Crypto Native — Preface
In December 2017, after a round of regulations, the entire blockchain world was in a daze: hindered with embracing traditional business, various financial and technology chains that wanted to change the world were called off. Not only did regulatory compliance not open its arms, but even the “huge innovation” it had been hyping was completely liquidated. What surfaced was a game called CryptoKitties, which reportedly sold tens of thousands of Crypto Kitties in a day, the same way that today’s Axie Infinity game earns $8 million a day over Honor of Kings. At that time, I realized that blockchain is not compatible with the traditional world, just like the “American continent” and “European continent”, it is not a simple copy, but a reshaping of the future. Expecting the traditional continent to transfuse blood to the new world is a kind of speculative thinking that is greedy for the shortcut.
The new world needs newcomers to build it out little by little but expecting to take blockchain as a tool to transform the traditional world is a mistake and it would certainly not be able to give full play to its creativity and advantages. Just like “America is America” and “Europe is Europe”, we can only create constitutional monarchy even if we yearn for the democracy of America. After the failure of various Connectionism, the complete virtual world closed-loop project “CryptoKitties” was a great success, which has to make people think. So I set up a small group — “Ether World Immigrants”: only on-chain closed-loop applications are considered, no longer care about the rights and wrongs of the traditional world, and then started the journey of creating NEST.
It has been three years, during which I met a variety of people and friends and experienced a bull market as expected, the on-chain closed-loop application we conceived at that time is today called DeFi, and we’ve gotten our deserved reward for insisting on decentralization. In the past three years, we have gone from learning how to develop smart contracts to make a real oracle, forming our own contract development model and DEFI design methodology, which is rare in Asian teams.
However, the bigger gain comes from the perception of blockchain: at first, like the general public, we looked at it as a tool similar to the Internet and approached it with an Internet product mindset, but later we found out that this idea is wrong, and it is not an Internet product. The mainstream Internet product is to eliminate the uncertainty of ordinary people, you can say that imToken is an Internet product, but the ETH protocol cannot be described in the conceptual language of Internet products, because it is used to eliminate the uncertainty of the entire human group. It is an expansion of the boundaries of human knowledge, and it is not expected that an ordinary person must understand (but as long as you are willing to understand, it can serve you); then we considered DeFi as a financial product, just moving it onto the chain to decentralize financial transactions. Now I understand that it is not made for transactions, because transactions require decreasing marginal cost, while blockchain naturally requires increasing marginal cost, which is contradictory.
The basis of this contradiction is also what we now recognize: Blockchain is a value production model, not a value exchange model. That is, blockchain is a mechanism used to produce new native value, not to exchange already existing value — exchange has been decentralized as early as the rise of commercial civilization, which was named: the market mechanism.
The change in this perception is significant, and I tried to compare blockchain and markets together (instead of comparing blockchain and the Internet or Bitcoin and Apple Inc.). Both are non-cooperative games, only one is used for value production and one for value exchange. Only when the value produced has asset attributes, can it fit the model of increasing marginal cost. This is our further understanding: Blockchain is a non-cooperative game tool (model) used to produce native assets, which is called equilibrium assets, that is, when this game reaches equilibrium, it can create new features and functions that cannot be created by traditional cooperative games, such as tamper-proofing data (BTC), logical calculations (ETH), and random information Stream (NEST).
We were able to gradually think about these contents because we insisted on a very pure way of thinking from the beginning: Crypto Native thinking, complete decentralization, and refusal to compromise. When we found that we needed an oracle for DeFi, we were determined not to use Chainlink that could not be decentralized for on-chain verification. We believe that in the long run, USDT and Chainlink represent the position of the “Europe”, not Internet products based on the “Americas” standpoint, and Crypto Native is not the same world, so there is nothing to avoid.
It is difficult to persist on Crypto Native because innovation is extremely difficult, and compromise is everywhere. However, our exploration of the new world has just begun, and we have to go back to the old way, which naturally does not talk about any faith and sentiment: survival is important, but since we are already the purest believers who have cut the traditional world of right and wrong, we should at least have Washington’s spirit to create a different world.
Therefore, we are here to launch the Crypto Native community, dedicated to the research and creation of purely decentralized protocols, where any good ideas can be exchanged and collide, but the highest purpose is to sticks to the decentralized or non-cooperative gaming mindset framework. Just like the innovation of the NEST community, NEST Protocol, CoFiX, Parasset, Fort, Tank, Flow DEX…, one after another, just to explore the boundaries of the blockchain world and build this new non-cooperative game continent, which is such an exciting thing to think about. The human value production model, for thousands of years, has been a cooperative game, until Satoshi Nakamoto opened a new chapter of non-cooperative game value production. I personally predict that the value of non-cooperative games in the future, that is, equilibrium assets, will account for 20%-40% of human wealth. At that time, Crypto Native will not be seen as a street rat or “sick” success, as it is now.
I look forward to this day, and I look forward to everyone witnessing the success of Crypto Native. It would be even better if we can create it together, that’s why we started this community in the first place. In 2017, we started the “Ethereum World Immigration” to do on-chain closed-loop applications, and then we waited for the explosion of DeFi. Today we start “Crypto Native” to generate equilibrium assets on the chain through the non-cooperative game model. In a few years, there will be an explosion of equilibrium assets, I firmly believe.
Author: James
