QuarkChain Prof. Yaodong Yang：Blockchain is Not an Isolated Ivory Tower
The Quarker is an exclusive Face-to-Face interview programme produced by QuarkChain in 2019. A quark is a type of elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei. Someone who works for QuarkChain is called as a Quarker, just as someone who lives in New York is called as a New Yorker.
Started from Silicon Valley，QuarkChain forms a global team whose members are based in cities all over the world. They mainly communicate through Wechat and emails. For Yaodong Yang, one of QuarkChain scientists based in China, his day usually begins with replying to emails and Wechat messages.
After following up on emails and Wechat messages, Yang arranges his daily routine based on the monthly calendar. In the morning, he focuses on researching, including reading and analyzing materials about blockchain, as well as writing analysis reports. In the afternoon, he usually discusses the latest developments with his colleagues via online meetings. At 8 pm, Yang holds an audio chat in the Wechat community and answers the questions raised by the community members. His daily work doesn’t come to an end until 9 pm in the evening.
This is one day in Yang’s routine at QuarkChain, productive and orderly.
Connections with Blockchain and QuarkChain
Yang’s connection with blockchain dates back to 2016.
Back in 2016，China proposed a strategy of “San Chuang”, an initiative to encourage the masses to do business creatively and drive innovation. The initiative also encourages college students to innovate with entrepreneurial spirit. As a professor of Xi’an JiaongTong University (XJTU)，Yang particapted in helping college students to do business. A copyright protection project called “Expensive Copyright” by XJTU students impressed him deeply. This is when the concept of blockchain first came to Yang’s horizon during his discussion with students about protecting copyright through technological methods. Afterwards, a communication with Feng Han, author of “Blockchain: Quantum Wealth”, further piqued Yang’s interests and subsequently helped deepen his understanding of the blockchain industry.
2017 was a big year for the cryptocurrency space: coin prices skyrocketed and BCH forked from BTC. Yang realized that performance was a bottleneck for blockchain development and began to brainstorm on possible solutions. It was in this year, Yang met Qi Zhou, CEO of QuarkChain, who proposed sharding as a solution to solve blockchain performance bottleneck problem. Yang could not agree more. In January of 2018, Yang joined the QuarkChain team officially.
Yang’s Three Responsibilities to Promote Technological Integration
As a QuarkChain scientist, Yang’s responsibilities including discovering new technologies, expanding eco-partners, and promoting blockchain applications.
There are multiple public chains in the market and Yang is passionate about researching the latest blockchain technologies. “It is important to understand technology solutions of the public chains, especially those that can benefit the development of QuarkChain,” Yang said. In addition, emerging technologies such as 5G, AI and cloud computing are also on Yang’s radar. “ Blockchain is not an isolated ivory tower; only by integrating with other technologies, can blockchain have powerful chemical reactions effect and create higher values, ” Yang expressed.
QuarkChain is an underlying architecture for blockchain, in Yang’s opinion, only by building applications on QuarkChain, can blockchain bring values to ordinary users. In reality, building these applications require cooperation from eco-partners. Thus, in his daily work, Yang is also devoted to researching projects which have the potential to become those that would interest QuarkChain’s eco-partners. He also actively help expand the eco-partner network for the firm.
Blockchain is in its early stage of development; how to encourage the existing economic system for massive adoption remains a significant question. Yang said that to solve the problem requires cooperation with experts from traditional industries, working together to bring blockchain applications to the traditional industries. Thus, making blockchain applications readily deployable for common use cases and create values for economy is also one of his important duties.
QuarkChain’s Outstanding Advantages to Face Blockchain Challenges
Blockchain has been developing for about 10 years but there are few successful blockchain applications. Lacking explosive applications has always been the bottleneck of blockchain development. It also has been regarded as the biggest challenge that blockchain is facing.
According to Yang’s opinion, the solution to the question is to build a solid foundation. “That is exactly what QuarkChain has been doing, to improve the network throughput, scalability, and flexibility,” Yang said. “In addition, it is also necessary to understand demands and pain points of traditional industries. The popularity of 4G technology gave birth to projects like food delivery services， shared bikes, and TikTok. However, all these projects would not have been successful without deep understanding of the pain points of those industries at that point in time.”
