained builders’ attention.

2.1 MEV Auction, aka MEVA, by Optimism

MEV auction 

MEVA is a solution proposed by Karl Floersch, CTO of Optimism, to reduce the network congestion from bidding. MEVA allows whoever wins the auctions to manage the sequencing for the day. This is a fairly simple and blunt solution to reduce bidding activities, but there are also significant downsides to it. Because the MEV is harvested by winning bidders, the mining revenue for other sequencers will have to be supplemented by the users, which will result in a higher cost for users. Furthermore, MEVA incentivizes centralization of the sequencer network as smaller sequencers try to collaborate to outbid larger sequencers, resulting in an overall more centralized consensus. 

2.2 Fair Sequencing Service, aka FSS, by Chainlink

Fair Sequencing Services by Chainlink

FSS attempts to solve the sequencing fairness by inserting an oracle network in between the mempool and relayer contract, SCON. The oracle network will fetch the transactions from the mempool and sequence them in the order of transactions entering the mempool. This sequence of transactions will subsequently be sent back to the mempool and then to the relayer contract for committing to the network. This would be a more reliable mechanism to provide sequencing fairness and also have high compatibility with the existing consensus architecture. However, this would also introduce the risk of oracle collusions and may potentially increase the user cost, as the incentivization of oracle providers may incur an additional fee.

2.3 Threshold encryption

Visual representation of threshold encryption

Some projects attempt to use threshold encryption, where private keys are distributed across miners and require above a certain threshold number of miners for decryption. This allows transactions to be encrypted before the consensus is reached. This solution provides strong privacy around transactions and potentially eliminates a large amount of MEV. However, it also introduces a complicated validation procedure and requires a large number of miners, which may be unfeasible. 

2.4 Randomizing transaction order

Randomization of the transaction order is another way to mitigate MEV. Miners will first pick a batch of transactions that will be committed. Then, miners will receive a random permutation, based on the hash of the current and previous block, and the ordering of the batched transactions will be performed based on the permutation. Such a mechanism can reduce the MEV and also increase the cost of performing MEV because multiple bundles of transactions need to be submitted in order to have a higher chance of extracting the intended MEV. The probabilities will increase as the cost of the transactions increase in this case. 

2.5 Some thoughts about the current solutions and problems

Currently proposed solutions minimize MEV through various angles of approach. However, I believe it is crucial for the solution to have a more selective minimization of the MEV. For example, if randomization or threshold encryption is implemented, it would be economically unfeasible to perform good MEV, such as arbitraging and liquidation. Therefore, MEV minimization solutions shall not have an all-or-nothing approach, but rather have optionality in design to achieve selective MEV minimization. 

3. Proposer builder separation and associated MEV problems for post-merge Ethereum

Finally, time to talk about an MEV problem with post-merge Ethereum. This is the exact reason I originally started thinking about writing this article; there is a problem with the post-merge consensus for Ethereum. Before diving into it, let me elaborate on an upgrade in Ethereum relevant to MEV; proposer builder separation, aka PBS.

3.1 What is PBS? Why does Ethereum need it?

PBS refers to the separation of the traditional miners into two different parties, proposers and builders. Builders will be in charge of creating an exec block (ordered transactions that will be the payload for the N+1 block), and proposers will be in charge of bidding on the block without knowing the content of the block (the highest bidding block will be committed). Such pre-confirmation privacy of the block will provide protection against MEV stealing by miners, which essentially negates miners of the authority over block sequencing tasks (one of the problems I mentioned previously was miners having too much control). This can also reduce transaction censoring as it would be harder for the proposer to coordinate with a builder to block victim transactions. For more details on the theories behind it, please check out Vitalik’s proposal. 

Economic incentives for proposers and builders will also be a key design that makes PBS feasible. Proposers will receive both the gas fee and the proposer fee, which is a % of the MEV extracted by the builder submitting a given block, while builders will own most of the MEV profit. With such an incentive scheme, proposers would generate an increased APY of +5% on top of existing APY, theoretically, on the staked ETH while builders can compete for extraction of MEV without MEV stealing.

3.2 So what is the problem?

There is a major centralization risk for the builder network. With the introduction of PBS, most miners will turn into proposers with staked ETH from the likes of Lido and Rocketpool. However, only a portion of players who can perform MEV well will become builders, as the bulk of the economic incentives will be driven by MEV from “block optimization”. In addition, MEV is a competitive landscape in nature and has a higher barrier of entry compared to just being a miner. In Q1 2022, Ethereum validator number was reported to be around 340k, among which some performed MEV. For flashbots, the number of searchers is around 56k, but their active monthly searchers are only 9k. Given that only a portion of the miners who are actually capable of MEV (knowing how to do MEV and doing it well is a challenging task unlike just running a bunch of GPUs) and some flashbots searchers would become builders, it’s very possible that the Ethereum post-merge (post-Splurge to be accurate) will have significantly more proposers than builders, which poses the centralization risk on the consensus network. 

Furthermore, there will be competition among builders to best optimize the block. But, most likely, a handful of experienced MEV searchers/miners (a bit of exaggeration here) will dominate, whose blocks will more likely get committed to the blockchain as they can afford to pay a higher proposing fee to the proposers. Such centralization risk unattended may lead to consensus security instability, which will erode the decentralization, permissionlessness and neutrality of the network.

3.3 Ok, we get the problems, but is there any solution?

Currently, a handful of players are trying to create a solution for the problems as far as I know: Flashbots, Blocknative, and BloXroute (not 100% sure). How those solutions will look like and if each can work in harmony is still uncertain, but here are a few potential approaches that we may see upcoming. 

One approach is providing MEV SaaS for anyone who wants to participate as a builder and do so profitably. One of the biggest challenges to being a searcher and builder is to know how to do MEV and generate sustainable revenue from that (less revenue, less incentive, fewer builders). A high barrier to entry can bar a lot of people who would be interested in participating otherwise. Hence, a SaaS solution can significantly lower the hurdle and flatten the learning curve for non-searchers, aka curious people like me, to enter this MEV space and become a builder to support the consensus network.

Another approach will be from infrastructure middleware. Flashbots has recently started testing their new feature called MEV-boost. This is essentially the PoS version of the MEV-geth where the validators/proposers can start running MEV-boost to accept blocks from both builders and Flashbots. This will boost yields while further supporting the decentralization of the builder network through competitions and more searcher participation through Flashbots. 

4. Conclusion

MEV used to be an untethered space where fierce competitions raged on among searchers and miners. However, the competition has reached a degree where it started eroding the network performance and usability. At some point, people started calling it Dark Forest as everyone hide in the dark to snatch as much value as possible out of the hands of unaware users/traders. While there are some good forms of MEV, the Dark Forest is still festered with malicious ones. Many have proposed various solutions, but most still struggle to selectively minimize MEV’s negative externalities. With the introduction of PBS, we will encounter another major problem, the centralization of the builder network. When an MEV player is not a stakeholder within the consensus mechanism for pre-merge Ethereum, the centralization of authority over MEV, which is an existing problem, may not pose as much threat as when a player is an independent stakeholder within the consensus mechanism. Even though PBS is intended to mitigate transaction censorships and the concentration of miner authorities, the centralization of builders may well threaten the future of Ethereum. I believe this is a problem that needs to be tackled imminently to build a healthy and decentralized future for Ethereum.

1. Compliance seems to be a double-edged sword in crypto industry. From one side, compliance will broaden the target group of crypto. From another side, it may have limitations on the industry as crypto is always thought to be free entered and permissionless. How do you think about the paradox?

I think it is true to some companies that compliance might be a paradox, but we don't see it that way. For a company of our size, we see compliance as an advantage. We absolutely see that being compliant in our space is the way of the future, and we already obtained various licenses/registrations and are in the process of obtaining more licenses around the world. We also have robust AML capabilities and controls. We see ourselves as a compliant company and we believe compliant companies have a longer viability.

2. How do you think about compliance for Defi companies given DeFi companies are premised on a decentralized and permissionless concept?

Bitcoin was born on a public permissionless blockchain; that hasn't changed. What has changed is if it touches fiat, it can be subject to regulations because fiat currencies are subject to the multitude of financial regulations that have been around for decades. In terms of Defi, if it does not touch fiat, then it could stay unregulated in that world; however, at some point crypto has to link up with fiat, so DeFi is likely to be regulated. This is the current status, however, with travel rule implementation, all service providers will likely have to verify blockchain transactions too.

（A Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) rule [31 CFR 103.33(g)]—often called the “Travel” rule—requires all financial institutions to pass on certain information to the next financial institution, in certain funds transmittals involving more than one financial institution.）

 For DeFi, there could be regulation implementation if more infrastructure built around Decentralized Identifier (”DID”) is in place. We will continue to watch this space. This is the reason why we believe this space is eventually going to regulated. At the fundamental level, public blockchain is still going to be permissionless. Once you build use cases upon a permissionless blockchain, and if you touch fiat currencies, that's where regulation will likely kick in.

Another way regulations come into play is if you do a token issuance, that may implicate securities law. Securities laws around the world are relatively consistent. If it is a security, then you must register and disclose. And that's a century old rule. So security laws would apply to ICOs. But there are cryptos which are clearly not securities, for example, Bitcoin and Ethereum. They may be regulated as commodities rather than securities. I think the whole world is probably going to gravitate towards that kind of regulatory landscape.

3. So what's the difference between commodity and security regulations when applying to different tokens. Which regulation will be stricter, security or commodity?

When talking about commodity, you can just think about oil or gold. Bitcoin is more like digital gold, and therefore it is like a commodity. The definition of a security varies around the world, but a common theme would be whether a single entity controls a lot of it, and if so, it is a security. The legal test is whether it is sufficiently decentralized. In a layman’s term, if a single entity controls the bulk of the token, then it's most likely going to be a security. For example, Ethereum when it was issued years ago and one entity controlled the bulk of it, it was a security then. But now, no single entity controls Ethereum, then it's more like a commodity.

