WaykiChain Co-founder & CEO Gordon Gao: Exploration and Practice of Public Chain Implementation
WaykiChain Co-founder & CEO Gordon Gao: Exploration and Practice of Public Chain Implementation
WaykiChain Starts Public Chain Exploration from Just Needs of the Market
Looking back, we can divide public chain development into three stages. The first one is budding, 2014 to 2017. The second one is exploration, 2018 to 2019. The third one is implementation, this year and on. As one of many public chains, WaykiChain explored and attempted a lot during 2018–2019.
In 2018, public chains were super popular. Many consider it the first year of public chain development. In May 2018, WaykiChain held a strategic conference in Shenzhen. WaykiChain mainnet and the first quiz product launched together. Later that year, public chains like EOS, Ontology, and IOST launched. The main pursuit of the blockchain industry at the time was not the implementation or created value, but concepts and future possibilities.
Initially, WaykiChain wanted to start its public chain ecology with quizzes because we believed that quizzes and blockchain had a natural integration point. The fairness, openness, and transparency of blockchain could solve the black-box operations, fund security, and other issues of the quiz industry.
However, when we discussed technology iterations and product development plans, we found that the market is not particularly willing to pay for our solution and the incremental value it can bring is not enough to cover the cost of learning and understanding of blockchain for the public. The threshold to understand blockchain, what smart contracts are, and how to buy digital assets is high for traditional users.
Later, we saw that DApp value is less than the learning cost plus the value of the original product. In late 2018, we also tried game DApps and found that their features are a pseudo demand and not a just need for users.
By the end of 2019, the DApp wave had gone and many public chains invested less than one-tenth of their budget in DApps. Chances were that the public chain market faced its death. Many teams switched to alliance chains or outsourcing and only a few public chains were left. This was the context when WaykiChain started the transformation of commercial applications.
DeFi Commercial Application Transformation: Taking the Lead in DeFi Layout
1. Why Decentralized Finance?
In early 2019, WaykiChain was the leading DeFi project in the Chinese market. When taking the DeFi decision, we considered three reasons.
First, what kind of needs are just, what kind of demand can lead people from the traditional world to the decentralized world? We saw some blockchain believers and programmers who had the idea to change the world. No doubt, they were more interested in investors that maximize profits in the blockchain industry. No matter what group of people we talk to, making and borrowing money have been people’s just needs since ancient times. Features of blockchain such as cost reduction and high efficiency can help people solve this demand specifically.
Second, in any financial activity, the system generates certain profits. When people borrow money to pay the interest, a part of this interest is the profit of the whole system. This upgrades blockchain from the zero-sum game of “either you lose, or I win” to a win-win solution for all.
Third, no matter if you do a quiz DApp or something else, if you want to connect blockchain with a wider audience, you need to have your own stablecoin circulating on the whole public chain. The best stablecoin solution is generation through collateralized lending.
2. What DeFi Products Does WaykiChain Have?
On October 21, 2019, we launched the first DeFi product, Wayki-CDP. What problems can it solve? When you hold certain digital assets, like BTC, ETH, or WICC, and need to put them into circulation in the short term without selling them, you can pledge the assets and borrow stablecoins. You can use these stablecoins for investment and daily expenses, while solving the liquidity problem for other users.
Wayki-CDP has been in normal stable operation for one year. This September, WICC collateral reached 46 million tokens, which is about USD 11 million of TVL. Loans in WUSD stablecoin reached USD 2.7 million. What do these figures stand for? WaykiChain’s market cap is less than one-thousandth of Ethereum’s, but we rank the top five among Ethereum lending protocols. It’s quite a challenge to reach this operational volume.
We’ve got a new problem. How to expand the circulation scenarios of WUSD? If a stablecoin lacks circulation scenarios, it faces a lack of liquidity and even a value decline. We cooperate with W Broker, a licensed securities company that helps users trade in Hong Kong stock market and accepts WUSD. WaykiChain also reached strategic cooperation with Atlas Mimarlik, a well-known Turkish construction company, and Vintage Boutique Hotel Alacati, a global hotel chain. WUSD has become one of their important payment options. However, our public chain ecosystem needs more scenarios like these.
Data says that 90% of the trading volume in traditional finance comes from derivatives. Therefore, it is necessary to introduce derivatives to DeFi to increase the trading volume. In early 2020, we started the derivatives layout. In September, we launched Wayki-X, the decentralized synthetic asset protocol. What problems does this protocol solve?
Earlier this year, crude oil prices plummeted, and so did the US stocks. We believe, everyone would have liked to enter this market and earn some money in the global financial market turbulence. Guess what, you could not. For ordinary investors, the entry threshold is too high. However, Wayki-X allows investment in a variety of global target assets with a low threshold and at almost zero cost. Users can profit from value fluctuations without holding the original assets.
Currently, the underlying protocol framework of WaykiChain is relatively complete. It covers lending, investment, and derivatives trading. Next, we will focus on the improvement of functions, products, and services of the underlying transaction protocol. We will open this experience to more users, will give more development projects to programmers, and will provide more innovations to entrepreneurs.
Ecosystem Deepening: Technology, Community, and Strategic Investments
Besides laying out our business model, we also need build a good public chain infrastructure. Investment in technology has always been our focus. On July 20, WaykiChain 3.0 launched and brought some exciting features.
1. We have gradually increased TPS from 1,100 in public chain 1.0 to 3,300, and again to 4,500+ in 3.0. 4,500+ TPS can meet 99% of the financial needs. WaykiChain is a leader here.
2. Originally, we used the lightweight Lua VM, but introduced the more powerful WASM. Wayki-X is developed with WASM. Now, WaykiChain supports dual-VM development with Lua + WASM.
3. Cross-chain functionality brings innovation to the consensus mechanism, bottom-level accounts, CDP, and DEX.
Besides the continuous iterative technology updates, WaykiChain has also developed community and made strategic investments. In 2018, 99% of WaykiChain community users were from China. By the end of 2019, our overseas communities made a significant progress, Twitter had 14,500 followers, Telegram had 10,000 active members, and 30% of WGRT users were from abroad, including Japan, South Korea, Turkey, and Vietnam.
In the past two years, we have invested in the incubation of W Broker, Gyro Finance (Tuoluocaijing.cn), and Beekuaibao. W Broker is a licensed securities company in Hong Kong that accepts deposits and withdrawals in USDT and WUSD and manages more than USD 150 million. Gyro Finance is a new financial information service platform for the blockchain industry. It has 9,000+ financial columns, over 2 million registered users, and an average of 200,000 daily users. Beekuaibao is a leading Chinese streaming platform. Its core team comes from BAT, it has 2.6 million registered users and about 7 million of content items. The current business expansion and profitability of these three companies are very good-looking.
In the past three years, WaykiChain has explored and attempted a lot. We have stepped into the pit, suffered losses, and had some detours. However, we are lucky we are on the straight road that is DeFi. We will continue to explore and innovate, improve our products, attract more users, provide a more secure and stable public chain, and further expand global communities.
Website: www.waykichain.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/wayki_chain
Telegram: https://t.me/wiccofficial
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WaykiChainWICC/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/waykichain/
