After graduating from Ant, they flock to Web3

The two technological revolutions in the tech world that are highly anticipated are AI and Web3. AI is expected to reshape productivity, while Web3 is anticipated to reshape production relationships.

In the tech circle of 2023, there are significant news almost every day; it is the inaugural year of generative AI and also a deep bear year for Web3.

The total financing amount for Web3 in 2023 was only $3.6 billion, a decrease of 78% compared to nearly $16 billion in 2022. In contrast, the AI sector saw financing reach $25 billion in the first half of the year. One of the largest venture capital firms in cryptocurrency has begun to expand its focus to AI.

People who once thought "Web3 is the new sexy" now feel that "Web3 is no longer sexy" and have turned to AI.

But it must also be acknowledged that this deep bear market of Web3 seems a bit more lively than before. During the bear market, there are still people discussing compliance, ZKP (Zero-Knowledge Proof), and Bitcoin ETF. There are also those who choose to enter the market at this moment.

"When I communicate with colleagues at Ant, I often compare AI and Web3, as their development trajectories are quite similar." Jerry Li analogizes that there have been three waves of artificial intelligence over the past sixty years, with nearly every wave seeing billions to tens of billions in funding, and peaks and valleys occurring alternately, until OpenAI emerged as a game changer. "This new large-scale technological revolution requires several cycles to truly bring about leapfrog development."

Jerry Li had several prominent titles: former chief architect of Ant Chain, former director of Apple China R&D, and top scorer in the college entrance examination in Shanxi Province. Now he has added another one—Web3 newcomer.

Of course, strictly speaking, Jerry is not a newcomer to Web3. After graduating from Tsinghua University, Jerry worked in Silicon Valley for over 10 years, and then returned to Shanghai in 2015 to establish Apple's Asia-Pacific R&D center. In 2017, Jerry joined "Ant Blockchain," which had not yet upgraded to "Ant Chain," at the P10 level.

"The industry is still too early; compared to AI, it has not yet reached the previous round of development. Currently, the total market value of the entire cryptocurrency market is still less than half of that of Apple alone." Jerry compared to his former company, it seems that the cake of Web3 is still too small.

Of course, compared to AI that is over fifty years old, Web3 seems to still be in its adolescence.

The concept of Web3 was first proposed in 2014, with its predecessors "cryptocurrency" and "blockchain" concepts being first released in 2008 through Satoshi Nakamoto's "Bitcoin White Paper", which was only 15 years ago.

Rebellious and unstable, Web3 is undergoing a painful period that makes "parents" shake their heads in disapproval. After the collapse of FTX, which had a market value of 32 billion dollars last November, regulators around the world began to impose restrictions on this "naughty child."

At this juncture, at the end of 2022, Jerry left Ant Chain and officially went all in on Web3, launching the public chain project Artela. He stated that he would not consider doing anything else in the short term. When discussing the reasons, Jerry quoted the famous saying from Ant: "Because we believe, we see."

The Artela team has chosen the public chain track, which is part of the Web3 infrastructure and is also known as the "highway" of Web3; without roads, everything cannot be transported.

In the public chain sector, there are long-established Web3 foundational projects, such as Ethereum, which has already built its own moat through the "network effect" of its ecosystem, and there are also several all-star lineup projects that come from privileged backgrounds.

"Although there is a lot of competition in the public chain market, it is still very imperfect and has a long way to go." Recently, Jerry has been attending meetings around the world, which is his first step in adapting to his new identity. After his rounds, he gained a lot. "After communicating with numerous projects, our confidence has actually been strengthened."

The biggest difference between Artela and other chains is not in the current "involution" of Scalability (performance scalability), but in Extensibility (functional scalability), and it is compatible with EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine), allowing developers to transfer applications with one click.

This is to prepare for the future of Mass Adoption.

Mass Adoption is a term frequently mentioned in the context of Web3. In other contexts, it can be described as the "iPhone moment for the industry" and the "last mile," but the core issue is quite clear: how can we enable ordinary people to use Web3?

The "gang" of ants is the shaper of Mass Adoption in the internet era. In their context, Mass Adoption is more about building another "Alipay" in Web3.

Of course, it is filled with experience. Artela's CTO Qiu Honglin (alias: CP) has previously supported the underlying architecture of Ant Group's digital collectibles platform, Whale Discovery. He stated that Whale Discovery had already achieved over 100 million daily active users through the New Year's collective blessing event. "At that time, we had already achieved stable on-chain transactions at the billion-level, while Ethereum was only at several million. In a way, we can say that Ant Chain has truly reached Mass Adoption."

CP was once a team OG of AntChain. He joined the initial form of AntChain in 2015 when it was still an interest incubation group.

"They say that if someone in Ant Group wants to talk about blockchain, by the time they ask the second person, my name will definitely come up." CP has slightly curly hair and speaks with a hint of a Cantonese accent, giving off a feeling of casual conversation, but upon closer listening, the content of his speech is very professional and detailed. Ant Chain holds the highest number of blockchain patents globally, and CP alone holds hundreds of blockchain patents.

Regarding Extensibility, CP gives an example: "In games, besides the input from players in the front end, there are also background elements, such as map refresh, time and weather, or when a big boss dies, the small monsters nearby will also be eliminated, etc. In blockchain, there are no background tasks, because all executions in blockchain must go through user interactions."

In the future, running Fully On-Chain Games on Artela may become "the Earth keeps turning without you", meaning players design the rules and the system operates automatically.

