-Depth Interview By Lianyan.pro
First of all, the term “public blockchain” may be the most highly anticipated project type in the blockchain industry. But why the public blockchain is so popular? Actually， it is related to its position. The public blockchain is positioned as basic infrastructure of the underlying blockchain. Without complete infrastructure, all of its derivative industries will be directly affected or even impossible to survive.
For example, if your city does not has a series of transport like bus, subway, train, airport, highway, car and bicycle, then the economic hub of a city to develop the prosperity will no longer exist because it lacks basic infrastructure.
Therefore, the public blockchain plays a quite important role. Regarding the future development of blockchain, the first step is to build a complete underlying public blockchain, so as to make it possible to build the ecology of different industries. Building a complete public blockchain involves decentralization, performance, security and other factors. Therefore the difficulty can be imagined.
Of course, when it comes to the earliest industry leaders in the public blockchain, Ethereum has to be mentioned. Its blockchain ecosystem is very well established, but it still has flaws in its performance. But currently community and development team, even the three-party startup team adopt cross-chain strategy to expand storage space. The lightning network is also trying to solve this problem, even though at present it is still at the stage of exploration and development.
Therefore, it gives an opportunity for other public blockchains to join. The most famous blockchains such as Cardano, EOS, Aeternity, IOST, Zilliqa, and even some projects that use DAG (Directed Acyclic Graphs) such as TrustNote, are rushing forward to occupy the market.
And the EcoBall, the project we’re interviewing today, aims to build an integrated “multi-chain parallel” blockchain operating system. It aims to realize a compatible blockchain project by connecting together different blockchains, including the BTC system, the ETH system, the XRP system, EOS (EOS) system, QTUM-quantum chain system and DAG (directed no-loop) system (such as GBYTE-byte snowball, MIOTA-Eyota, etc.).
In order to enable the blockchain enthusiasts to have a deeper understanding of this project, we hereby invite the EcoBall CEO Mr. David Chen to have an exclusive interview conducted by Lianyan. Here starts the interview.
Q1: First of all, It’s an honor to have an interview with Mr. Chen, CEO of EcoBall project. Please allow us to give a brief self-introduction. Lianyan is a project reporting platform dedicated to blockchain innovation research. So we will use innovative interviews forms (communities can participate together) to help blockchain enthusiasts understand the story and innovation behind the project development team. Then, please introduce “you” and your team to us.
A1: Hello everyone! First of all, thank you so much for Lianyan.pro’s interview. Please allow me to briefly introduce my own situation. I have obtained master and bachelor degree (software engineering major) of Jilin University. After graduation, I have worked for Huawei for nearly 10 years and has been engaged in the distributed development, and developed distributed file systems, distributed databases, big data systems (Hadoop, Spark), and OpenStack cloud platforms later on. In retrospect, Huawei’s experience has given me priceless experience in technology accumulation and product application. Also, it gives me a glimpse of industrial ecology.
In fact, I heard about Bitcoin in 2012, but there is no time to understand it in depth due to hectic work in Huawei. Since 2015 when I start to handle OpenStack, I had the opportunity to understand the open source ecosystem. Later on, I had a deeper research on the blockchain technology (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Fabric, and IPFS). I finally became a believer in the blockchain technology and I believe that blockchain technology is the footstone to realize the value network. New productive forces will inevitably bring about new production relations. The huge impact on the development of society and human civilization cannot be overestimated.
EcoBall, developed by the Singapore EcoBall Foundation, is willing to focus on building an open, universal, and compatible blockchain operating system. Furthermore, it aims to realize the large-scale commercialization and engineering application of blockchain technology and lead to deeper integration between blockchain technologies and various social fields. Ultimately value network can speed up the development of human civilization.
Our team gathers outstanding technical and operational management talents from high-tech companies both at home and abroad, such as BAT and Huawei. The technicians are basically graduates from many key universities, among which the doctoral or master’s degree accounts for over 40%. The core technicians are basically over five years of work experience. Several of them are joined from other well-known teams (core developers and architects).