The regulations for securities are stricter. In the sense, when you issue a security, you must register and disclose. The disclosure obligation is pretty cumbersome and it varies from one country to another. In comparison, commodities trading itself is less regulated. But if you trade derivatives of commodities like oil futures, then you shall be subject to regulations on derivatives. For example, the CFTC regulates commodity derivatives in the US, whereas the SEC regulates securities.  

Let's talk about Asian countries. For commodities itself, sometimes it is not regulated at all. But the derivatives of such commodities, if they qualify as certain kind of derivatives, they would attract regulatory reporting requirements and other regulatory obligations.

4. With regards to KYC, does Defi or DAO require KYC?

For onchain KYC/AML, there are some tech solutions like Chainanalysis and Fireblocks that Amber currently uses to track and block suspicious transactions. In the meantime, we are developing our in-house capabilities in these areas.  We believe more and more infrastructures, for example the use of DID, are being built and utilized to tackle compliance /KYC issues.  Once the infrastructure is built and utilized, we could see more smart contracts being adopted by financial applications.

5. What’s the impact of compliance on NFT and GameFi?

I think NFT space is quite interesting. Some of the regulators have come up to say NFTs are speculative. But they also said that they will not regulate this space. Because if you think about it, NFTs are not the only speculative things out there. I think the regulators are recognizing that they can choose not to regulate certain things and leave it. But they would just make sure the investors or retail guys are aware of the speculative nature of these. And we can have disclaimers or we can have certain marketing guidelines to ensure that is not so readily available. And that seems to be kind of the way they are dealing with it.

And I think in the realm of gaming, at, least I don't see directly a lot of direct regulations affecting gaming. What they can do is to say, if you have certain tokens which are being used in games. They will identify these tokens: are these tokens payment tokens, utility tokens or securities tokens? And if these tokens somehow are security tokens, they might try to regulate them.

6. How does Amber Group deal with compliance? Could you share your experience?

First of all, compliance is taken very seriously by Amber. The tone from the top is set by our cofounders to the senior management and all the way down. And then obviously you will have the framework which is created by people that you hire. All hired employees have the appropriate expertise, many of whom have experience working for regulated institutions and help to create the right control culture and environment in Amber Group. Another key area in which we have done heavy investment is in the realm of our compliance systems and processes.  We use best in class vendors and systems that meet our business needs and ensure that if we meet our control and risk management requirements. For example, apart from sanctions monitoring, we also use established vendors to perform media screening, transaction monitoring and other types of surveillance; all of these things are just part and parcel of a good and solid compliance program.

One additional point to bring up is that we have a core set of policies that set a firm foundation for the compliance and conduct culture in the firm. Apart from typical policies, we have a code of conduct to make sure that all employees understand the values and objectives of the firm; we have policies to guide employees on the appropriate behavior and how to act in the marketplace while avoiding any kind of conflicts of interests, we have communication standards and other market conduct guidance as well. These are the things that we have worked on and continue to enhance - not every company might have a similar type of philosophy.

7. How do start-up companies deal with compliance? Do you have any suggestions?  

A lot of it depends on the company itself. When you first set up, you might need quite a simple setup. If a start-up company does not serve customers all over the world, and your business model is a simple one, your compliance program and processes can be simpler. As the company develops in sophistication and complexity, then you should also grow your compliance and AML framework to cope with the increased risk of such activities.

Compliance is necessary because there are rules you have to follow when you conduct certain types of financial business. Following these rules will necessarily give you access to the right customers, investors and shareholders you want to attract. And as the company grows, you then build up and scale up the compliance/AML program. Even for Amber Group, since inception till now, the compliance and risk management program has evolved and become more sophisticated and granular.

8. Could you list milestone events for compliance since the industry initiated? For example, Coinbase is the first exchange to be compliant.

I think the milestone thing for me is countries accepting Bitcoin as legal tender. I think some African country, Central African Republic has also done that. Regulators around the world have also been issuing licenses to some of these crypto players. If we talk about Hong Kong, we have OSL and Hashkey got a Crypto Virtual Asset Trading Platform License. In Singapore, since last year, the first crypto licenses were issued by the MAS. A lot of action is happening in the Middle East. They have issued provisional licenses to a number of players. These are crypto milestones for me.

At Amber Group, we have obtained 12 regulatory licenses so far, including the licenses in HK, registrations with the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC), the U.S. Department of Treasury Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN), the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC), U.K. Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), and Japan Financial Services Agency (JFSA), and a member of the Swiss Financial Services Standards Association (VQF). This reflects the company’s lasting commitment to compliance, security, and most importantly, investor protection as it strives to continue building trust and confidence in digital assets.

Obviously, there are certain Bitcoin futures, Bitcoin ETF, or funds that have started all around the world. All of these are, I guess, milestones that show increased mainstream adoption of crypto. Also, I think Visa is accepting or tying up with merchants to accept crypto payments, for example for luxurious goods such as Gucci and Lamborghinis. This will eventually be rolled out to more goods – paying for them using your crypto is a big milestone because it actually affects the daily life of people.

9. Could you make some conclusions about today’s conversation?  

Actually, regulators are trying to maintain a balance between promoting innovation and development and ensuring financial stability in the ecosystem. As a responsible player in the ecosystem, I think compliance will make allow the whole industry to thrive and become accepted and not be considered “a wild industry”. Strike the balance and don't be afraid of it, because it is a competitive advantage. Every time we talk to any interested stakeholder, they generally have two main concerns: first, are you compliant with rules? And the second one is obviously about information security. I think in this regard, Amber has prioritized these quite well for both compliance and info security of digital assets.

（Fenbushi Capital had an interview with Nest’s founder Charles.)

1. There is a dispute around Web3. Someone thinks it will smash Web2 empire; Someone thinks it is always about gambling and Ponzi plans. What's your opinion about Web3?

Charles: Web3 is a parallel and potentially more expansive, trust-based digital ecosystem. We see it as the next stage of digital evolution. Web3, if or when enacted correctly, will supersede Web2. To paraphrase, Web3 is conceptually a user-led rewiring of what people commonly hold to be ‘the internet’ or ‘online functions’.

Web3 encompasses the connections, services and data access across most all of digital space. Rewiring is made possible by certain types of technologies. Blockchain is the most familiar example. The choice, control and secured exchange capacity that has recently been permitted through distributed ledger technologies, blockchain is just one of them, holds the potential to upend currently centralized services, digital and traditional (physical), alike.

Due to the technologies and structures that were available then, Web2 proliferated gated access to services, data and features. These gatekeepers were Amazon, LinkedIn, Facebook and the like. Today, Web3 has the potential to genuinely democratize both the input as well as the access and control of engagement. This next stage is somewhat of a flattening out of digital access and ownership controls. Also, it is user-led. These users are obviously in the real-world, not in any one location. So, Web3 is naturally a decentralized repositioning.

Web3 is a burgeoning concept and potential. It is still in its infancy. New Web3 tools are being introduced in rapid succession. For those that think it’s always about gambling or ‘schemes’ - in order to draw a practical comparison of a mainstream adoption timeline for Web3 - we could reference say the internet bubble of the 90’s and the more recent ICO bubble in the blockchain space. Fringe practices and ‘dodgy’ offerings are typically the first headline grabbing focal points in certain emerging tech. Such teething issues generally do not speak to, nor indeed limit, the true underlying potential impact of the tech itself. The Web2 issues did not kill the internet, ICO’s did not stop blockchain then and current Web3 issues won’t kill the true capacity now. Web3 is quite a conceptual, user-first change in positioning. It speaks to a different form of ‘online’ access-control for most, which is only starting to see the light of day.

Through user-led personal choice capacity, of both their data control and secured exchanges, the options and indeed responsibilities in Web3 are somewhat repositioned to the individual rather than say Web2 empire fiefdoms. Web3 adoption is a user-led practice. Engagement will determine the shape as well as the speed of effects that the underlying technologies will carry.

2. What do you think about the acquisition of Gem by Opensea? Will it undercut the innovation of the industry? What kinds of innovation will come up (could be infrastructure, tools, and NFT applications)?

Charles: Initially, it strikes as somewhat contradictory to their intended mission statement of “Gem is on a mission to create a decentralized and open future for the internet, and even more so, the metaverse.“

There are three top of mind considerations. Firstly, current mainstream pseudo-anonymous wallets and asset ownership structures are insufficient. Access does not and cannot equate to ownership. In most cases of popular NFT sales and use, when using typical wallet solutions there is ‘no one’ who can actually claim to own either the wallet or content (as the wallet is by design pseudo-anonymous), and there is nothing ‘to own’ should the master-file of say an NFT artwork a) not have been sold under contract and b) remain publicly accessible. In short, the setup for typical NFT sales and ownership demands a massive overhaul – which NEST® is addressing but which forms the content of another answer.

Secondly, the lazy-mint structure of OpenSea does feel, to some, as generally misleading. This ‘lazy-mint’ being the process by which digital assets’ listed on the marketplace are not actually NFT’s until after they have been purchased by a second party or ‘buyer’. Meaning they are in many ways not secured, registered or ‘on-chain’ in the commonly perceived capacity until they have actually been sold to someone else. This methodology, and many variations of it, allow for the ‘free mint’ or ‘low fees’ offered by numerous services. The Gem website, we believe for inventory and listings, is primarily scraping the OpenSea databases through APIs. So, this leads to questions of what an ‘aggregator’ does and at what time or stage in the process this is performed.

Thirdly, OpenSea is a decentralized, layer-two application with integrated support for 3 networks – Ethereum, Polygon and Solana. The third question then arises – what would be the reaction to say a comparison site like Expedia, TripAdvisor or Kayak being purchased by a single airline? This could be extended to say any comparison websites being purchased by a single operator in the relevant space.

All in all, for sure there will be practical and immediate benefits for cross exploration and discovery potential throughout existing networks. But whether Gem’s acquisition by OpenSea, a somewhat centralized marketplace, is actually in support and of benefit towards a truly distributed ownership-control for users, in the ‘free market’ sense, is something that remains to be proven.

