CT Chinese Focus｜The Web3 world is expanding rapidly, what role will Ontology play in it?

Since the birth of the blockchain, the entire industry has experienced from "irrational" fanaticism to "after precipitation" calmness. When the craze extinguishes, the real practitioners fall into a calm state and explore the development path of the blockchain. What will the blockchain technology eventually evolve into?

Some blockchain platforms, such as Ontology, Ethereum, Polkadot, and Cosmos, are establishing new startup models suitable for Web 3.0. They make it easier to create and connect decentralized applications, and enable innovators to build better solutions. These multi-chain protocols act like startup accelerators, providing opportunities for new entrants to participate and support emerging projects.

On September 28th, Cointelegraph Chinese hosted the online ace interview column Focus, and invited Li Jun, the founder of Ontology, to participate in this interview "The Web3 world is expanding rapidly, what role will Ontology play in it?" ".

Through the interview with Cointelegraph Chinese CEO and co-founder Vadim, the audience learned how Li Jun entered the blockchain industry, Li Jun's views on the future development of Web3.0, and Ontology's ecosystem.

Guest's wonderful views:

1. Web3 has not yet been fully launched. The future Web3 will become a new mechanism or a new processing protocol, which will change the existing economy.

2. In Web3, there will be no big companies to be the controllers, they are just the public protocol or the bottom layer, and their role is to provide services and connection methods for various users. Everyone can carry out various cooperations based only on public agreements, without the participation of large enterprises.

3. There is competition in the market, and Ontology does not want to repeat this kind of competition. We want to innovate and focus on new scenarios in the future, especially those based on Web3.0. We don’t want to use incentives and monetary incentives to attract decentralized applications on Ethereum. We want to come from the blockchain industry Outside the decentralized application developer community.

4. NFT has come, but because of pricing issues, NFT is very risky. I think there is a pricing problem in the current NFT market, and only a few projects have received (reasonable) pricing, which is a big risk for investors.

The following is the content of the interview organized by Cointelegraph in Chinese:

Q1: Can you briefly introduce your relevant background before entering the blockchain field?

Okay, let me first talk about my educational background. My major is computer science and finance, which can be combined with blockchain work, which is very suitable for this industry. Five years ago, I quit my job and entered this industry to serve in the field of blockchain platform technology, including blockchain basic technology and protocols. During this time, we used existing resources to build the Ontology blockchain platform. Different from other blockchains, Ontology pays more attention to Web3. Of course, Web3 is a hot topic right now. At that time, we focused on decentralized identity, decentralized data, and building decentralized communities.

Q2: Can you explain in detail how you joined the blockchain industry?

I joined the blockchain field full-time about five years ago, almost six years ago. At that time, I was doing technical research in a financial institution, which was one of the largest financial institutions in China. At that time, I led an innovation team to study many new technologies, especially in the financial field, including artificial intelligence, big data, blockchain and so on. At that time, I realized that blockchain technology has changed the entire economic model, especially the financial field. I just thought that it is not just a cryptocurrency, but a new mechanism that may bring innovation to many business processes. I am very interested in this.

So, I decided to quit my job and enter the blockchain industry full-time. Now we can of course say that it was a very good decision for me. I've been on a lot of exciting journeys over the past five years.

Q3: How did you start the Ontology project?

To be honest, at the beginning, I just did a lot of research and research on blockchain technology. At that time, I had no idea about building an ontology at all. I did a lot of technical research and did a lot of projects for enterprises, governments, and other large organizations. Then I realized that we need a new kind of underlying public chain, instead of creating digital and decentralized functions for each enterprise one-to-one. I just thought that we need a new type of public chain that can support both Web3 and enterprises, and even the public governance process. So Ontology came into being.

We have done a lot of design and research, and designed the token economy and mechanism. Afterwards, we built our ontology on top of this. To this day, we still do technical upgrades every month.

Q4: What is your opinion on the future development of Web3?

I don't think Web3 has fully kicked off yet. Most blockchain industries or scenarios are more like digital assets, including NFT, which also acts like a digital asset, so most scenarios are aimed at digital assets, DeFi, and various decentralized applications. I think that the future Web3 will be a new mechanism or a new processing protocol that will change the existing economy.

This means that we will gradually open up traditional financial services, not limited to DeFi, but also social networks, and the real economy. People can even manage their own data, information. That means we will face many challenges from traditional networks and large enterprises. So it's not just about technology, it's about business as a whole. So I think the actual application of Web3 is very limited at present.

To be honest, at present, many decentralized applications of Web3 are basically unusable, with only a few use cases and a small community. These applications are still based on traditional Internet applications. I believe that in the next two to three years, decentralized applications of Web3 will appear. In the next five years, perhaps in some specific scenarios, such as social networks, etc., there will be a large number of Web3 organizations, communities, and even DAOs, which can compete with traditional Internet companies. In my opinion, Web3 will spread all over the world, and the traditional network model will never return.

Q5: What role does ontology play in the development of Web3?