The team has been growing rapidly and currently owns about 70 members. At present, the team has declared 12 invention patents for blockchain technology and 23 blockchain software copyrights. It is expected that there will be nearly a hundred blockchain invention patents and software copyrights within the year of 2018.
The team has already had in-depth exchanges with leading universities both at home and abroad on the cutting-edge technology. After then, we would realize the joint construction of blockchain technology, Blockchain Economic and Financial Research Institutions (including research institutes, joint laboratories, and joint research centers, etc.).
At present, the team has designed and developed blockchain technology solutions for many enterprises at home and abroad.
Q2: Why did you establish the EcoBall project? Please introduce the advantages of EcoBall and the problems it solved?
A2: The technology of the blockchain is still at the early stage. There is still some time needed before the large-scale commercialization of the blockchain. At present, everybody knows that the mainstream public blockchain platforms like Bitcoin and Ethereum, still cannot support commercial decentralized application.
The advantages of EcoBall target at the problems that need to be solved before the realization of large-scale commercial application of blockchain technology. The technical advantages are as follows.
- Freemium Strategy
In Ecoball system, block package will no longer be the purpose of mining, and the packaged block is free of charge. Thus it reduces a large number of meaningless transactions, avoiding lots of miners’ resource consumption, and consequently improve system transaction throughput. As a result, it makes it easier for business organizations to open up their business based on Ecoball and build a brand new blockchain business ecosystem.
- Multi-Chain Parallel Mechanism
EcoBall adopts a multi-chain parallel mechanism. It creates multiple main chains based on the Creation Ball. Each main chain is responsible for a special business field, and they are independent but also related to each other, which improves system processing efficiency.
- Multi-Side Chain Parallelism
The main chain of the business can lead to the sidechain on demand. The sidechain records the subsidiary data of the main block transaction and does not affect other transaction. Each sidechain can operate in parallel. The transaction records of the sidechains are confirmed by smart contracts or signatures of relevant parties (consensus is limited to related parties).
- Cross-chain Parallelism
The Ecoball will adopt a universal cross-chain mechanism, gradually incorporate the mainstream digital currency, and build a bridge that links with other chains. The cross-chain technology consists of two parts. One is the interconnection between the Ecoball blockchain and other chains, implemented by hash anchor and relay chain technology. The other is the inter-communication between other chains based on the Ecoball.
- Decentralized Data Storage Network
At present, the block data of mainstream platforms such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are stored in local nodes. The storage space required for block data increases with time, and the storage space of local nodes is limited. It is not realistic to store all block data on one single node in a blockchain system platform. It needs a decentralized data storage network to support it. EcoBall encourages miners to provide storage space and retrieval services through providing digital currency incentives. Users can use decentralized storage networks free of charge through mortgaging the digital currency. The more digital currencies they mortgage, the more storage space they can use.
After the user deletes the distributed data, the locked digital currency will be released. The increase in the amount of data storage will increase the value of the data, which will encourage more storage miners to join the decentralized storage network. As a result, the overall storage capacity of the network would greatly increase and it provides strong support for commercialization.
Q3: From the white paper we can see that EcoBall is going to do an operating system that supports multiple chains and will be compatible with Bitcoin, Ethereum, EOS, QTUM, and even DAG systems. Can you tell us how you will realize the compatibility of underlying public blockchains? What is the probability of success?
A3: The cross-chain technology mainly includes the notary mechanism, side chain/relay, and hash lock. At present, there are several projects in the community that are studying cross-chain, but from the perspective of commercial landing, I believe cross-chain is one of the keys and necessary technologies that support commercialization.
EcoBall mainly uses cross-chain/relay and hash lock technology to achieve cross-chain, and it can be successfully developed from the current technology accumulation.
Q4: As you can see from your roadmap, the main chain of EcoBall will be online in December of 2018. It is only 6 months from now, and the project has only been started for six months, which is much faster than the development cycles of other public blockchains. Can you tell us how you plan to complete a series of technical research and development in such a short time. What is your development team structure?