In regards to innovation, the content of an NFT and its secured use, control and exchange is where the most exciting developments will come. Not simply from streamlined collection listings of any one ‘form’ of NFTs. We believe a more accurate or apt description of the future NFT space is to describe NFTs as ‘data-as-an-asset’. What this ‘data-as-an-asset’ is leading to is users’ own secured, omni-network and dynamic digital capacity that permits far more broad functions, as most any type of data can be included in this.

For the user, this ‘data-as-an-asset’ package enables new forms of protected engagement and exchange across any function or service. This ability for newly secured and controlled data has impacts that encompass most all activities, from those online right across to real world contractual engagement or participation. The tools and associated infrastructure that will first shine will be determined according to the most demanded features and services. Right now, first in mind NFTs are artwork and photos. Item purchases. Next up we may see ticketing with event participation. With this comes broader implementation of real-world contractual terms of usage and exchange, such as Intellectual Property (IP) right allocations, creator usage restrictions or persistent royalties associated with set data. Shortly after, we see dynamic long-term engagements, such as membership or employment right across to more intelligent forms of user profiles all implementing different forms of NFTs. And these examples only scratch the surface.

4. Keeping the safety of digital assets is the prerequisite of Web3. What we witness is theft, fraud, and scams all over the place. How could we solve the safety issue of the industry?

Charles: Absolutely correct. Enabling authentic ownership-control of digital assets is a prerequisite of Web3. Until this is done, Web3 will not reach its potential. To actually secure a digital asset requires a combination of protocols which we have found are quite often not understood and rarely, if ever, wholistically implemented. When taking an overview of online engagement, be it Web2 or Web3, again everything exists because of the users. It is the users’ choice to download applications, participate, exchange or engage. Web2 and the concurrent precursors to our most familiar networks, primarily ended up consisting of gatekeepers. These were the leading services, functions and features that were either popularly embraced, such as social media, or somewhat professionally required, like communication and productivity tools. To operate, gatekeepers must maintain a certain environment of trust and facility. The access to gatekeepers demands from the users’ varied forms of term acceptance as well as users’ disclosure of information, behavior and details. This is centralized authentication e.g., allowed use of a hosted profile. The consequence of such central collation becomes a divulging of personal data (identity, access, use, connections, assets and so on), as well as these gatekeepers’ retention of power and control over the services and environments offered. The centralized gatekeepers as businesses, groups or organizations are typically real-world companies with registered headquarters, offices and the like. The centralized nature of gatekeepers then places the services and environments able to be offered under geographically regional jurisdictions. This setup then poses multiple and major limitations on both sides, for sure.

Then we come to popularization of blockchain and associated technologies. The underlying promise or potential of truly immutable distributed technologies and networks is the unmediated distribution of trust itself. Meaning, due to the secured nature or the form of documentation and exchange facilitated through DLT transactions, the code itself and its subsequent entries can be more trusted than any one centralized gatekeeper. This is one key principle behind cryptographically secured forms of currency and smart-contracts which, for any user, result in quite simply no more than mathematical proof that something happened. No external or third-party verification is needed. DLT entries are immutable and decentralized so – ideally – they are then outside the purview or control of any individual jurisdiction, organization, agency or entity.

To not repeat the gatekeeper methodology and structure, or to indeed properly utilize DLT, users’ must now retain confidential control of both their identity as well as digital assets. This is throughout any blockchain network or service of choice. And more than this, they must have the capacity to securely and privately link their real-world ownership to digital assets and then be the sole controller of such link. To authentically secure the safety of a digital asset, there needs to be 1) a real-world person, who 2) owns and controls a distinctly identified asset; 1 _ Pseudo-anonymous wallet solutions cannot accommodate real-world ownership. Centralized wallet solutions are by definition not authentically confidential nor truly private. So, at NEST® we start with confidential, individually encrypted, device-side control of personal information and data. Unlike most – NEST® never retains or stores private keys thereby removing even our capacity for user data access and ensuring full privacy for the user. This device-side, individually encrypted environment permits the users to generate, own, edit and control their Self-Sovereign Decentralized ID (SSDID). This results in a hyper-encrypted digital tool and signature capacity for the user which enables many things such as hard-coded provenance authentication, signatory to notary authority and access control. Use and any transaction appearance on any network is publicly retrievable, on-chain, yet only privately decryptable by the owner;

2 _ Access does not equate to ownership. Legal rights to any asset cannot be sold, transferred, bought or exchanged if that asset is undefined and/or uncontrolled. Digital files are reproduceable, anyone with access may basically perfectly replicate that file. Additionally, in the digital space, multiple networks across varied jurisdictions are all without a single database for verification. One argument often made here, for the veracity of current NFTs, is that timestamped events on-chain are immutable. This position being the ‘first claim’ to registration wins. True. Access to one first appearance registration can hold an impact. Yet it does not answer in what situation or to whom or how can this claim genuinely holds impact. Asset hosting, as most frequently performed today, is often open and unsecured leaving genuine asset definition and ownership unaddressed. To solve this, at NEST® we ensure that the master-files for digital assets are not available to download for anyone else apart from the verified owner. Data is instead individually encrypted and kept differentiated from corresponding publicly accessible, purposefully open registrations. Taking art NFTs as an example, only a ‘photocopy’ or light-weight version of the artwork is kept on IPFS or similar open databases. The actual asset or primary master-file is individually encrypted to the owner him or herself. Transference and re-encryption are accommodated and this works for every stage from minting, imports, edits, swaps to contractual exchanges and the like. All SSDID and data (assets), are stored by users in failsafe blockchain networks, using splintered, quantum proof security. Only the authenticated owner has the capacity to access, decrypt, sell or exchange the distinct and secured digital asset(s). This permits the authenticated and secured expansion or use of NFTs from artwork to music, movies, contracts right over to personal data and so on.

Without the above two features - theft, fraud, and scams can be rampant. Without the above, there is generally and legally speaking ‘no one’ who ‘owns’ any asset in question. And without these two steps in place, there is a knock-on effect imposing significant limitations on digital assets by removing the potential user participation in legal contracts (copyright transfer, sale, exchange, etc.), value-added services (loans, mortgages, lending, etc.), real-world practicalities (authenticated verifications for items, membership participation), and the like.

NEST® can provide the tools that facilitate users secure choice selection. Enacting the control for the safety and security of digital assets is fundamentally in the hands of the users themselves.

5. Could you introduce NEST? What's your initiative in creating the company?

Charles: NEST® stands for Naturally Encrypted, Secure Technologies. We focus on bespoke development of easily accessible infrastructures and software that facilitate confidentially secured user access, ownership, and control of Web3. NEST® is truly interoperable and has its own layer-zero-to-one blockchain. We have built both desktop and mobile applications which together provide over 50 different, first of their kind features.In creating the company, we saw it more as a necessity than an option. Critical barriers for distributed genuine privacy, exchange participation, ownership, monetization, and user control exist that no one else seemed to be addressing. Solving these critical barriers and enabling user-led control was not really about starting a business; it feels more like personal responsibility.

We started with the question – how can you make choice personal? This is not an initially simple proposition to explain. To truly ‘make choice personal’ requires that the individual retains agency in action, that they have sufficient privacy to formulate their own judgments and decisions which are as free as possible from external influence or bias as well as they hold an active capacity to securely and safely execute those choices. For many years we have been building, in stealth mode, a multichain ecosystem able to accommodate this complete lifecycle. Our answer to how we can ‘make choice personal’ is what we provide to users through our infrastructure. Confidential, interoperable and authentically user-owned tools that privately bridge their digital to real-world divide.

Parachain performance

The features of Astar Network can be summarized as followings:

1. Compatible with EVM and WASM

2. DApp Staking

3. Multi-chain cross-chain deployment

4. Supports Layer 2 solutions

Firstly, Astar Network supports both EVM and WASM. The EVM platform and Solidity language were launched 5 years ago in response to Bitcoin scripts not being Turing-complete. But five years after ETH launched, no significant improvements have been made to the underlying virtual machine and contract technology. Compared to Solidity, WebAssembly-based Wasm has a more complete set of instructions that can support more complex logic. Smart contracts based on WASM allow developers to break writing limits of Solidity and increase the product logic and complexity by orders of magnitude.

WASM is backed by big names like Google and Microsoft and its developer group is growing. Public chains such as EOS and NEAR have also chosen to use WASM for smart contract development. It demonstrates that WASM technology is gradually accepted and applied in the crypto world as it evolves. ETH 2.0 will also transit from EVM to eWASM, while it is so large that cannot upgrade to eWASM within the foreseeable future. To sum it up, EVM and WASM are short-term and long-term options for developers. EVM is currently the most popular technology among developers, while WASM is a more powerful technology with unlimited potential. Astar's compatibility with EVM and WASM considers both current and future situations.

Secondly, DApp Staking is what makes Astar networks stand out. For PoS chains, the staking reward is given to the node to ensure the security of the chain. While to attract DApp to deploy on it, Astar gives half of each block reward to DApp developers and nominators and the other half to the nodes. Such staking reward is dynamically balanced. Users can stake tokens to their favorite DApps. If the staking amount in Dapp increases, its staking reward will become less; users will return to the node to achieve a balance.

Dapp staking provides developers with a clearer long-term revenue path. Under the network effects, developers and projects will strengthen the ecosystem of Astar through Dapp staking and bring more projects to the ecosystem.

Thirdly, Astar supports parachain cross-chain and heterogeneous cross-chain. Parachain cross-chain refers to parachains being inserted into slots that can send messages to each other, communicate with each other, and realize data cross-chain through the XCMP protocol. Astar carried out the cross-chain bridge development in terms of heterogeneous chain. While most cross-chain projects only focus on ETH/BSC/Polygon, Astar will also support Avalanche/ Dfinity/Cosmos.

