After "graduating" from Ant, they flock to Web3

! [After "graduating" from ants, they flocked to Web3] (https://cdn-img.panewslab.com//panews/2022/11/21/images/6fec8d512506835bb8e4621900afdb9a.jpeg)

! [After "graduating" from ants, they flocked to Web3] (https://cdn-img.panewslab.com//panews/2022/11/21/images/389ce385217f784b026bd140555a6fb4.jpeg)

Two technological revolutions in the tech world are AI and Web3. **AI is expected to reshape productivity, and Web3 is expected to reshape production relationships. **

The tech world in 2023, with blockbuster news almost every day, is the first year of generative AI and the year of Web3 bears.

Web3 raised a total of just $3.6 billion in 2023, down 78% from nearly $16 billion in 2022. In the first half of the year, the AI track raised $25 billion. **Paradigm, one of the largest crypto ventures, has ushered in a paradigm shift, saying that it will no longer focus only on cryptocurrencies and Web3, and has begun to expand its focus to AI. **

People who once thought "Web3 is the new sexy" felt that "Web3 is no longer sexy" and turned to AI.

! [After "graduating" from ants, they flocked to Web3] (https://cdn-img.panewslab.com//panews/2022/11/21/images/4cd57f7335085f7e1a7ec938cf6b51ab.png)

But I also have to admit that the deep bear of Web3 this time seems to be more lively than before. In the bear market, there is still talk about compliance, ZKP (zero-knowledge proof), Bitcoin ETFs. There are also people who choose to enter at this moment.

"When I was at Ant, I used to talk to my colleagues, and I often used the analogy between AI and Web3, and their trajectories were very similar. Jerry Li analogizes that there have been three waves of artificial intelligence in the past 60 years, almost each time with billions to tens of billions of dollars invested, and the highs and lows have alternated until OpenAI was born. "This new large-scale technological revolution needs to go through round after round of cycles before it can really bring about leapfrog development. ”**

Jerry Li used to have several conspicuous labels: former chief architect of AntChain, former R&D director of Apple China, champion of the college entrance examination in Shanxi Province, and now there is one more - Web3 newcomer.

Of course, strictly speaking, Jerry is not a Web3 newcomer. After graduating from Tsinghua University, Jerry worked in Silicon Valley for more than 10 years before returning to Shanghai in 2015 to set up Apple's Asia-Pacific R&D center. In 2017, Jerry joined Ant Blockchain, which had not yet been upgraded to AntChain, with the rank of P10.

! [After "graduating" from ants, they flocked to Web3] (https://cdn-img.panewslab.com//panews/2022/11/21/images/cf7cc76d4373531fbf084b20672e06aa.jpeg)

! [After "graduating" from ants, they flocked to Web3] (https://cdn-img.panewslab.com//panews/2022/11/21/images/23921130ad23d799604cc216a4073af6.jpeg)

"It's still too early for the industry, and it's not even the last round of development compared to AI. Today, the market capitalization of the entire cryptocurrency market is less than half of the market capitalization of Apple alone. "Jerry's Web3 pie seems too small compared to his former employer.

Of course, compared to AI, which is over half a hundred years old, Web3 seems to be still in its adolescence.

The concept of Web3 was first proposed in 2014, and its predecessors, the concepts of "cryptocurrency" and "blockchain", were first released in 2008 through Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin White Paper, just 15 years ago.

Rebellious, unstable, Web3 is going through a painful period, which makes "parents" shake their heads. After the collapse of FTX, which had a market value of $32 billion in November last year, local regulators began to put a tight spell on this "skin child".

At such a juncture, at the end of 2022, Jerry left AntChain and officially went All in Web3 to start the public chain project Artela. He said he wouldn't consider doing anything else anytime soon. Talking about why, Jerry used the famous saying of ants: "Because you believe, you see." ”

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The Artela team chose the public chain track, which belongs to the infrastructure of Web3, also known as the "highway" of Web3, where there is a road to transport everything.

In the public chain track, there are long-established Web3 genesis projects, such as Ethereum, which have already built their own moats with the "network effect" of the ecosystem, and there are also a number of all-star projects with golden keys.

Now opting for a more crowded track, WSJ. chatted with Jerry about his thoughts on the "first-mover advantage."

**"Although there is a lot of competition in the public chain market, it is still very imperfect, and it is still a lot worse. Recently, Jerry has been running around the world, which is his first step in adjusting to his new identity. I ran a lap and it was very rewarding. "After communicating with many projects, our confidence has actually increased. ”

The biggest difference between Artela and other chains is not the scalability of some of the current "involutions" (scalability in performance), but in the extensibility (scalability of functions), and it is compatible with EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine), developers can transfer applications with one click.