A4: Let’s clarify that in December 2018, the test main chain of the platform will be online (block browser, developer kit, and platform wallet release). Developers can develop based on EcoBall. Blockchain technology is a new technology. There are too many key technologies that need to be solved. Security is also involved in all aspects. Please understand that a truly commercial platform requires time to realize.
The exact launched time of the official EcoBall needs to be determined based on actual progress.
Our goal is to launch a competing main chain online in December 2020, so the formal main chain will be released before this time.
Q5: As a underlying public chain or operating system, in order to make it develop, the ecology and quality of Dapps will be the key factors that determine the success or failure of projects. What are the plans for EcoBall’s ecological construction in the decentralized application?
A5: We attach great importance to the construction of Dapps Ecology, and our team is currently providing blockchain technology solutions for leading enterprises in many industries at home and abroad. In the future, it will support partners to migrate to the EcoBall platform to complete blockchain technology upgrades. It is important to strengthen the community’s technological development because there are also a large number of Dapp needs on EcoBall in communities around the world.
Q6: From the perspective of the public blockchain and the characteristics of the blockchain, the two factors of high performance (TPS) and decentralization are actually like a scale. At present, many public blockchains are blindly pursuing high performance, as a result of which decentralization has been sacrificed. How does EcoBall design and balance between the two factors?
A6: Both Bitcoin and Ethereum are based on POW consensus, so each node (actually a mining pool) is required to do the same calculation.
EcoBall’s vision is to create a value network that is not only used for accounting, but also for realizing value transfer. In the future, if large-scale commercial blockchain technology can be realized, network nodes will reach tens of millions, and even tens of billions. With the purpose of supporting such a large blockchain network, the network nodes will need to be divided into domains and zones.
EcoBall’s high-throughput technologies include:
a. Proposal, pre-execution, and division of block recording processes, each process can be parallel;
b. Fragmentation technology: There are countless logical subnets in the entire network, and partitions can be executed in parallel.
c. Smart contract asynchronous execution; Parallel execution of different business chain contracts;
d. Multi-consensus integration: DPOS+POS+BFT. Using appropriate consensus+random node BFT to verify attacks against malicious nodes at different stages of the process.
Q7: We know that smart contracts are the essence of the public chain, but there are also certain thresholds for current smart contracts, such as technical personnel’s cooperate. Then there is a question, the next step in the development of the public blockchain must simplify the smart contract. How does EcoBall lower the threshold in this respect and allow more EcoBall customers to quickly complete their application establishment?
A7: The smart contract is the main application of Decentralized application at present, and writing it requires a certain threshold, and security needs to be considered.
EcoBall will provide developers with a convenient development toolkit, as well as smart contract templates for common scenarios and industry application scenarios, which will speed developers’ development.
As for the security of smart contracts, the security verification (including vulnerability review and formal security verification) of third-party platforms is introduced. Developers can pay a certain amount of ABA to obtain services. This is also a part of ecological construction.
Q8: Because of the decentralized nature of most blockchain projects, it has difficulty in forming an effective supervision. But the sound development of as an industry must be inseparable from effective supervision and guidance. So, EcoBall, as the underlying blockchain solution, is it taking into account the provision of certain intervention programs for regulators in its planning and design?
A8: Indeed, it is difficult to achieve regulatory due to the nature of blockchain decentralization. EcoBall will consider it from a trusted value network and provide an account mechanism. For a company’s business chain, the company can coordinate with the government’s supervision. There is a multi-privilege account on the main chain. The company only needs to provide a readable account to the relevant section. Then the supervisor can view the company’s chain. Information (accounts without permission, the information on the public chain can be stored encrypted). Due to the fact that the blockchain cannot be modified, once a company’s information is written onto the blockchain, the data the regulator sees will be historically real data. In this way, it is valuable for some branches of the government to join in the EcoBall chain. Therefore, the regulatory guidance based on blockchain technology will be more valuable than the current Internet.