Fourth, Astar supports Layer2 ecosystem. Currently, Astar has implemented an OVM solution (Optimistic Virtual Machine), and OVM can help with money transfer from Layer1 to Layer2. In addition to Optimistic Rollup, the team is working on a solution for ZK Rollup with the 7th grant received from Web3 Foundation to fulfill this vision. Astar Network is devoted to being a smart contract platform that contains various complicated development environments for various DApps. These include ETH compatible (EVM, Solidity, Truffle, Remix, Metamask, etc.), WASM compatible (ink!, ask!, Metis, Redspot, etc.), Plasma, ZK Rollup, and Optimistic Rollup.

Ecosystem

Since the launch of the parachain, the Astar ecosystem has developed rapidly, with a TVL record of $2 billion. Currently, Astar TVL is $900 million, ranking first among Polkadot parachains. Among them, the Astar Incubation Program has contributed more than 600 million US dollars of TVL to the Astar ecosystem. The Astar Incubation Program is supported by industry-leading capitals such as Alameda Research, Fenbushi Capital, Digital Finance Group, LongHash Ventures, etc. Plus, The Astar core team provides all-around and high-depth incubation for the incubated projects. At present, two projects of ArthSwap and Starlay from the Incubator Program have been launched, and three projects of AstridDAO, Starfish and Avaault will be launched soon.

April is an important month for Astar with at least 15 new projects going to be launched. Starlay Finance has been one of the biggest success stories on Astar Network, reaching $182M in TVL and $253M in borrowing volume in less than a month since going live. Also, one-stop Defi/Dex on Astar Arthswap has reached $154M TVL.

There are also new projects going to be launched on Astar Network, including but not limited to:

Dapp-staking: ADAO

Yield optimizer platform: Alnair Finance

Multi-collateral stablecoin: AstridDAO

DeFi & GamiFi dApp: Astar Farm

Yield aggregator： Avault

StableSwap protocol: Kagla

veToken: Muuu Finance

Fractional-algorithmic stablecoin: Orcus Finance

Cross-chain stablecoin AMM: Sirius Finance

Decentralized investment platform: Starbank

Astar Network also promotes ecosystem development through self-incubation. At present, five projects including ArthSwap, Starlay, AstridDAO, Starfish, and Avaault have come out of the Astar Incubator Program in the first season.

Team and partner backgrounds

Stake Technologies is a Japanese company incorporated in 2018, having many resources in the Japanese Internet industry, including Microsoft Japan. Microsoft Japan provides Astar with Microsoft services such as Azure, infrastructure support, and human resources such as entrepreneurs and blockchain engineers.

Secondly, the young team led by Sota Watanabe (25 years old only) is a force to be reckoned with in Polkadot and even in the whole industry. Astar developer team has applied for and received great numbers of grants in the Polkadot ecosystem. It has overcome many technical difficulties, including the aforementioned ink, Playground, OVM, ZK Rollup, etc. As for the institutional investors, in February 2021, Binance Labs invested USD 10 million in Astar Network (Plasm) in its seed round. In June 2021, Fenbushi Capital led another 10 million USD investment in Astar Network in its strategic round. On January 19, 2022, Polychain led USD 22 million in Astar Network in its strategic round.

To sum it up, any DApp can find its own place on Astar, regardless of the programming language or the platform on which it is built. In addition, Astar's strong support for WASM demonstrates its ambition to take the lead in the next blockchain era. Backed by Internet giants, Astar also has advantages in technical strength and resources. Finally, Astar is trying to boost its ecosystem through DApp Staking.If it works, such a developer incentive model will help the ecosystem grow steadily over the long term.

从波卡架构以及插槽拍卖机制来看，平行链相当于一条独立公链（不过共享中继链的安全性）。拍得插槽的平行链会吸引一大批小项目以较低的成本在上面部署。因此智能合约平台是波卡的刚需，也是生态发展初期竞争最为激烈的赛道。目前已知的的选手有Moonbeam, Clover还有Acala，那么Astar Network如何从这种竞争格局中突出重围？它的竞争优势又有哪些？本期要讲讲Astar Network的平行链性能、生态发展以及团队方面的事。

(本文由Fenbushi Capital原创，有匪撰文。）

平行链性能

Astar Network的特性总结下来有以下几点：

１.　兼容EVM和WASM

２.　DApp Staking

３.　多链跨链部署

４.　支持Layer２扩容协议

**首先，Astar Network同时支持EVM和WASM。**EVM平台以及Solidity语言是于5年前针对于比特币脚本并不图灵完备而推出的。然而在以太坊上线五年之后，底层的虚拟机以及合约技术并没有大的改进。相比于 Solidity，基于WebAssembly的Wasm具有更完备的指令集，可以支持更复杂的逻辑。Wasm智能合约支持开发者突破 Solidity的编写限制，可以将产品逻辑和复杂度提升一个数量级。

WASM受到了谷歌、微软等大厂的支持，其开发者群体在逐步扩张中。包括EOS以及Near等公链也选择了用WASM来进行智能合约的开发。这些公链的初步试水证明了WASM技术发展的同时逐渐在加密世界受到认可及生出应用。其实，以太坊 2.0 也将会从EVM过渡到eWASM，但以太坊毕竟体量庞大，eWASM 升级遥遥无期。总结而言，EVM和WASM是开发者短期以及长期的选择。EVM是目前开发者呼声最高的技术，而WASM则是性能更强、潜力无限的技术。而Astar选择兼容EVM和WASM，既顾及了眼下以及未来的需求，也具有足够前瞻性。

**第二点，DApp Staking是Astar Network最与众不同的一点。**对于PoS机制的链来说，质押奖励都会给到节点，以此保证链的安全性（当然也有相应的惩罚机制）。而Astar为了吸引DApp在部署在上面，将每个区块奖励一半给到DApp开发者和提名者，一半给到节点。且这种质押奖励会保持动态的平衡。举个例子，用户可以质押代币到自己喜欢的DApp上。比如，用户可以质押代币至Sushiswap上成为提名者并获取质押收益。如果DApp质押量增多了，那么其质押奖励就会变少；质押者将重回节点质押，以此达到一种平衡。

过去，开发者靠融资解决生存乃至盈利问题已经成为一种常态。而DApp Staking为开发者提供了更加明确的长期营收路径，更加能调动他们的积极性。尤其在网络效应下，寻求DApp staking的项目将壮大Astar的生态，而生态的发展又能源源不断地将项目带进来。循环往复，Astar的生态将受到持续正面的影响。

第三点，Astar支持平行链跨链以及异构链跨链。波卡平行链跨链指的是通过XCMP协议，插入插槽的平行链之间才可以互相发送消息，互相通信，实现数据跨链。与以往的资产跨链不同，此次跨链指的是信息跨链，证明未来平行链之间将具备更强大的互操作性。在异构链跨链方面，Astar进行了多链跨链桥的开发。当在跨链项目还只专注于以太坊、BSC以及Polygon跨链上，Astar上的可能的多链部署直接跃升了一个层级。Astar还将支持Avalanche/ Dfinity/Cosmos等跨链。

**第四点，支持Layer2生态。**目前Astar已经实现了OVM解决方案(Optimistic Virtual Machine)，OVM可以帮助Layer1和Layer2的资金传输及交流。除了Optimistic Rollup，团队正在开发ZK Rollup的解决方案，之前所收到的Web3基金会的第 7 笔奖金就是用于实现这个愿景的。Astar Network致力成为包罗各种复杂开发环境，支持各种各样DApp的智能合约平台。这当中包括：以太坊兼容（EVM, Solidity, Truffle, Remix, Metamask等）、WASM兼容（ink!, ask!, Metis, Redspot等）、Plasma、ZK Rollup 和 Optimistic Rollup。

生态发展

自平行链上线以来，Astar 生态发展迅速，TVL最高纪录达到 20 亿美金。目前，Astar TVL 为 9 亿美金，在 Polkadot 平行链中位居首位。

其中，Astar 官方启动的 Astar Incubation Program 为 Astar 生态贡献了超过 6 亿美金的 TVL。Astar Incubation Program 由 Alameda Research, Fenbushi Capital, Digital Finance Group, LongHash Ventures 等行业领先的资本支持，由 Astar 核心团队向被孵化项目提供全方位、高深度孵化。目前，孵化器中已经走出了 ArthSwap、Starlay 两个项目，AstridDAO、Starfish、Avault 三个项目即将上线。

四月份是Astar生态发展的重要月份，有将近15个新项目上线。目前生态项目主要以Defi类型为主。其中已经上线的有一站式Defi/Dex Arthswap以及波卡上借贷协议Starlay Finance。其中Arthswap上线两个月以来的TVL已经达到了$154m，而Starlay上线一个多月借贷+存储总TVL达到$427m.     其他未上线的项目还包括多抵押品去中心化稳定币AstridDAO、混合式AMM+NFTFi协议Starfish、Astar原生生息代币收益聚合器Avault、 基于dapp staking的ADAO、 LP质押平台Alnair Finance、 Defi&Gamefi Astar Farm、 稳定币兑换平台Kagla、 Vetoken平台Muuu Finance、 算法稳定币Orcus Finance、 跨链稳定币AMM Sirius Finance以及 去中心化投资平台Starbank。项目的详细信息参见https://medium.com/astar-network/astarseason-is-coming-6a31e5638830。

团队及合作伙伴背景

Astar的开发公司Stake Technologies是一家成立于2018年的日本公司，拥有众多日本互联网行业的资源，其中就包括了微软日本。微软日本为Astar提供了包括Azure等微软服务、微软全球网络等基础设施支持以及企业家、区块链工程师等人力资源的支持。

其次，年仅25岁的渡边创太所带领的年轻队伍是波卡乃至行业不可忽视的力量。据悉，Astar开发者团队是波卡生态里申请以及交付grant最多的团队，获得了来自Web3 基金会的多笔 grant，啃下了很多技术上的硬骨头：包括了之前提到的ink！Playground、OVM、ZK Rollup等等。投资机构方面，2021年2月，币安实验室领投了Astar Network（Plasm） 1000万美元的种子轮。2021年6月，Fenbushi Capital领投了Astar Network 1000万美元的战略轮投资。2022年1月19日，Polychain领投了Astar Network 2200万美元的战略轮投资。