This is in preparation for future Mass Adoption.

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Mass Adoption, is a word on the lips of Web3 people. In other contexts, it can also be described as the "iPhone moment of the industry" and the "last mile", but in fact, the core of the problem is clear, how to make Web3 accessible to ordinary people?**

Ant "gangsters" are the shaper of Mass Adoption in the age of the Internet. In their context, Mass Adoption is closer, and in Web3, build another "Alipay".

It's a lot of experience, of course. Artela's CTO Qiu Honglin (nickname: CP), who has supported the underlying architecture of Whale Scout, Ant's digital collection platform, said that Whale Scout has already achieved the achievement of hundreds of millions of daily lives with the activity of collecting five blessings during the New Year. At that time, it had already achieved stable transactions on the chain at the level of 100 million, and Ethereum was only a million**, to some extent, AntChain had truly reached Mass Adoption. ”

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! [After "graduating" from ants, they flocked to Web3] (https://cdn-img.panewslab.com//panews/2022/11/21/images/155115eb249f20d04e89606299e143fd.jpeg)

CP used to be the OG of AntChain's team, and he joined AntChain in its original form in 2015 as an interest incubation group.

"They said that if someone in the ant wants to talk about blockchain, they usually ask the second person, and there must be my name. "CP's hair is slightly curly, and he speaks with a slight Cantonese accent, which always makes people feel like he is doing something homely, but if you listen carefully, the content of the expression is very professional and detailed. AntChain has the largest number of patents in the world, and CP alone holds hundreds of blockchain patents. **

For Extensibility, CP for example: "In addition to the input of the front-end player in the game, there is also a backstage, such as map refresh, time and weather, or the big boss dies, and the little monster next door will also be eliminated together, etc., the blockchain has no background tasks, because all the execution of the blockchain has to be interacted with by the user." ”

In the future, running Fully On-Chain Games on Artela may become "the earth still turns without you", that is, players design the rules and the system runs automatically. **

For blockchains, which are now a bit difficult to play board games, there are higher requirements for the computing layer to achieve interaction without lag. "We wanted to do a hundred times the EVM. Thanks to the experience accumulated in AntChain, CP added, "In fact, the current test data shows that we can already approach two orders of magnitude at the computational level. ”

But they don't want to replace Ethereum, a project on the Ethereum chain that can be transferred to Artela with one click. CP "abstraction" sums up Artela's features: "To put it simply, if we compare the EVM to the CPU of a blockchain, we add a GPU to the blockchain. "To put it more simply, you can play big games on the blockchain in the future.

"**Borrowing and Huabei in the era of Internet finance are all innovations from 0 to 1, and our group of people have experienced the process of turning from a vague concept to a specific commercial product, and we know the complexity behind it. **CP feels that the same road, going through the same road again in the era of public chain, has many challenges, but fortunately, there is experience for reference.

Most of Artela's team members are from ants. "A team of more than a dozen people has a very tacit understanding and the work progress of more than 20 people is about the same. Within a few months of its founding, Artela raised $6 million in seed funding led by Shima Capital, with participation from A&T Capital, Big Brain Holdings, SevenX Ventures, Dispersion Capital, Amino Capital, and others.

Artela's testnet went live in September, with a targeted invitation system for current ecosystem partners. Both Defi and Fully On-chain Games may constitute the future powerhouse. CP said that Artela does not plan to engage in the combination of airdrops and conventional punches of the public chain, but wants to explore innovation with ecological applications. They worked it over the next few months, and it was officially open beta around December.

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can stably run hundreds of millions of daily active users, there is no doubt that AntChain has already reached the ceiling in some areas of Web3. But their activity is vaguely isolated from Web3.

**Just as Web3 decentralization should bring "open source", not "patent". Compared with the public chain in the mainstream direction of foreign technology, it is also a bit "incompatible" with the coinless blockchain, also known as the alliance chain, which is more suitable for the domestic context. **AntChain, on the other hand, wants to go through a different Web3 in China, open the alliance chain, and industrial Web3.

As early as 2017, Ant already believed in the future of blockchain. At that time, although the industry was not yet formed, Ant had already regarded blockchain as a core strategic strategy. "At that time, Ant said that we should focus on investment, but in fact, no one understands it, we are a small team. After reading a lot of foreign literature and reports, I feel that this thing still has great potential, especially in the context of globalization, and I think it is particularly valuable to have financial applications. ”

Jerry, the chief architect, studied the white papers of Bitcoin and Ethereum, and as he studied it, he became more and more convinced that blockchain is the next stage of "using technology to serve finance". **

In the same year, Jiang Guofei, the "first brother" of Ant Chain, joined Ant Financial as vice president and president of the fintech business line, in charge of Ant Blockchain. AntChain is constantly moving up the strategic level within the group. AntChain is in the limelight, cross-border remittance, supply chain finance, electronic bills, judicial evidence preservation... All of a sudden, industry-based applications have blossomed in an all-round way.