Q9: Since this year, the public chain projects have been launched and online one by one. Competition is very fierce in this area. What do you think of the core competitiveness of EcoBall? How do you plan and make EcoBall stand out from them?
A9: The public chain projects have been launched one after another, but the effect of the online main network is still far away from the commercialization. The core competitiveness of EcoBall is to take into account problems that need to be resolved in the large-scale commercialization of blockchains, and to make a breakthrough in high-throughput, decentralized distributed storage, cross-chain integration, free-to-use and other important business strategies and technologies to build a true platform system that satisfies the large-scale commercialization of blockchains. At present, most of the mainstream public blockchains are solving problems one by one. The cycle of the main chain online is also according to the need of the market. It can be said that everyone’s stage is not much different. If we look back at the development of the next few years, it is still at an early stage. EcoBall has completed the construction of talent reserves and key technologies. The development speed of subsequent development will be faster. From the team’s R&D capabilities and the cooperation with cutting-edge technology in universities, the strength of our team is leading ahead.
Q10: What are the application values of EcoBall Token? What role will it play in the EcoBall system and how do you design the closed loop of its economic structure?
A10: The application values are:
a) The owner of ABA can use EcoBall operating system through mortgage ABA.
b) The owner of the ABA can also lend to other people for interest.
c) Participate in community voting according to the number of ABAs they held.
d) To participate in the super nodes of EcoBall and ecological contribution of nodes, a certain amount of ABA needs to be mortgaged.
EcoBall adopts the strategy of using EcoBall free of charge by mortgaging ABA. 70% of the ABA can be obtained through the nodal incentive method in 30 years after the main chain is officially launched. The mining the node provides the EcoBall with calculation power. In addition to providing storage space for EcoBall, mining of storage nodes can also provide decentralized storage services to everyone. The user locks the ABA to upload data, and the user can access the data wherever they are. When the user deletes the data, the locked ABA is released.
The EcoBall economic system also needs to be designed from the perspective of economics. The team unites well-known financial colleges and famous scholars to design EcoBall’s economic system. Blockchain economics will become a new discipline, integrating economy, technology, and community, and it will also be a gradual process.
Q11: In addition, can you disclose some of the EcoBall plans for the next 2 years?
A11: The white paper has disclosed the plans for the next 2–3 years. More information is welcome to pay attention to the official release channels.
Q12: Imagine what kind of project would you position EcoBall as in the future?
A12: EcoBall positioning is to be a value network platform to meet the diversified needs of businesses. In the future, it can be used as a value layer to link computing networks, storage networks, AI+ intelligent machines, and linking IOT, etc. The nature of the current Internet giant and the emerging sharing economy is still monopolizing user traffic by spending a large amount of money, and then raising prices. Individuals play a major role in the development of the Internet as consumer for so long. Through EcoBall’s value platform, everyone can participate in the ecological contribution of value networks and gain incentives for nodes. By enhancing social efficiency, it effectively improve corporate operations and profits, and build a more valuable platform for serving the public. With the technological development of AI robots, AI + robot + clean energy will be able to meet human basic material needs in the near future. Most people will be “unemployed”, “useful class” and “useless class.” “The useful class” is to complete self-worth or mobilize others to complete self-worth and contribute to the human social civilization. “The useless class” does not mean that there is no value, and that it can do many meaningful things. In this scenario, people use content to generate value. EcoBall’s goal is to do this value network. In this value network, resource sharing access, digital asset value exchange, asset security, and social productivity improvement are realized.
Q13: I am very grateful to EcoBall CEO Mr. David Chen for attending this interview. I hope that EcoBall can become a unicorn project that we are proud of. In the end, what do you want to say to us and EcoBall fans?
A13: At this stage, we are fortunate to contribute our strength to the landing of blockchain technology. We hope to leave our team’s footprint on the journey of commercializing blockchain technology. Our team would continue to pay attention to the development of technology and the construction of the community, and maintain an open mind, and join forces with other public blockchains to advance technology commercialization.
In the end, the team is welcoming talented partners to join us.
Thank you!