总结以上，无论是使用何种编程语言的或者构建在何种平台上的DApp都可以在Astar上找到落脚点。此外，Astar对于WASM的强扶持也彰显着它在下一个区块链纪元里占据领先地位的野心。而背靠互联网大厂的Astar在技术实力以及资源上也存在着优势。Astar通过DApp Staking的方式对生态进行热启动，这种开发者激励模式成熟之后，将帮助生态步上正轨并进行长期稳健的发展。

Web3 似乎无处不在，已成为 2022 年最大的技术趋势之一。尽管它吸引了投资者、technorati （网志搜索引擎）和帕丽斯·希尔顿（Web3布道者），但听说过它的人数远远超过了真正了解它的人。Web3本质上只是区块链的更名，以软件为核心。

（本文来源于Bloomberg Market，Parmy Olson撰文，Fenbushi Capital翻译。）

区块链曾经是炙手可热的投资领域，然大约三年前投融资的势头逐渐减缓。去年这种去中心化账本技术以“web3”新名称重新流行起来，声称是互联网的下一个篇章。但是，对于区块链技术是否真正管用的担忧仍然存在、不会消失，几年前投资者曾因此兴趣锐减。

Web3爱好者认为，由少数几家价值万亿美元的科技公司主导的互联网已经成为过去：此为web2。未来是一个以加密货币为基础的更加去中心化和公平的互联网。那个未来有多远？尽管web3投资火热证明了它的合理性，但它确实离我们还很遥远。根据Crunchbase数据，风险资本仅在 2021 年就向 web3 初创公司投入了 180 亿美元。web3 互联网可能永远不会被主流采用，因为到目前为止它还无法承载用户及开发者友好的应用程序和服务。简而言之，web3 还很难用。去中心化应用程序即dapps很难流行起来。

举例说明，Twitter的克隆产品 Peepeth曾在2018 年推出时吸引了几千名用户。发布“peep”(即推文）需要用户支付一小部分ETH。支付方式是通过加密货币钱包和浏览器插件，例如 MetaMask。（插件或专用浏览器（包括 Brave 和 Opera）是与 web3 交互的主要方式。）Peepeth 推出几个月后，备受争议的美国播客主持人Joe Rogan在他的节目中谈到了这款应用，称赞它是一种审查证明工具，因为区块链上的数据无法更改。那一年的分析师还表示，dapp被主流采用只需要一两年的时间。

尽管大肆宣传，总部位于旧金山的 Peepeth 和其他分布式应用程序仍难以吸引大量受众。活跃用户数量减少了数千甚至数百。原因之一：服务难以使用。例如，在Peepeth上发布一条推文需要大约一天的时间，而在 Twitter 上只需要一秒钟，而且使用 MetaMask 购买和消费通证很麻烦。Peepeth 的开发者Bevan Barton 没有回应置评请求。

2018 年，以太坊上最受欢迎的 dapp 使用户能够进行加密资产的投机交易。例如，CryptoKitties 允许你在区块链上收集和“繁殖”数字猫，有时需要花费数千美元。Dapp 的数量已从 2018 年的 1,500 个增长到今天的近 10,000 个——但最受欢迎的服务仍仅限于融资和交易，其中不乏一些游戏。根据DappRadar UAB数据，最受欢迎的 dapps 还属OpenSea（NFT市场）以及PancakeSwap。

Web3的另一个挑战实际上是无法实现去中心化的理想。

Moxie Marlinspike是世界上最著名的密码学家之一。他曾领导 Twitter 安全团队创建了加密消息应用 Signal，并与人合著了支持 WhatsApp、Facebook Messenger、Google Messages 和 Skype的加密协议。Marlinspike 在 1 月份的一篇博中写道，web3 的基本原则在实践中已被搁置，此言论引起了轰动。Marlinspike 写道，目前的Web3鲜少运用到加密技术。事实上，流行的 web3 服务（例如 NFT 市场）仍然依赖 web2 形式链接到区块链。

作为web2 的基石API可以连接不同的软件程序，允许在线企业相互通信。例如，亚马逊公司通过统计客户“调用”其 API 的次数来向其云计算业务 Amazon Web Services 的客户收费。

Marlinspike 指出，流行的 web3 服务，例如 OpenSea 和用于访问 web3 应用程序的浏览器插件 MetaMask，正在使用 API 第三方访问以太坊区块链。这意味着使用服务的人无法直接访问区块链。例如，Marlinspike 在以太坊上创建了一个 NFT，该 NFT 存储在他的 MetaMask 加密钱包中并显示在 OpenSea 市场上。但是，当 OpenSea 将这个NFT从市场上撤下时，它也从用户的加密钱包中消失了。

想象一下，你将上传至Twitter的照片删除之后，在计算机硬盘驱动器中的图像也删除了。这与 Marlinspike 的 NFT 发生的情况类似。理论上它应该继续出现在MetaMask 中，但 MetaMask 并不与区块链直接交互。它本质上只是展示 NFT的门户，必须向至少一家其他公司进行 API 调用。Marlinspike 的 NFT 在区块链上的不可删除性并不重要，因为他的加密钱包需要使用 OpenSea 的 API 来显示。MetaMask 更像是一个窗口，而不是一个钱包。MetaMask 的联合创始人 Dan Finlay 证实，他的服务依赖于 OpenSea API 展示用户MetaMask 钱包中的NFT。“我们知道为数字资产建立一个中心化索引是一种有缺陷的策略，但我们有办法去抹除这些缺陷。”他补充道。

当拥有手机和计算机的个人无法直接接入区块链时，分布式和数据透明的理想就没有实际意义。因为这些网络是由服务器连接的，服务器是通常由公司控制的强大计算机。随着平台之间进行整合，web3 呈现出 web2 的中心化外观。web3 并没有破坏看门人的力量，反而在培养他们。

人们很容易将互联网的标准化视为理所当然，然而这种标准的建立在30年的试验以及实践上，才达成了万维网联盟或 WC3 等组织的共识（不要与 web3 混淆）。今天的基础设施运转良好且可互操作，我们却几乎从未注意到它。特例是Android 手机可以播放高质量视频，但 iPhone 不能；因为它的浏览器没有实施新标准。

传统互联网之所以可以规模性地全球范围内运作，在于几乎所有站点和服务都使用 TCP/IP（传输控制协议/互联网协议），这种架构源于美国国防高级研究计划局在 1960 年代后期的研究。它还依赖于 HTTP（超文本传输协议），这是用于传输文件（包括文本、图像和视频）的另一组关键规则。如果互联网是我们一路欣赏到的美景，那么 TCP/IP 就是一条条道路，而 HTTP是行驶在路上的特殊卡车。还有其他类似 HTTP 的协议（是不同的汽车和卡车），但 HTTP是最受欢迎的且行驶在同一路上的“卡车”。

比特币和以太坊等区块链缺乏统一的“道路系统”以及类似的“卡车”来处理数据。如果无法建立统一的标准，也无明显的竞争者，web3 仍然是一系列脱节的网络。因此，上面的服务仍然难以构建、扩展和交互。

元宇宙是与现实世界的虚拟世界，需要对内容生产、经济系统、用户体验以及实体世界内容等进行大量改造。目前，行业内接近元宇宙形态的平台包括Sandbox、Decentraland、Cryptovoxels等。其中，Sandbox目前生态最为完善。本文将以用户体验、内容及内容生产、经济系统这几个维度来分析这个项目。

（本文由Fenbushi Capital原创，有匪撰写。）

用户体验

从媒体介质来看，游戏无疑是最为适配元宇宙世界的媒介。从用户体验来看，游戏是应用中互动性最强、用户注意力最集中的品类。未来随着3A游戏出现，游戏效果将极大增强感官冲击，让玩家产生如临游戏场景的体验。随着人们对于游戏形态的不断拓展，玩家将不仅停留在打怪闯关上，也会探索游戏内的社交、玩赚以及学习等功能。最后，当爆款游戏成为一种文化现象而引发人们的讨论时，其意义将远超游戏本身。

Sandbox是现阶段唯一具备游戏性的项目，Decentraland以及Crypto Voxels还停留在浏览的基础上。浏览指的是玩家只能在虚拟空间中走动，而无法做到其他的互动。在最近的Sandbox Alpha Season2中，玩家可以惊喜地发现不同的地图（游戏）对应不同的功能：有的地图强调游戏性（德古拉篇），有的地图突出文化输出（Snoop Dogg篇），有的地图则侧重于科普（天星小轮篇）。当游戏开始拥有着复合的功能时，人们将实现在虚拟空间中云蹦迪、云逛展、云演唱会、云学习、云结婚，不仅仅是打怪升级而已。

内容及内容生产

UGC其实不是一个新鲜的词汇了，Web2中的Youtube、Tiktok、Bilibili等短视频平台都是采用的UGC模式，永动机式的内容创作使平台拥有强劲的生命力。对于游戏UGC而言，从魔兽3开始小试牛刀，到Roblox将概念发扬光大；游戏UGC代表游戏创作的一种先进的思路。相较于传统游戏从萌芽到诞生历经艰辛，寿命却非常有限；游戏UGC使基于底层架构的游戏源源不断开发出来，实现了生态的可持续发展。虽然Roblox是划时代的产品，却受困于Web2体制而发展受限，这会在最后一个章节中细说。

Roblox给开发者提供的支持在于平台为创作者提供工具帮助开发游戏，且作为流量入口为游戏倒流。参照Roblox，Sandbox为创作者提供了两款创作工具。其中VoxEdit帮助游戏开发者创造体素素材（Asset）并放在市场上售卖，而Game Creator则帮助玩家搭建游戏场景、放置体素素材以及设计角色的动态效果等。

对于UGC而言，创作工具的难易程度以及平台方的扶持都至关重要。目前，Sandbox的创作工具完全是内部开发的，还未引入外部工具。这意味着第一，对于不熟悉体素创作的创作者需要时间学习，且从入门到精通的周期长。第二，现有的体素素材库库存还远远不够，官方需要吸引更多创作者创作以及引入外部素材。目前，官方开启了优秀体素作品的激励计划以及资助了部分的工作室，扶持力度有待加强。

