On August 30th, Elastos co-founder Feng Han spoke about why Elastos is a unique project in the blockchain industry. After four years of development, its stable and growing global community has attracted members from world-renowned organizations such as Capital6 Eagle and Morgan Stanley, which has further promoted the development of the Elastos tech stack and laid a foundation for its future success.
Now, Elastos will integrate resources from technology, community, and other organizations to attract more developers and users to the Elastos ecosystem, thereby forming a real development hotspot in the near future.
Feng’s talk is translated below in its entirety:
Hello, everyone, I am so glad to be here with you to celebrate the 4th anniversary of Elastos. Today, I will share my thoughts and what I have learned from my involvement in Elastos in the past four years, as well as some prospects for the future.
Elastos is a unique project in both the realms of blockchain and digital currency. We all know the origin of Elastos. Before 2017, Rong Chen and the team at Kortide had been exploring the Internet operating system for nearly 20 years. Before 2017, the concept of building a decentralized Internet operating system in Elastos had been supported by many different parties. In 2016, Rong and I discussed blockchain together. Over the course of several meetings, we came to agree on quite a lot.
Later, I slowly understood that the core role of Elastos is to protect personal data. I also proposed that the future role of blockchain would be to transform data into assets by giving speeches, writing articles, and publishing books. I even put forward the perspective of quantum wealth using quantum mechanics. All in all, my perspective is very consistent with those of Rong, who served as a teacher to me.
In June 2017, we decided to start Elastos, which we have been working toward for four years. In the past four years, I have been deeply involved in the development of Elastos. I wear an Elastos T-shirt at almost all public events and take every opportunity to promote it.
Though everyone has his or her own opinions, Elastos is very different from other projects. Today, I would like to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of Elastos.
The advantage of Elastos is that it has a foundation that other decentralized projects do not have. It has adhered to the concept of a decentralized Internet for nearly 20 years, and for that reason can only be compared with Bitcoin. As a decentralized project, Bitcoin is currently the most successful in terms of ecosystem, community, core concept, and mainstream recognition. It can be seen from Bitcoin that there must first be a globally acceptable core concept under which the global community can continue to gather and expand. Whether it is Bitcoin or Ethereum, the most important factor for success is to stick to a concept and form a global consensus. Elastos has also adhered to the initiative of decentralizing the Internet for nearly 20 years, and I believe the future is promising in regards to forming a global community. After four years of development, I am very pleased with my foresight and persistence, which proved to be mostly correct.
At present, Elastos is forming a stable and prosperous community and has attracted world-renowned capital ventures and teams to join it. For example, Elation Studios, the new CR Commissioner, has set up a studio and created a website for promoting Elastos led by a vice president at Morgan Stanley, and joins Mark Xing, Brittany Kaiser, who is the founder of the OwnYourData Foundation who won the data ownership lawsuit with Facebook and is active in the CR Council Telegram group and on Twitter. Meanwhile, Elastos joined the World Economic Forum. Now, everyone is promoting the prospect of a decentralized Internet of Elastos.
It is true that Chinese people are not good at proposing new concepts. In China, especially in the blockchain industry, a project like Elastos who put forward its own concepts and adhered to them is particularly rare. In fact, it is the foundation of a decentralized project to form a global community and attract global resources. In this respect, Elastos is very unique. In addition, Elastos has set up a decentralized community platform in Cyber Republic which has effectively promoted the development of the Elastos ecosystem and laid the foundation for its future success.
These are the advantages of Elastos. Many people say that Elastos has focused so much on development, and has benefitted little as a result. To tell you the truth, many of Elastos’ advantages have actually appeared to be disadvantages at various points in the last four years.
What are the disadvantages of Elastos? Due to the 20-year focus on its concept, Elastos is the farthest project from the market, especially the digital currency industry. The top 10 global blockchain industries do not have China’s ranking, and China is rarely seen in the top 20. The greatest period of growth for Elastos does not overlap with the blockchain industry, and the existing core culture does not overlap with its core concept either.