Today, Ethereum is undoubtedly the largest underlying public chain, which is more suitable for various digital assets including NFT. The mechanism and economy of Ethereum are designed for digital assets. However, Web3 will have more application scenarios, perhaps verifiable certificates, reputation management, personal information, credit scoring, etc.

A single public chain protocol cannot meet all requirements. You can do everything on Ethereum, but there are many challenges, including performance and cost. Therefore, I believe that various public chains will emerge in the future, focusing on providing services for specific scenarios. Ontology wants to provide more services for projects involving digital identity authentication, data services, reputation and credit scoring, personal information and verification, and social networking.

This also means that a low-cost and efficient protocol is needed, which can cooperate with Ethereum cross-chain, and combine digital assets, reputation and personal information to form a complete ecosystem. Ontology will provide specific underlying services for this purpose.

Q6: Just now you mentioned IT giants and some large enterprises, how difficult will it be for these IT enterprises and giants to transition to the new Web3 economy?

Now, the top Web2 Internet companies are already facing many challenges because of this change or the needs of users. Users will want to protect their data and protect their privacy, but today, the profits of these companies mainly come from the current economic model. Although they think that Web3 is better, they can give users more control and comply with various regulations, but if they do this, the profit will be zero and they will not be able to become a big business. This is a dilemma they face, and it is a difficult decision. Even though they realize there are better ones, it's suicidal, so...but challenges will come.

If you don't make changes, you will face more challenges. Eventually, they will become our competitors too. But I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon at a mainstream level. While we have a pretty decent blockchain community today, it's still quite small compared to the internet user base, to be honest. I want to say that in many mainstream scenarios, we are the strongest in Web3. In this process, no big companies will become controllers. They are just public agreements or the bottom layer. Their role is to provide services and connection methods for various users. Everyone can carry out various activities based on public agreements. Collaboration, without the involvement of big corporations, this is Web3. I don't think it's an easy process, and I don't think all online businesses will make changes of their own accord, but competition will force them to.

Q7: What is the progress of Ontology's current technology development and architecture? What are your near-term plans and strategies?

Ontology can now support multiple virtual machines and smart contracts, including Native VM, EVM, NeoVM, and Wasm-JIT. This also means that on Ontology you can use all mainstream programming languages to create smart contracts. Ontology is already a very good underlying blockchain platform for Web3, because on Web3, there are not only digital asset scenarios, but also many real scenarios. That means that blockchain developers, as well as traditional Internet developers, can easily create Web3 decentralized applications on Ontology.

In the next stage, Ontology can also become Ethereum Layer 2 and combine with Ethereum. At the same time, we also have a cross-chain protocol, you can transfer assets based on Ethereum and ERC to Ontology, and use various Web3 applications.

At the protocol level, of course, we will have a decentralized identity protocol and a data protocol. After that, we will launch some new projects, mainly around blockchain-based reputation and credit and NFT-based credit and identity information in the Metaverse, etc., including the fundamental elements of Web3 decentralized applications. I hope these protocols and modules can help developers to develop Web3 applications more easily.

Q8: Public chains have been competing with each other to get the best projects and the best development teams to develop these protocols. So what is the Ontology ecosystem like?

Like I said, Ontology's ecosystem revolves around Web3. Of course, we also have DeFi projects. To be honest, many people today think that the public chain is a competitor, because there is only one application scenario on the blockchain, which is a digital asset-based scenario, including DeFi, exchanges, NFT, etc. All public chains do the same thing as Ethereum, but adopt different incentives, including low fees, rewards, etc., to attract decentralized applications, DeFi or assets on Ethereum.

There is competition in the market, and Ontology does not want to repeat this kind of competition. We want to innovate and focus on new scenarios in the future, especially those based on Web3. We don't want to use incentives and monetary incentives to attract decentralized applications on Ethereum. We want to attract people from the blockchain Decentralized application developers and communities outside the industry, these developers come from different places, even Web2 Internet developers. If these developers are willing to optimize their applications or services and turn them into decentralized services, then Ontology is one of the best choices. Because when developers make judgments, they will not only consider incentives, but also consider performance, language and mechanism, which one is more suitable for Web3. We want to provide better products and the underlying layer to attract projects from this track to build an ecosystem together.

Q9: Do you believe that the future world will be built on the blockchain?

I think assets can be based on the blockchain, because in this way the transaction will be simpler and it will be easier to achieve global cooperation. This is a feasible way and a good choice in my opinion. But centralized services, including verification services, KYC services, etc. will not become controllers, but service providers. All cooperation, whether it is between people or between organizations, should use the blockchain as the bottom layer.

In addition, the blockchain should transform this process together with traditional Internet services and business cooperation, and the blockchain cannot cover all scenarios. Therefore, in the long run, both centralized projects and centralized projects need to work together to provide services.

Q10: For many blockchains, finding excellent developers is a big problem. How does Ontology get developers? How do you work with projects that want to build new things on top of Ontology?