如果元宇宙平台是飞船，UGC作为引擎已经有了，而以IP主导的内容作为燃料需要不断填充进来。有人说元宇宙的形态是赛博朋克，而事实上元宇宙横亘古今、放眼寰宇，且亦实亦虚，如梦似幻。元宇宙可建立在现实世界中，亦可脱离开现实；目力所及或想象力所达之处皆可称元宇宙。以Sandbox为例，IP可以是耳熟能详的阿迪达斯、华纳音乐以及Snoop Dogg，亦可以是创作者脑海中的德古拉城堡、唐朝边陲小镇、海底世界等等。现实世界IP诸如阿迪达斯、Smurf、Snoop Dogg、Atari的入局赋予了传统IP新的生命力，同时也让元宇宙平台更加出圈。同时，UGC模式也鼓励新IP的创作，比如说The Walking Dead、Deadmao5等都将持续在平台上推出游戏。只要UGC模式不熄火，那么内容将会不断迭代更新。

经济系统

上文提到Roblox发展受限，其原因可以归结于Roblox的货币Roblux仅仅在游戏系统中流通，兑换成法币颇为困难。这导致创作者的收入锐减，远低于行业的平均水平。除了平台、流量、创作者以外，变现以及收入分成才是UGC的精髓。比如，短视频平台目前采用的是对用户免费开放以获取流量，通过广告以及游戏进行变现的模式。对于Web3平台来说，即便拥有了FT&NFT可以灵活地调和各方的利益，仍要审慎地运用并掌握经济模型。经济模式终归是把双刃剑，它能加速生态的发展，也能让生态进入死亡螺旋。Sandbox涉及了诸多的利益相关方：平台、创作者、B端用户、C端玩家、土地持有者以及通证持有者，一旦NFT或者FT的价格出现剧烈波动，打破了各方的平衡，便会影响到整个生态的发展。因此，项目方需要保证生态渐进发展，以谋求更长远的未来。

综上所述，Sandbox是目前元宇宙平台中生态发展最为稳健的。这种游戏＋UGC＋IP内容＋经济系统的组合充满着机遇（对于创作者而言），却也面临着不小的挑战。比如，平台如何吸引创作者源源不断地进入生态？又如何平衡平台以及创作者的利益？平台方除了土地收入以外，还有哪些盈利模型？这些挑战还待项目方认真思考以及解决。

Axie Infinity作为2021年风靡全球的链游，带火了P2E以及公会模式。公会为游戏玩家提供了良好的社区基础，玩家们可以在同一屋檐下讨论游戏机制、如何保持游戏中的竞争力。其实，每一个链游都需要公会的存在，公会也可随着链游热度的冷却而自行解散。其中，能持续发展的主要是大型公会，大型公会指拥有大约 1,000 及以上帐户的公会。大型公会规模庞大以及资金充足，它们探索新游戏，并于早期积累游戏资产以及进行相应的投资。他们着眼于3-5年长期的收益，而非短期的每日收益。YGG、Merit Circle、Unix Gaming、Guildfi就是此类公会。

从产业角度来看，链游分游戏开发，游戏融资，游戏宣发，游戏运营这几个环节。而大型公会牢牢地把握了上下游环节并参与其中，在行业里拥有很大的话语权。它既可以作为早期游戏的融资渠道，也可以凭借庞大的用户群体参与到下游宣发以及运营当中。甚至，游戏公会自己可以开发链游，形成整个生态的闭环。本文将着重探讨大型公会的过去、现在以及未来的发展模式。

（本文由Fenbushi Capital原创，有匪撰写。）

公会的发展历程

公会的发展历经了不同阶段，每个阶段也对应着公会的转型：

模式探索时期：以Axie为例，由于购买/借用/培育 Axies 的存在一定的初始成本，游戏公会的业务模式主要是租赁Axie或提供奖学金给到学者，以换取他们在玩游戏时的 SLP 收入分成。在Axie游戏收入丰厚的初期，活跃在东南亚的公会通过这种方式拉新迅速扩张。此时，公会还只是“寻租”的中介机构。

资本助力时期：P2E的模式一经验证，一些大型公会获得了资本的亲睐，比如YGG、Merit Circle、Guildfi等。这些公会在融资的同时，也对未上线的游戏进行投资以及购置资产。同时，大型公会因具有一定社群规模以及影响力，起到了帮助项目方引流的作用。投融的过程中，项目方与公会之间相当于进行了资源置换。此时，拥有一定流量、用户以及资源的大型公会已经完成了转型，主要发展投资业务。例如，截至2021年底，YGG已经宣布了超过21个游戏合作伙伴。

整合调整时期：公会的快速扩张也遇到了不少问题。其一，公会之间竞争剧烈（主要集中在东南亚市场），挖墙脚现象严重。其二，公会与学者之间的关系难以稳定维系，尤其在市场冷淡时期，用户不断流失。公会也重新审视自己的发展方向以及内部管理问题。

未来链游公会的发展模式

如上所述，目前公会的商业模式以“寻租”以及投资模式为主，然而这两种模式也面临不少挑战。关于投资模式，随着链游板块备受关注，公会内外对于热门游戏资产的竞争日益激烈。内部指游戏公会之间的竞争，而外部指的是来自公会外机构以及组织的竞争。比如，最近Delphi Digital（YGG的早期投资机构之一）大量购买了Crypto Unicorn的白名单。

现有的公会解决方案之一是通过SubDAO的方式扩张公会版图以及精细化运营。 SubDAO可以按照公会所投的单一游戏/地域进行创建，SubDAO会对特定游戏资产进行托管（不过钱包以多签的方式由DAO控制），且根据游戏资产的收益进行通证化。YGG就是SubDAO的推动者和践行者。目前，YGG推出了以下SubDAO:

YGGLOK （Leagues of Kingdom）

YGGSPL （Splinterlands）

YGG Pilipinas （YGG菲律宾）

YGG SEA （YGG东南亚）

YGG IndiGG （YGG印度）

除此之外，GGG（Good Guild Games）计划开发仪表盘为学者们提供更多P2E的便捷性。GuildFi则通过学者的游戏足迹予以活跃用户白名单以及NFT馈赠。链游公会们希望通过提升内部治理效率以及调动学者积极性来巩固自己的行业壁垒。

关于寻租模式，公会传统的“寻租”模式可能不适用于未来的游戏形态。一般来说，“寻租”模式只适用于重资产游戏。重资产游戏指的是玩家需要购买贵重的资产才能进入游戏，且需要一定的回本周期才能盈利。对于公会来说，重资产游戏的风险主要在于：部分游戏在上线之前炒作热度，而上线时质量不及预期，游戏资产将快速贬值。公会若是盲目地选择游戏进行“寻租”或者“投资”，可能会陷入亏损的境地。

而“寻租”模式不适用于低门槛游戏。低门槛游戏让更多玩家几乎无成本进入游戏，强调了游戏的趣味性以及竞技性，可能成为未来主流的链游模式。Skyweaver就是这么一款低门槛卡牌游戏，玩家可以在Rank模式进行无限次数的练习，也可以通过Conquest模式进行打金（需要支付1.5U门票）。玩家需要连赢三场才能获得可交易的金卡。这时候，公会需要转变思路，摈弃原有的“寻租”模式，提供精细化的教学和服务来培养学者。

面对不同维度的竞争压力以及未来游戏形态的变数，公会的发展模式需要进行改变。从长线来看，公会专注于以下几点可能更利于自身发展：

“

1. 拓展市场的同时巩固自身壁垒。除了目前活跃的东南亚市场以外，公会可以拓展其他发展中国家（印度、南美以及非洲）的链游市场。创建地域性的SubDAO并且寻找熟悉当地市场的代理商可能是比较理想的方式。其次，公会需要推出更有效的治理框架以及推举值得信任的MOD维护社群，同时持续推出奖学金计划等激励措施留存已有的用户。

2. 投资游戏的基础设施。游戏资产对于生命周期有限的游戏来说，本质是不断贬值的资产。而游戏基础设施的价值会随着行业的发展而增加。当然，这是两种不同的投资思路。

3. 探索更复合更灵活的商业模式。比如，公会可以参与链游的经济模型设计，与项目方（竞技性强的链游）一起举办电竞活动，甚至可以自行开发链游。

链游公会已经成为行业中不可忽视的力量。打江山易守江山难，如何在巩固行业壁垒的同时将链游带去更广阔的领域，这是所有链游公会需要思考的事情。

以太坊的叙事正在悄然发生变化。二层网络正式粉墨登场、大放异彩，越来越多的应用建立在各自生态上；而以太坊一层则退居二线，负责底层的安全工作。享受到以太坊红利的二层网络有着更强的竞争优势，这里的红利包括一层安全性、ETH资产（流动性最好）以及区块链去中心化精神。二层的发展和扩张才刚刚开始。

Arbitrum是起点最高、起步最早、迄今最成熟的二层网络。起点最高指的是Arbitrum近乎100% EVM兼容，使得一层网络上的应用可以无缝迁移到二层上。同时，EVM兼容似乎成为硬性条件，各个公链或者二层都需要EVM兼容（无论是Polkadot、Solana或是ZKsync以及StarNet）。起步最早指的是Arbitrum是二层中主网上线最早的，占据一定的先发优势。主网上线时，就有以Uniswap V3为首的74个项目部署在上面。最成熟指的是，基于前两点Arbitrum生态是最具规模性的，迄今为止就Defi锁仓量能达到二层总量的77%左右。

Arbitrum的几个里程碑事件：

2021 年 5 月 28 日，Arbitrum 将向开发者开放 Arbitrum One 的主网 beta 版。

2021年8月末，Arbitrum开发商Offchain Labs宣布完成1.2亿美元B轮融资，估值12亿美元。

2021 年 9 月 1 日，Offchain Labs 宣布正式启动 Arbitrum 主网。

2021 年 10 月，Arbitrum 的无需许可的代币桥接功能将对所有项目开放。

2021 年 10 月，Arbitrum 宣布将推出 Arbitrum One 的下一个版本，Arbitrum Nitro。它与 EVM 的兼容性更高，速度比当前技术快一个数量级。团队预计，Arbitrum Nitro 运行后，第二层执行速度将提升 20 到 50 倍，从而成本也会降低。