For blockchain, which is currently somewhat difficult for playing board games, achieving smooth interaction requires higher demands on the computing layer. "We aim to achieve one hundred times that of EVM." Thanks to the experience accumulated on AntChain, CP added, "In fact, current test data indicates that we are already able to approach two orders of magnitude in terms of computing power."

But they do not want to replace Ethereum; projects on the Ethereum chain can be transferred to Artela with one click. CP "abstract" summarizes the features of Artela: "Simply put, if we compare the EVM to the CPU of the blockchain, we are adding a GPU to the blockchain." In simpler terms, large games can be played on the blockchain in the future.

"In the era of Internet finance, services like Jiebei and Huabei are innovations that have evolved from 0 to 1. We have all experienced the transformation from a vague concept to a concrete commercial product, and we understand the complexity behind it." CP believes that taking the same path in the era of public chains presents many challenges, but fortunately, we have experience to reference.

Most of the team members at Artela come from Ant Group. "A well-coordinated team of a dozen people has similar work progress to a team of over twenty people." Established just a few months ago, Artela has secured $6 million in seed funding, led by Shima Capital, with participation from A&T Capital, Big Brain Holdings, SevenX Ventures, Dispersion Capital, and Amino Capital.

Artela's testnet was launched in September, and currently, it adopts a selective invitation system for its ecological partners. Defi and Fully On-chain Games may both become key areas of focus in the future. CP stated that Artela does not intend to engage in common public chain activities such as airdrops and regular combinations, but rather aims to explore innovations with ecological applications. They will be devoted to development in the coming months, with a formal public test expected around December.

It can consistently achieve hundreds of millions of daily active users. Without a doubt, Ant Chain has already reached the ceiling in certain areas of Web3. However, their activity seems to be vaguely isolated from Web3.

Just as the decentralized nature of Web3 brings "open source" rather than "patents". Compared to the mainstream public chains in foreign technology, there is also some "mismatch" with the non-cryptocurrency blockchain, also known as consortium chains, which are more suited to the domestic context. AntChain aims to pave a different path for Web3 in China, focusing on open consortium chains and industrial Web3.

As early as 2017, Ant had already believed in the future of blockchain. At that time, the industry was not yet mature, but Ant had already regarded blockchain as a core strategic focus. "Back then, Ant said it would invest heavily, but in fact, not many people understood it. We were a very small team. After looking at a lot of foreign literature and reports, I felt that this technology still had great potential, especially in the context of globalization, where it could have financial applications. I think that is particularly valuable."

Jerry, who serves as the Chief Architect, studied the white papers of Bitcoin and Ethereum. As his research deepened, he became increasingly convinced that blockchain is the next stage of "serving finance with technology."

In the same year, Jiang Guofei, the "Number One" of Ant Chain, joined Ant Financial as Vice President and President of the Financial Technology Business Line, overseeing Ant Blockchain. The strategic level of Ant Chain within the group continues to rise. Ant Chain is gaining momentum, with cross-border remittances, supply chain finance, electronic invoices, judicial storage of evidence... Applications based on the industry side have fully blossomed in a short period.

In 2018, Alipay Hong Kong launched a blockchain-based cross-border remittance feature, allowing over 180,000 Filipino domestic workers to send their wages home without having to wait several days and pay relatively high cross-border fees. Inclusive finance, Ant Group had already achieved successful case solutions early on.

CP also became a popular engineer of the company for a time. Jack Ma mentioned CP during the second World Intelligent Congress, along with his widely circulated matchmaking anecdote.

"We have an engineer at Ant Financial who wrote 'Engineer' on his dating resume, a coder, and as a result, no one clicked on his resume; the girls were not interested in him. Later, he changed his resume to 'Blockchain Engineer' and received over two hundred love letters."

In 2020, Ant Blockchain announced a brand upgrade to Ant Chain, and the company's executives stated that this decision "is no less significant than the decision to establish Alipay".

However, three years have passed, and AntChain, which has been deeply cultivating the Web3 industry, has not welcomed a truly "Alipay" level application.

Taking cross-border remittances as an example, a relevant person in charge at Ant Group told the WSJ that there are no technical barriers to cross-border remittances, but the level of support for this technology varies by each country's policies and regulations, making such projects more customized. "At that time, we collaborated with Standard Chartered Bank, which was already our long-term partner."

Even during the Spring Festival, the popular Whale Explorer, with over 100 million daily active users, faces issues of unsold collectibles and difficulty in breaking through market barriers. Previously, the digital collectibles launched by Whale Explorer were mostly cultural and artistic pieces, making it hard for young people to find them trendy. "But my dad really likes it; this is the only product I've made that he has consistently used." The work content of CP is of great interest to family members, and Whale Explorer may be one of the easiest products to understand among them.

"Although Ant Group is very advanced in fintech, the domestic regulatory framework mainly revolves around consortium chains. This actually removes the essence of blockchain, which is to use digital assets as their value representation. I believe that in the future, we still need to pursue the path of public chains, but currently, there is no soil for public chains in the domestic market." Jerry is more optimistic about the future of public chains.

The consortium chain that strips away the concept of digital assets has no basis for rights confirmation and incentives. "The consortium chain only undertakes data-level things. To truly reconstruct production relationships, I think we are still far from that stage."

"To truly run through a commercialized scenario, having a blockchain is not enough; there are still many aspects of technical support that are not in place, and the end-to-end process is not fully operational.