At present, for new scenarios and innovations, I believe that half of new projects are based on internal research and development. Internal research and development is mainly aimed at the basic projects of Web3, including identity, data and reputation protocols. The other half comes from enterprise development teams. Some traditional enterprise developers want to transform centralized services into decentralized services on the public chain, so they will cooperate with the Ontology team. We provide them with the underlying and development tools, and they can Easily transfer services to make them a Web3-based decentralized service.

Of course, we also have DeFi and cross-chain projects. These projects come from the community, and some apps I don't even know where the development team is from. To be honest, most of the communities based on digital assets are still on Ethereum. We will launch the Ethereum Virtual Machine and cross-chain services as soon as next month. People can directly transfer developers’ applications based on Ethereum to Ontology , achieve high performance while obtaining low price. But of course this is not our main direction, Web3 is our focus.

Q11: In addition to the first established Ethereum public chain, there are many other protocols, such as Solana, Avalanche, Polkadot, Near... How do you view their competition? What are the benefits of working with them? What is the advantage of using them? What do you think about this?

In fact, many public chains have emerged in the past five years, and many public chains have also been closed. In my opinion, there are no more than 20 existing public chains, and each public chain has its own strategy and focus. Solana is more about using high-performance, centralized mechanisms to attract Ethereum users, decentralized applications or assets. Protocols like Polygon and BSC want to get a piece of the Ethereum market.

Other protocols pay more attention to new fields and new scenarios. Polkadot and Ontology are like this, paying more attention to Web3, which means that there is no direct competition with Ethereum or other scenarios. Ontology is more similar to Polkadot, focusing on Web3 applications. Of course, we also have digital assets and DeFi, but we are more focused on Web3 infrastructure. Therefore, Polkadot and Ontology are the two main public chains that focus on this part.

In the future, I believe there will still be competition among new protocols that will also focus on Web3, and Web3 will also start to focus on DeFi. Finally, after improving the bottom layer over time, they will find that, in addition to these incentives, the Ontology protocol is more suitable for Web3 and DeFi scenarios. They will choose public chains in different scenarios to develop different types of decentralized applications.

Cross-chain and Layer2 protocols will help them connect all decentralized applications to different public chains. Of course, many people still choose Ethereum today, and almost all kinds of preparatory work choose Ethereum. You will find that some Web3 applications have high prices and low performance on Ethereum, and Ethereum can hardly operate these processes. I believe that in the next two years, developers will realize that "we need to choose different public chains for different scenarios", and these will eventually happen.

At the moment, I think Polkadot and Ontology are two options for Web3. Who is the final winner? Of course, Polkadot has greater influence than Ontology, but I think the final winner depends on who can provide a better underlying technology.

In the future, there will be more than 20 public chains and more and more scenarios, instead of a single market with only one public chain, there will definitely be a variety of public chains with specific use cases.

Q12: How do you view this bull market? Where are we in the bull market?

In fact, a few months ago, the world increased control over this field. People may feel that cryptocurrencies look dangerous, but it seems that cryptocurrencies can still survive and are very strong.

NFT has come, but because of pricing issues, NFT is very risky. I think there is a pricing problem in the current NFT market, and only a few projects have received reasonable pricing, which is a big risk for investors. But the modules and mechanisms of NFT will be a very good mechanism to digitize all assets. This also means that pricing is not just based on one or two tokens, there will be more and more tokens in the future, and people will have more and more choices in investing in the encryption field.

This is very good for the entire industry. We will have more scenarios, more applications, and be able to obtain more assets from traditional markets. Of course, competitors from traditional markets will also increase. You can imagine that maybe one day, Google will launch a public chain, and Facebook will launch a new DeFi project. They have become new competitors along with Uniswap and Ethereum, but this is a good thing. At that point, I think the whole industry will go mainstream and really achieve mass adoption.

I think it's still in the middle of a bull market. The only risk is the NFT I just mentioned. If more and more NFTs are priced high, the risks are enormous. Investors will invest more money to participate in different new assets, which will eventually affect the entire market. If NFT is not checked and balanced to make it a more stable market, each investor will invest in NFT in his own way, and risks will come and affect the entire industry.

Q13: Many people are discussing Metaverse now. What do you think of this trend?

In my opinion, there are three main directions for the future of the industry. The first direction is DeFi. As far as the entire industry is concerned, DeFi and digital asset-based scenarios already exist and are very popular; NFT, Metaverse, and Game are all digitized traditional assets, which will be another direction. The third direction is Web3. Web3 will revolutionize Web2 Internet services. Major companies and teams will create different protocols around these three directions.

The first two directions are already very popular, and the third direction has been discussed a few years ago, but now there are no very popular Web3-based decentralized applications. I think Web3 will be a hot topic in the next year.

Q14: If you met Satoshi Nakamoto, what would you say to him?

First of all, of course, thanks to Satoshi Nakamoto, because he opened up a new industry, a new world. In addition, I would like to ask him, how did the idea of blockchain come about? Now, if you look at blockchain-based technology, you will think it is not very complicated and can be easily understood, but the first person with this idea is very important. I want to know how to generate innovative ideas.

At the same time, before I die, it is my dream to know who the real Satoshi Nakamoto is.