在发展过程中，Arbitrum一直在夯实基础，为生态发展铺平道路：

1. Arbitrum和八大交易所以及一些支付渠道合作，使用户可以直接在二层上出入金。

2. Arbitrum大力发展基础设施，从开发者工具到链上数据平台，一应俱全。

3. Arbitrum不断培养社区并形成自下而上的治理体系，有助于日后内部孵化出好的项目。

时移事易，Arbitrum的战略也在发生变化，官方从刚开始迁移Layer 1项目到目前重点扶持新项目。Arbitrum主网上线时，迁移了诸如Aave, Curve, Uniswap V3, WePiggy, Sushiswap和SynFutures这些Defi 1.0项目。尽管Sushiswap、Curve仍是TVL最靠前的应用，但是基于二层的原生也有良好的发展势头。GMX、Dopex等新兴Defi项目在Arbitrum上找到了生存发展的土壤。其中，去中心化永续合约/现货交易所GMX在交易价差方面进行了优化，同时交易手续费更为低廉。GMX作为社区发起的项目受到了以太坊用户的喜爱。

Treasure DAO上线为Arbitrum的发展提供了新思路——即Arbiturm应当拥有自己的NFT生态。自主网上线以来，Arbitrum的定位局限在了Defi Hub上，接入了大量多链部署的Defi项目。目前，生态上Defi项目已经达到了饱和的状态。而拥有着像素风格、“Free Mint”文化以及独特世界观的Treasure DAO为生态带去创新，NFT相关领域或许是官方未来着重探索的方向。

Arbitrum在性能方面并不是二层网络中的最优解。首先是交易手续费方面（这里包括转账以及交互的费用），Arbitrum的总体排名是靠后的。其次，官方跨链桥在转账方面需要七天挑战期，对此Arbitrum已经引入去中心化跨链桥以及交易所来解决这个问题。Arbitrum性能将决定整个生态的上限，比如它是否适用于操作次数频繁的游戏，能否成为以太坊版的“任天堂”？这个问题有待版本更迭后对性能进行提升再看。

尽管我们无法判定未来二层网络的竞争格局是什么样的，但肯定的是未来拥有竞争力的二层网络需要做到：

1. 基础建设完善，满足EVM兼容，最好沿用Solidity语言

2. 项目方效率高、资源足，能够脚踏实地地实现路线图

同时，项目方在挑选二层网络时还会考虑这两点：

1. 生态繁荣度。Defi乐高追求可组合性，而NFT乐高则追求集群发展。生态良好的二层能够为这些项目方带去诸多资源。参考Treasure Dao上的NFT生态。

2. 当前性能。衍生品交易所、游戏等项目会选择手续费极低、操作流畅的二层网络来上线他们的产品。参考StarEx（Starkware推出的初级版本）上的DYDX，Deversifi以及Immutable X。

综上所述，二层网络的发展才刚刚开始。Arbitrum无疑是具有先发优势的，也是目前生态最繁荣的。但Arbitrum的上限仍不得而知，能否兼容对于手续费要求极高的游戏，还要看后续的版本迭代。目前，ZKsync 2.0测试网上线，Loot realm及生态项目也将上线StarNet。随着越来越多玩家进场，二层网络的发展和竞争也将进入白热化阶段。

交易市场作为NFT生态的关键一环是兵家必争之地。Opensea作为全球最大的NFT交易市场一直保持着垄断地位，那么未来会诞生“opensea杀手”吗？在讨论这个问题之前，我们需要对NFT交易市场进行分类。分类的维度有以下：按公链分，每条公链上都有对应的NFT交易平台：Solana生态上的Solanart、AXAX上的Kalao、Stacks上的STXNFT等。按照NFT类型分，PFP类NFT主要集中在Opeasea，游戏道具类NFT市场则有Treasure DAO、ImutableX、Gala等，艺术品NFT平台有SuperRare、Rarible等，虚拟地块交易平台有Sandbox、Decentraland。

（本文由分布式资本原创，有匪撰写。）

现阶段的竞争局面

Opensea毋庸置疑已经成为现阶段NFT领域的“淘宝”，涵盖了包括PFP、游戏道具、艺术品、虚拟地块以及其他所有的NFT品类。由于较早的入场时间以及行业内长期耕耘，Opensea几乎垄断了所有供应商资源，因而囊括所有NFT品类。成立于2018年2月份的Opensea，早期还需要一一游说项目方入驻平台，而现在项目方们主动上架Opensea似乎已经成为了共识。Opensea在TO B用户的累积上已经从量变到质变。尽管在税费以及Gas费并不划算，由于Opensea长期把持着供应端，用户只能在大而全的市场上选购商品。尽管Looks Rare、X2Y2企图通过通证机制进行热启动，若无法短期吸引大批B端用户入驻，则无法进行弯道超车。至于未来此类项目能否与Opensea抗衡还需要看后续的发展。

另一方面，以太坊上NFT交易的火热导致了Sol、Avax、BSC等公链NFT生态的发展。每个公链上也有各自的交易市场，形成了类似割据的生态。目前，Opensea已经接入了以太坊以及Polygon，未来可能接入Solana，这对于现有公链上的NFT市场会产生较大的竞争压力。

未来可能出现的业态

那么是否能绕过Opensea而进行差异化竞争呢？这里有几种新颖的思路可供参考。**第一种思路是细分NFT交易市场。**如果把Opensea比作是“淘宝”，那么类似于“唯品会”或者“得物”这样的市场会出现吗？其实，现阶段已经有类似的产品或者雏形出现了。

针对于游戏道具NFT，目前大型链游基本上配备有自己的交易市场，而小型链游则聚集在不同游戏生态上，比如Gala、Treasure DAO、IMX生态。以Treasure DAO为例，Treasure DAO 是一个去中心化 NFT 生态系统，建立在以太的二层链 Arbitrium 上，目标是将 NFT、Defi、Gamefi 三者融合起来，为众多封闭的 NFT 提供桥梁，连接到游戏和元宇宙。Treasure DAO的NFT市场从上架自家Bridge World游戏道具以外，逐渐集成了Smol brains、Body、Sees of Life等外部Defi类的小游戏。$MAGIC 作为生态系统的通证将贯穿在 Treasure 市场上的每个项目中。值得注意的是，Treasure DAO上的游戏道具都保持一致的像素风画风，未来统一画风的游戏生态将成为趋势。

针对于PFP类NFT，情况则不太一样。PFP类NFT分不同的梯队：

第一梯队是BAYC、Cool Cats、Doodles等早期顶级NFT项目；

第二梯队是自带IP以及KOL流量的NFT，比如说杰伦熊、The Heart Project；第三梯队是草根类型NFT，这类NFT或许拥有精美的画风以及创新的用例，但是可能因为缺乏流量而无人问津。

目前众多项目方（尤其是第三梯队）都在寻求一种画风一致、集中曝光的平台，这个平台可以理解为元宇宙。Worldwide Webb为此类NFT提供了展示平台。Webb所集成的NFT画风均为像素风，穿戴PFP的玩家也能聚众进行元宇宙挖矿、蹦迪、寻宝、炸街等活动。未来期待Worldwide Webb能开发出游戏内交易市场，使玩家们在游戏过程也能拥有沉浸式的购物体验。

第二种思路是自孵化模式，即交易平台孵化扶植项目方，形式包括不限于提供合约部署、宣传推广、资源拓展、安全防控等服务。作为条件，项目方只能在该交易平台上启动或者销售。在web2.0时代，这种模式被称为京东自营或者天猫自营。这种自孵化模式或许能解决不少NFT行业内的乱象以及痛点。比如，项目方无法正确部署NFT铸造的合约，导致铸造时间无限延迟。又比如，项目方在安全把控上有所疏漏，导致Discord被黑，用户平白蒙受损失。这时候交易平台或许能够为项目方提供一站式的解决方案，以更加快速、高效以及安全地推动进展。其次，实力雄厚的NFT交易平台可以更好地为项目方引流和赋能。当项目方拥有一定的影响力时，交易平台也能收到正反馈，共同进步共同繁荣。

综上所述，目前直面Opensea竞争的交易市场仍面临很大考验，需要积攒实力、厚积薄发。通证机制可能在短时期能提高用户/供应商的使用率，然而长此以往却无法进行用户留存，从而建立强大的壁垒。而创新型项目则可以往细分NFT交易市场以及自孵化模式去考虑，绕开opensea从而创造出新的业态。

1. Could you briefly introduce crypto market in Africa? How about people’s adoption of cryptocurrency and relevant applications? Are crypto-related policies and regulations are strict in Africa?

The crypto market in Africa is very vibrant. It is experiencing exponential growth due to both investment and utility use cases. In October of last year, Chananalysis stated that Africa's cryptocurrency market expanded by over 1200 percent in terms of value received in 2020, and Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Tanzania are among the countries with the highest grassroots adoption rates in the world. From an investment standpoint, more adults are gaining trust around crypto-assets; this trust emerged from the overall global adoption of cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin, in the last four years. With the average African adult still lacking access to investment services and mainly limited to the savings model, cryptocurrency investments are breaking new grounds for millions of adults across the region as the entry barrier to the crypto world keeps getting simplified by innovators both in and out of the continent. From a utility standpoint, cryptocurrency represents an alternative to hedging against currency devaluation and securely sending transactions faster without any limits. As a result, cryptocurrencies are making their first appearance in the FX, Remittance, settlement, and payment space even without fully-fledged products facilitating the transaction. 

The early phase of mass cryptocurrency adoption in Africa came about during the 2017 bull run of the crypto market; at the time, major centralized exchanges platforms had the upper hand in customer acquisition and volume. Since then, regulations around cryptocurrencies have gotten a lot stricter in the regions in response to the risk associated with money laundering and the facilitation of illegal transactions via crypto. As a result, around 2019 through 2021, restrictions were placed on bank accounts and centralized exchanges that were suspected of enabling bad actors. This gave rise to decentralized exchanges where today, millions of people buy and sell cryptocurrencies across the region.