In 2018, Alipay Hong Kong launched a blockchain-based cross-border remittance function, which allows more than 180,000 Filipino maids to pay their salaries home, no longer have to wait for days and pay relatively high cross-border fees. Inclusive finance, Ant has reached a successful solution very early.

CP also became the company's Internet celebrity engineer for a while. Jack Ma mentioned CP when he participated in the second World Intelligence Congress, and his widely circulated blind date anecdotes.

"We have an engineer in Ant Financial, he wrote on his blind date resume that he is an 'engineer', a coder who writes code, but no one clicked on his resume, and the girl was not interested in him, and later he changed his resume to I am a 'blockchain engineer', and received more than 200 courtship letters. ”

**In 2020, Ant Blockchain announced a brand upgrade to AntChain, and the company's executives said that the decision was "no less than the decision to establish Alipay". **

However, 3 years have passed, and AntChain, which is deeply involved in the industry Web3, has not ushered in a real "Alipay" level application.

Taking cross-border remittance as an example, the relevant person in charge of Ant told WSJ. that there are no technical barriers to cross-border remittance, but the degree of support for this technology is different in each country's policies and regulations, so such projects are closer to customization. "We were working with Standard Chartered at the time, and they were already our long-term partners. ”

Even whale scouts, who live hundreds of millions of dollars a day during the Spring Festival, are also facing the problem of unsalable collections and difficult to break the circle. Previously, most of the digital collections launched by Whale Scout were humanistic artworks, which made it difficult for young people to feel trendy. **"But my dad loves it, it's the only product he's ever made, he's always using it." "The work content of CP is very popular with the family, and Whale Scout is probably the best product to understand. **

! [After "graduating" from ants, they flocked to Web3] (https://cdn-img.panewslab.com//panews/2022/11/21/images/f6ca5c3b826317260f30fb987b5922cf.png)

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"Although Ant is already very leading in fintech, the domestic regulatory framework is mainly alliance chains. This actually takes away the essence of the blockchain, that is, digital assets as its value representative. I think we still have to take the road of public chain in the future, but there is no soil for public chain in China at present. Jerry is more optimistic about the future of public chains.

The alliance chain that has stripped away the concept of digital assets makes it impossible to talk about the right confirmation incentive. "The consortium chain only undertakes the data level, and I think it is far from that stage to really reconstruct the production relationship. ”

**"To really run through a commercial scenario, it is not enough to have a chain, and now there are still many links whose technical support is not in place, and it is still difficult to run through end-to-end. **The current application scenario, in fact, only needs to use a database plus permission settings, if you insist on a blockchain system, it seems to be a bit of a snake to add. ”

CP has experience in building multiple consortium blockchain application scenarios. For example, he said that the use of blockchain technology for food traceability is expected to eradicate food violations such as "poisoned milk powder".

But the reality is that no one is paying for a better system. "Food traceability, food production, overseas transportation, customs entry to the platform for sale, is a matter of the industrial chain. Everyone needs to access the blockchain to work, but when it finally reaches the consumer, not a penny rises. ”

**"Many companies in the industrial chain are passively pulled in, and there is no consensus. "Consensus is the core enabler of Web3 and the secret to doing more with less, but the market is nowhere near that right now.

Until the "consensus" is obtained, it seems that the consortium chain will be in an awkward position for a long time. Outsiders don't know it, and insiders don't like it.

While at Ant, Jerry joined an interest group related to public chains, and CP was among them. Today, the interest group has once again become the initial incubator for the project.

CP left his job in March of this year to join Artela, his first venture. "Actually, every year a Web3 project comes to me, and I think about it seriously for a long time, because I haven't started a business before. But I didn't think long about Artela's opportunity this time. CP is based on his belief that the team is more important than anything else in entrepreneurship. "Especially in Web3. In the circle, he has heard a lot of negative teaching materials. **

When meeting with "WSJ" this time, when he mentioned his identity as an "Internet celebrity engineer", CP laughed and said: "It's already outdated." CP has a Möbius ring on his ring finger, saying goodbye to the blind date story, and his career and life have moved to the next stage.