Therefore, during these four years, all of the ups and downs have basically been misaligned with Elastos’ development opportunities, and there are various opinions in the community as to how to respond. For me, it makes me want to hurry; I want to push forward. After setting up the Manhattan Project Fund in New York in 2018, I hoped that there would be a position to push forward in the market according to my intentions, and to develop Rong’s concept of protecting personal data on the second-generation Internet into the concept that data is a personal ownership asset. I believe that only in this way can we cultivate market momentum. Hence, we have cooperated with Zhang Zhijun, chief architect of the World Bank, Wang Long, Vice President of Tencent Cloud, and others. It was very important to work with them in August 2019 to begin the data capitalization movement, which has now taken form in CreDA.
On October 31, 2020, an internal meeting was held for Elastos where I stressed that Elastos must keep up with industry trends. If Elastos cannot keep up with the trends in the market, it will not succeed – even if our vision is correct. What is a market trend? In the market, it is simply a public blockchain project. Does it attract enough encrypted assets? Does it attract users? Does it have liquidity? These are very simple indicators. All projects with these elements are ranked very high in Coin Market Cap, especially Ethereum. With the development of its ecosystem, various applications have appeared consistently, and new digital assets have been produced, injecting new vitality into the whole ecosystem. In the digital currency industry, the logic is very simple: when there are more digital assets, more people come to trade, liquidity will rise, and the number of users will naturally grow. Therefore, a blockchain project is completely different from the traditional Internet.
At the end of 2020, some members from the Elastos community began to participate in the FilDA project. FilDA was formed under difficult circumstances because there was no financial support, meaningful technical support, or users. However, due to the opportunity to launch on HECO, FilDA developed successfully and achieved a peak of $2.1 billion USD in TVL, placing it in the top 5 five DeFi lending pools in the world. Even when the overall market was relatively depressed some time ago, there were hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, along with thousands of daily users. FilDA provides a real application scenario for ELA by involving it in lending processes and providing valuable liquidity for ELA and the ecosystem projects that integrate it. FilDA has driven the peak of ELA post-2018, but the nature of its connection remains unsustainable. FilDA is still isolated from the whole of the Elastos ecosystem, with no real support for capital and technology. Elastos missed a significant DeFi opportunity this year.
But we will never give up. Right now, we need a decentralized credit platform to follow up on the success of FilDA – hence the development of CreDA. For the next step, we think that the future development of DeFi needs a global decentralized credit system, just as everyone’s data can create their own credit. Then, if on-chain data can create credit for everyone, DeFi can act as a tool for realizing data’s value quite easily. Following Rong’s concept that every user should have his own data on the next-generation Internet, we submit the concept of owning your data and transforming it into your wealth, which is now slowly being implemented. Moreover, if Elastos can follow these points, it can follow the trends in the market. On October 31st, a consensus was reached at the Elastos internal meeting.
As I said in the AMA, CreDA has a real opportunity to establish a decentralized credit system around the world. Their vision is very innovative. So far, no project has successfully applied it. Presently, we are supported by a lot of important figures in the Cyber Republic Council. The public realizes that no matter how good a concept is, Elastos must take action to bring it to the market. As a public blockchain, what is most important is to have real users and asset liquidity, so growth must be driven by ecosystem applications. Most people are beginning to agree with this perspective.
In this respect, the various development teams of Elastos finally began to form a consensus. For example, Rong also expressed on Twitter that building a decentralized financial system is one of the strategic goals for Elastos’ future development, a goal which has been echoed by the global community. Next, we will actively push forward and pool resources from all ecosystem organizations to create encrypted assets (NFTs), and finally develop deep liquidity and capitalize on market opportunities in the global blockchain industry.
I’m very optimistic about the second half of the year, and I think there are still big opportunities ahead. Hence, we will actively promote Elastos DeFi, especially with the help of our global community and Cyber Republic DAO. Finally, I would like to appeal for FilDA and CreDA to return to Elastos and operate on-chain in our ecosystem. In fact, apart from technical support, the most important thing is the need for liquidity (500,000 USDT) and an established funding pool. Such a fund is not designated for consumption, but for growth. I don’t believe the technical or funding-related challenges present an unsolvable problem for EF or CR. I also hope that everyone in the community will join me in pushing for FilDA and other community projects to move on-chain in our ecosystem as soon as possible. A robust ecosystem can be formed through our solidarity, and we can capitalize on market opportunities in the next round of industry development. I believe there is a very powerful opportunity ahead, and I hope we can work together to advance Elastos.