Cryptocurrency is without doubt the keyword of blockchain development this year: Facebook has announced to launch its stable coin Libra. It is said that PBoC will issue its own cryptocurrency. In relation to those news, Yang said that QuarkChain is ready to play an important role for these two cryptocurrencies.
“QuarkChain would be very happy to share our experiences about solving scalability problem in blockchain and provide technological support for these projects,” Yang added.
According to Yang, QuarkChain’s advantages of horizontal scalability and underlying architecture would provide strong technological capabilities for these projects who would serve billions of users. At the same time, Yang pointed out that these projects may have far more users than the number of users that current blockchain industries are serving. “ It is predictable that these projects will have a high requirement for performance. However, scalability for decentralization and centralization are different. ”
“I have analyzed the talk of Mu Changchun, deputy director at the PBoC. QuarkChain is fully ready to fulfill the technology requirements that he mentioned,” Yang said confidently.
Expanding QKC’s Application Scenario in The Future
When talking about the prospects of blockchain’s future development, Yang said it will without doubt improve the development of many industries.
He pointed out that in the copyright protection field, both registration and inquiry will be more convenient and the cost of copyright registration will be lower if blockchain technology is applied in this field. Blockchain’s decentralized storage can guarantee that no institutions can tamper data. Thus, the protection for copyright will be more reliable and more transparent, reducing the probability of plagiarism. As for the logistics ,Yang noted that the immutable property of blockchain technology can guarantee information of the sold products to be recorded permanently. Once the logistics information is recorded on the blockchain, the logistical process would form a complete chain, easily traceable from the originators, the manufacturers, to the end users, the consumers.
“Blockchain will impact the financial industry the most,” Yang emphasized. In his opinion, blockchain will continue to be an underlying technology for digital coins. The supervision will be stricter to make finance more secure and increase credibility. Digital coins under supervision will come out and the corresponding supply chain will develop feverishly. As for the cross-border payment field, Yang expressed that the introduction of blockchain will solve the problem of asymmetric information and build trust mechanism quickly, which will bring about several benefits such as improving efficiency，lowering the cost, and realizing peer-to-peer settlement.
There are thousands of blockchain projects in the market, how will competition play out? Would it be a monopoly or a market with many players?
Yang expressed his view that some weaker players will leave the industry, ”some public chains will be eliminated as the competition intensifies. However, some of their innovative and new technologies will be absorbed and integrated by the larger players. In some specific industries, there will be a living space for public chains which are highly compatible to the industries, such as IOT and intelligent manufacturing.”
At this point, Yang expressed his preferences for QuarkChain, Polkadot ,and Nervos. “These projects have strong technologies as well as having a broad world view,”he said. Yang also introduced that QuarkChain would focus on expanding the usage scenario of QKC in the next phase of development.
“The use case for QKC is actually the same use case for QuarkChain. We are looking forward that QKC will play an important role. Thanks to QuarkChain’s outstanding performance, applications like DeFi, Dapp and STO will develop further on the QuarkChain architecture. We expect that transaction cost for both parties will be lower when using QuarkChain.”
When asked about his expectations of Quarkchain’s future prospects, Yang said, “ there is a list on CMC for projects with top 10 circulation market value. Every year there are projects added to the list or or deleted from it. I am looking forward to seeing QuarkChain on the list in the future.”
Introduction of the Interviewee
Yaodong Yang, a QuarkChain scientist. Vice chairman in education at Xi’an Jiaotong University, Frontier Institute of Science and Technology. After graduating from ZheJiang University, Yang received his PHD from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He has published more than 50 articles in peer reviewed journals such as Science Advances. He participated in research projects supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology、the Ministry of Education and Natural Science Foundation of China. He is the review expert for the Ministry of Education , National Natural Science Foundation, China Association for Science and Technology and so on. He is a long-time reviewer of multiple famous journals. He is also an editorial board member of Scientific Reports.
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