Dr. Chen Jidong (nickname: Pi Dong), a member of the Standing Committee of the Big Data Expert Committee of the China Computer Federation and has been deeply involved in AI for nearly 20 years, has also become a "Web3 newcomer". Pi Dong also has a more well-known resume - the founder of Alipay Face Payment and Ant Shield Anti-Fraud, with the rank of P10.

He is more bullish on the combination of Web3 and AI. In October last year, he founded Trusta Labs, a Web3 security project that benchmarks Alipay's "Sesame Credit." **

Pidon was introduced to blockchain in 2017 when he moved to Ant's blockchain team, where he was responsible for the commercialization of security technology in terms of security. Before coming to Web3, their team had been operating independently of Ant, and the team was closer to the entrepreneurial form, so Pi Dong had rich experience in technology, business, and going overseas.

But now, when the wind blows towards AI, Pidon chooses to be a retrograde.

Full of anticipation, Pidon went to CP to "study" Web3. After another half a year of research, Pidon decided to bring his accumulation of AI to Web3. In less than a month after its founding, Trusta Labs was crowned the winner of the Gitcoin Open Data Hackathon Championship.

Compliance is on the rise, and this time, AntChain's architecture has also expanded compliance Web3 on the basis of industrial Web3, and replaced it with two legs walking together.

A person close to Ant Group told WSJ. that Ant Group has hired people to do a series of Web3 talks internally, "and they don't want to miss this opportunity." ”

In April, AntChain open-sourced the cross-chain protocol, announced that it was compatible with ecological protocols such as Ethereum, and reached a cooperation with Conflux, the only compliant public chain in China, which means that AntChain's open alliance chain will further support the Web3 ecosystem.

Industrial Web3 is still doing and will not stop. If helping enterprises make apps is compared to "building a building", after building a building, the next step is to "build a road", that is, to realize data flow and realize incentives in a non-token way.

"We don't think Web3 is about issuing coins and then exploring business models. The relevant person in charge of ants explained.

"Multi-party incentives are the spirit of Web3 in the industry, but they don't necessarily have to be done in the form of tokens. Why do we have to use tokens to motivate? It's because there is a group of strangers in foreign circles. But when we do industrial business in China, we can't not know each other. TO B is an acquaintance in the industry, so it is not necessarily necessary to use the form of tokens, but it can still complete the rapid flow of assets in the entire industrial chain and gain the trust of all parties. ”

**For the development of compliant Web3 in Hong Kong and overseas markets, AntChain has also made new moves. **At the Bund conference on September 8 this year, Ant released its new Web3 product, ZAN. ZAN provides technology solutions for Web3, especially security compliance technology products. Zhang Hui, the former CTO of AntChain, serves as the CEO of ZAN, and Zhang Hui is currently based overseas.

ZAN is a team of dozens of people, with technical support from AntChain, and at the same time, recruiting new recruits on a small scale. The difference is that ZAN does not mention the number of patents or industrial blockchain, but talks about open source and RWA (Compliant Asset Distribution).

"We've been paying attention to it all the time, just looking for the right moment. The person in charge of Ant said that ZAN is not a "pat on the head" decision.

In fact, it's not just ants. Huawei, Tencent and other major manufacturers have chosen to "advance bravely" this year. **

HUAWEI CLOUD has made frequent appearances at various summits in Singapore and Hong Kong, held the TechWave Web3.0 Special Day at Hong Kong Cyberport, and released a series of blockchain services such as Web3.0 node engine service NES and QingTian Enclave confidential computing.

The "Goose Factory Gangster" is more well-known, and Cai Yige, the former head of Tencent Blockchain, left his job at the beginning of this year to found the Web3 wallet Punk Code. In addition, many employees of business lines that have more contact with blockchain and the metaverse, such as Protophantom Core and Zhixin Chain, have turned to Web3 to start businesses.

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"In 2021, there was a lot of money, but the project was also chaotic, and many well-known people in the industry ended up ruined. Jerry started talking to investors in October last year, before the funding window closed.

"If we do it this year, it may be difficult to start the project. WSJ. understands that another major Web3-based project ran into a big dilemma when it sought funding this year.

"Too early or too late won't work. "Deep bear bottoming out may be a good time for long-term investors who have raised capital. **

"In the previous cycle, blockchain was not an industry. Kevin, another co-founder of Artela, studied psychology at Fudan and worked at Ant for more than a year before joining Alibaba's high-level family office to manage investments. Out of personal interest, he has been involved in the Bitcoin and Ethereum community since 2016.

Kevin feels closer to what the industry's original crypto geeks looked like. He doesn't like to show up, but he always has deep links to the industry. In the vernacular of Web3, Kevin is "Crypto Native".