Regulators across the region are focusing on the common interest of their respective citizens. However, with about a third of the adult population still unbanked, local fiat still plays a significant role in economic activities. Additionally, the devaluation of local fiat currencies across the region has increased pressure on individuals and businesses by promoting high-cost and limited supply for foreign money used for imports. To make matters worst, Africa currently has the fastest-growing population of youths after India. It is challenging for regulators to have a liberal stand on cryptocurrencies in such a climate, especially if mass adoption will only result in accelerated currency devaluation. Also, there is minimal infrastructure and expertise to ensure KYC, AML, and CFT on the crypto transaction in the region, which poses a barrier for regulators, thereby incorporating a more defensive approach to crypto. However, there is interest in only four African nations that have banned cryptocurrencies Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia; these are all Northern African nations across Sub-Saharan Africa. Regulators are receptive to cryptocurrencies and understand the advantages of crypto over fiat assets. Moreover, four central bank digital currencies are being developed: the Enaira in Nigeria, Project Khokha 2 in South Africa, Mauritius CBDC, and Ghana CBDC. 

2. Also Could you introduce some mature crypto applications in Africa? What’s businesses of these companies in Africa? Do you know the reason why they have grown mature?

Luno, Payplux, BitPesa、Yellow Card, and Binance NG are mature crypto companies in Africa. These platforms are mostly either centralized, decentralized, or hybrid crypto exchanges. Luno is a nine-year-old centralized crypto exchange operating across Africa. They facilitate buying and selling crypto utilizing banking transfers for about 5 million customers. Their success is mainly attributed to their target demographics of banked adults in the region looking for investment opportunities. Payplux is a 12-year-old Ghanaian-based centralized exchange. It is the oldest crypto exchange in Ghana, serves 85,000 customers, and has processed over 1.2 million transactions summing up to $8.5M. Payplux enables the business of crypto with mobile money. Mobile money is still a significant reality across Africa as its usage grew by 12% to $562B in 2020 alone. Like luno, BitPesa is a 9-year-old crypto platform enabling crypto-based payments and crypto exchange utilizing bank transfers or mobile money wallets with over 30 million customers across Kenya, Tanzania, and eight other countries in Africa, South Asia, and Eastern Europe. BitPesa's success comes from implementing bank transfer and mobile money as a medium of exchange for cryptocurrency in-app. Yellow Card is another African-based mature crypto platform. Yellowcard is a 5-year-old crypto exchange enabling fast access to cryptocurrency powered by multiple supported forms of payments, including bank transfer, mobile money, or cash deposit. Its diversity in payments options has attracted millions of users and procced hundreds of million worth of transactions yearly. Finally, Binance NG is the most successful platform in the region. Binance NG is essentially a Nigerian version of the Binance Platform with specific services for the Nigerian target market, such as agent-based onramps/offramps and DEX trading. Binance NG is the largest crypto exchange in Nigeria, and its success comes from equally implementing multiple payment forms for buying and selling cryptocurrencies. Binance NG's success comes from effective marketing, inclusivity, and capacity across its centralized and decentralized exchange.

3. Can you briefingly introduce Canza Finance?

Across Africa, millions of individuals and businesses face challenges scaling their finances in an environment where minimal access to essential financial services such as savings, FX exchange, settlements, and investments remain a norm. Additionally, trade conditions are at the mercy of devaluating local fiat currencies with limited utility beyond their respective national boundaries. It is known that Africa is at the forefront of emerging markets globally; however, transitioning to an economic boom requires massive efforts in restructuring its financial landscape at the micro and macro level. Can Finance is a technology firm aiming to play a significant role in bringing fort innovation in the financial services space across Africa, leveraging Web 3.0. Our solutions are in three interconnected structures. Firstly, Canza DApps; provide access to cryptocurrencies for individuals and businesses utilizing a robust network of local FX agents and multiple DApp interfaces, including USSD, mobile, web, and crypto ATMs. Secondly, Jara Networks; enables enterprises' financial services through facilitating settlements using stable-crypto, FX, treasuring, and custody. Lastly, JollofSwaps; connecting individuals and enterprises across Africa with a Defi ecosystem keenly built for their prosperity.

4. You can also introduce team members of Canza? Why you guys gather together to fulfill the ambition?

The co-founders of Canza Finance consist of Pascal Ntsama acting as CEO, our Lead Engineer Emanuel Joda, and myself acting as CTO. We are all of African descent but grew up in the United States and Australia, respectively. We completed our education at Alabama A&M University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. We are experts in telecommunication, software engineering, and cloud computing. Our careers each spans over ten years of experience working for conglomerates such as AT&T, T-Mobile, IBM, and Paypal at a global scale. In the crypto space, we have interfaced with several projects with specific contributor roles at the Zcash Foundation, Althea, and Lamden.

Our Team has recently expanded from 3 in 2020 individuals to 20 members. Our remaining team members are experts with several years of industry know-how from multiple disciplines, mainly software engineers, investment banking, financial engineering, business intelligence, law, and global scale marketing. We are a fully remote organization with team members spread across the United States, Nigeria, London, Kenya, Cameroon, and Ivory Coast. What brings us together is our will to empower millions across the African continent without changing natural behaviors.

5. Which services do you provide and what is your major and secondary target consumer?

We provide three related services across three separate ecosystems for our userbase. We enable a seamless pipeline for crypto onramps and offramps by working with local FX agents who are experts in currency conversions. This section of our service offerings consists of Canza DApps built on USSD messages, mobile, and web interface where users can buy crypto from or sell crypto to our local FX agents, send, receive, swap, and stake their cryptocurrency. Each interface is essential toward targeting different demographics of users and promoting inclusivity. Here, our users can leverage the natural behavior toward accessing foreign currencies from local FX agents for peer-to-peer OTC trades. Each agent processes millions of dollars worth of foreign exchange yearly with large local currency reserves. Secondly, we offer a catalog of crypto-based financial services for enterprises, including crypto custody, treasuring, payments, lending, and borrowing as part of Jara Network. Lastly, we are building JollofSwaps, an African-focused DeFi portal that will serve as the underlining architecture for enabling all Canza Finance DeFi infrastructure and fostering liquidity of the Canza Token ($CNZA).

6. What’s business you have done in 2021. What’s your roadmap in 2022?

2021 was a very exciting year for us. We attain 7,000 accounts created via Canza USSD Dapp, which allow offline transactions to send, receive, swap, buy and sell crypto from smartphones or basic dump cell phones. Also, we grow our Local FX agents network to 250. In addition, we processed over $200,000.00 in cross-border settlements pilots.

We aim to maintain this growth pattern throughout 2022 as we focus on product releases, expanding our agent network, and our customer base across the region. In the first half of 2022, we aim to scale our agent network to support millions of customers via the Canza USSD Dapp beyond Nigeria. In addition, we are equally targeting the release of the Canza Tokens along with preliminary versions of Jara Network and JollofSwaps. In the second half of 2022, we will focus on exponential traction with aggressive marketing tactics and continuous improvement of products and services.

7. At the end, can you share your view about crypto development in Africa in the future?

We've seen Africa has received so much money from venture capitals surpassing all its previous years. I think we're just doing the right thing at the right time at the right place. In general, all elements in the continent are ready in terms of demographic structure, adoptions of cell phones, and consumer mindset. East Africa (Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda) has a vibrant ecosystem already, and West Africa (Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Ghana) are blockchain-friendly nations, so there are so many investment opportunities here.

If you want to build a mindset anywhere in any other part of the world, I think Africa is a perfect place to come. I've met so many people from different countries, Australians, Indians, Chinese, etc. I've seen so many different flavors trying to build around this continent and tackle many existing problems. So I think there will be something organically happening here.

Moonbeam is a EVM compatible smart contract platform on polkadot ecosystem. By the nature of XCM tech, polkadot is not directly competing with other layer 1 alternative, thus the EVM compatible project-Moonbeam is more like infrastructure for different projects, as moonbeam is the most active parachain on polkadot that will serve as a onramp for developers and end users to the polkadot and has massive potential.

From Moonbase testnet to Moonriver (Kusama) and now finally the polkadot main net, Moonbeam has a very smooth adoption curve, enabling different existing projects to test out and make adjustment for main net deployment; on the other hand, moonbeam also held hackathon to attract new native projects to develop on moonbeam, thus we could expect a rich and diverse ecosystem on Moonbeam in the near future.

As of today, Ethereum remains to be the public chain that holds highest transaction volume, tvl as well as the biggest group of developer. Though Wasm and rust is increasingly gaining attention, it’s still undeniable that the biggest innovation of application still happens on Ethereum with its most mature ecosystem and bottom up feature.

Moonbeam enable existing projects as well as new projects to embrace the existing mature Ethereum ecosystem. With meter passport bridge, synapse, connext, multichain(previously any swap) as well as many other bridge support in the future, moonbeam can help polkadot becoming a hub for cross chain routing as well as cross chain deployment with intergraded liquidity. As the polkadot realize its vision step by step, more and more eth native dapp could be using moonbeam to achieve cross chain deployment.

Past 4 month’s testrun on Kusama has already proved the success and the value of moonbeam. Up till the end of last year, Moonriver was the most active parachain on Kusama, with over 75 live integrations, 14.5M+ network transactions, 380k+ wallets, 1M+ MOVR locked in collator staking and 3k+ ERC-20 tokens created, not to mention big cex like binance had listed MOVR token. It is expected that the consensus will pass on to the moonbeam network and continue this huge success.

Personally, we like purestake team a lot. Derek definitely among one of the top tier CEO, and the whole team has strong execution power. With past entrepreneurial experience in the web 2.0 world, Purestake is composed of a team who has combined efficient entrepreneur management and web 3.0 vision . We expect to grow and innovate together with the team and participate in the future success of moonbeam network