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"There was no concept of a bear market, a bull market, and the community atmosphere was really different from what it is now, and everyone got together to discuss economics and the denationalization of money. ”

Kevin later became completely disillusioned with the industry due to the ICO boom of 2017 and 2018, which he described as an "idealistic dislocation". He sold the vast majority of coins, turned to the field of AI education to start a business, and also obtained financing. But then the education industry was also hit, and Kevin went to Columbia University for a master's degree.

Now, he's back in Web3. "Because I have seen the development of the public chain to this stage, if I want to go to the next level to Mass Adoption, what I have done, seen, and experienced in other industries is exactly what they need, and this is my motivation. **My personal Builder mentality is still quite heavy, although the market is in a bad state, but this thing makes sense, I will do it. ”

"It's a tortuous process of development. One of the important things this industry has taught me is not to make value judgments. Kevin explains.

"The alien sent a code, and everyone interpreted it as a frog egg. But what exactly does the frog egg represent? I tend to believe that in fact, the industry is really called a build, or when it actually has a driving force, it will develop on its own, grow on its own, and then grow something that may not be expected, and I think this process must be meaningful. ”

"Entrepreneurship is very fragile, but the motivation of the individual is not. The fundamentals of the Web3 industry are still there, as long as you grow with it. ”**

Kevin is a big fan of science fiction The Voice of the Lord, a science fiction novel about humanity receiving signals from visitors from outside the world. If you think of part of the signal as a recipe for production, you can create a wonderful organic substance, "frog eggs", but no one can decipher the information of frog eggs.

! [After "graduating" from ants, they flocked to Web3] (https://cdn-img.panewslab.com//panews/2022/11/21/images/3b0d0314d4873a2046b86bd2004c4f5d.png)

Mapping to reality, the emergence of the Bitcoin white paper seems to be a signal of visitors from outside the world. The value of Bitcoin is a "frog egg", what will Bitcoin bring to mankind? This is a mirror, and everyone sees themselves through its interpretation. "The voice of its lord is really my voice", Douban has an accurate summary of this book.

"It's a bit abstract to say this, to sum up, it's not to make value judgments, but always do things that are beneficial to the industry." ”

Kevin believes that Web3 will become more mainstream as it is embraced, and that it will find its own place and place of connection, even if it deviates from the original ideal.

The industry is indeed moving forward. The blockchain industry, which was originally built by crypto geeks, has been upgraded with the concept and the name has been iterated from "blockchain" to "Web3", the industry is differentiated, and more narratives are wrapped in it, making it easier for people to find their role in it. **

"This time it's a real business, although it was a fake business in Ant before. Jerry smiled. "In the past, Ant was a very good office, and the middle and back office could give a lot of technical and other support, although at Ant, we have always talked about using the spirit of entrepreneurship, but real entrepreneurship and fake entrepreneurship are still completely different. ”

Perhaps the most obvious change is that the office environment has fallen from "heaven" to "underground".

"We now have very small teams working in the basement, you know, a real basement. On top of that, Jerry is also in charge of administrative matters such as renting a house.

In a communal office space in Hangzhou, Artela's team rented an office that could accommodate six people, and the largest item on the desk, besides the computer, was an air purifier. There are no windows, there are greenery, but there is no sun. "We all say we're underground. CP laughs.

In the course of this interview, WSJ. asked the same question as the interviewees. "Will the experience advantage accumulated in AntChain be a dimensionality reduction blow to Web3?" they all denied again and again. **

In Web3, it is not called "founder", but only "Founder" or "early builder", and the organizational structure is no longer "company", but "DAO". These are all things that make these "old recruits" feel new. Jerry is still learning how to transition from Web2 to Web3. "We still have to be in awe of the industry, Web3 has a lot of ideas, values and community culture, if you directly copy some Web2 things, it will seem out of place, we have to avoid this phenomenon. ”

Although the big factory has a halo, it is also easy to be questioned by the community for not being "Crypto Native" enough. Jerry says he's heard the word many times. "On the one hand, there is a positive, relatively liberal spirit. But on the other hand, I don't think it's quite right, for the Web3 community, you can't be limited to yourself, if you keep excluding new teams to come in, the Web3 community will never grow. ”**

Despite their resignation from Ants, Ants are still a fertile ground for them. In September, Artela, Trusta Labs, and AntChain's overseas Web3 project, ZAN, launched A³DAO. Public chain, security, solutions, brother projects have formed a complementary ecology.

It is not yet known when the "Alipay" moment of the industry will come, but it is known that the ant "gangsters" will not miss it.

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