Dr. Xiao Zhen graduated from Cornell University in the United States, and after graduation, he worked as a researcher at AT&T Laboratories (formerly Bell Laboratories) and the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in the United States, and received the "Research Excellence Achievement Award" during his time at AT&T. In 2008, Professor Xiao Zhen returned to Peking University as a researcher and doctoral supervisor under the "Thousand Talents Program". His open course on Blockchain Technology and Applications has received over 1.4 million views on Bilibili.
The "OKX Campus Interview" series hopes to understand the perspective of campus personnel on the development of the Web3 industry through dialogues, and at the same time provide reference for the campus group to enter Web3 for employment and entrepreneurship. In this issue, we have specially invited Professor Xiao Zhen to be the guest speaker of the "OKX Campus Interview", hoping that his sharing will be helpful to you.
The "OKX Campus Interview" series is a special column produced by OKX, hosted by OKX official community ambassador Mercy (@Mercy_okx), aiming to explore the industry perspectives of global campus personnel and provide reference for friends who are starting businesses in Web3 and looking for employment.
1. Around 2018, you delved into underlying Blockchain technologies such as Ethereum. Over the past few years, the Web3 and Blockchain industry has gone through multiple stages of development. What significant changes have you observed in terms of technological evolution, industry ecosystem, and talent?
Our traditional field is distributed systems, and our past research work has mostly focused on optimizing the network layer and consensus protocols. In recent years, Blockchain has seen significant improvements in performance, with the emergence of various Layer 2 technologies. For example, Optimistic Rollup and zk Rollup technologies have greatly improved network performance by executing most transactions outside the main chain, while maintaining a certain degree of decentralization and security. Of course, the decentralization of some Layer 2 solutions is still debated. A landmark event in recent years is the Ethereum upgrade, the most prominent of which is the transition from PoW to PoS, which has significantly reduced energy consumption, in line with the concept of green environmental protection in today's world.
From the perspective of the industry ecosystem, DeFi, Metaverse, and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have all experienced explosive growth. Peking University has established a Metaverse Technology Research Institute, where I serve as the deputy director, focusing on the integration of AI and Blockchain technology. In the past few years, in addition to the mainstream Blockchain technologies and applications, emerging projects such as Theta Network have also brought important innovations and contributions to the Blockchain ecosystem. Theta Network is a Blockchain project focused on decentralized video streaming, which solves the problems of bandwidth bottlenecks, high costs, and centralization in traditional video transmission through the introduction of Blockchain and crypto-economic models. Unlike traditional streaming platforms (such as YouTube and Twitch), Theta Network utilizes the idle bandwidth and computing resources of global users for decentralized video content distribution, thereby reducing the cost of content delivery networks (CDNs).
From the perspective of talent cultivation, many traditional software developers and Web 2.0 developers have transitioned into Web 3.0, bringing rich engineering experience to the Blockchain and Web 3.0 industry, driving the professionalization and diversification of Blockchain application development.
2. In your teaching, you have interacted with students from different backgrounds. How do you see the current understanding of Blockchain technology among young people compared to a few years ago?
It should be said that the group of students who understood Blockchain technology a few years ago was still relatively niche. The 2017 crypto bull market caused many people to start paying attention to Bitcoin and Blockchain. I have offered courses on "Blockchain Technology and Applications" and "Introduction to Metaverse Technology" at Peking University, and the students who take my courses are mostly from science and engineering backgrounds. They are interested in the technical principles of Blockchain, consensus protocols, and Web 3.0 application development. My course assignments include implementing the cryptographic basics and consensus protocols of Blockchain using Go language, and programming smart contracts using Solidity.
At the same time, there are also some students from humanities backgrounds who are more focused on the application scenarios, financial attributes, and social impact of Blockchain, such as decentralized governance models, privacy protection, and digital sovereignty, which have the potential for social transformation. The cross-disciplinary integration and community-based practices of Blockchain have also made students more open and collaborative in their technological exploration, indicating that Blockchain technology will achieve more far-reaching applications and transformations in more fields in the future. In the past two years, with the rise of AI technology, I have also added content on chatbots, AIGC, and related legal and ethical issues in my courses. A feature of my lectures is to connect theory with practice, and a dedicated part of the course content is to discuss crypto scams to prevent students from being deceived in the future.
Overall, the understanding of Blockchain and Web 3.0 among contemporary young people is showing a more diversified trend. However, it is still a relatively niche field, and the number of students interested is not as high as courses on AI and algorithms.
3. What opportunities and challenges do you see for students in the Blockchain or Web3 industry in terms of entrepreneurship and employment?
The Blockchain and Web3 industry is currently in a stage of rapid development, and the opportunities abroad are somewhat more than in China. Mastering programming languages like Solidity and Go is the foundation for entering the Blockchain development field, and you also need to be familiar with development tools like Remix and Truffle, as well as the process of testing and deploying contracts. In China, due to policy factors, the focus is mainly on consortium Blockchains. My research group has cooperative relationships with mainstream consortium Blockchains in China (such as ChainAn Chain, Xingkong Chain, and AntChain). In order to improve the system throughput of consortium Blockchains and enhance the user experience, we have conducted in-depth analysis of the existing consortium Blockchain consensus algorithms, and the results show that the traditional research on improving system throughput by optimizing consensus protocols has overlooked the impact of data distribution on system throughput, shifting the performance bottleneck from the consensus layer to the network layer. To solve the performance bottleneck in the network layer, we have proposed a new data flow framework consisting of Predis and Multizone, which allows consensus nodes to utilize their idle bandwidth to pre-distribute block content in parallel, thereby confirming more transactions in a single consensus round, and reducing transmission latency through a compression-based block construction rule. Furthermore, the Multizone strategy further divides the network into multiple zones and combines multicast trees with erasure coding to reduce bandwidth peaks and data propagation latency in data distribution. The results of our collaboration with AntChain have been applied to AntGroup's business scenarios and have achieved significant results, winning the "CCF-Ant Research Fund Excellent Application Project" award.
At the same time, young people should also have the opportunity to accumulate development experience in public Blockchain projects abroad. Our group's collaboration with the Theta Blockchain public chain has been very helpful for students to deeply understand the working principles, consensus mechanisms, and transmission protocols of public chains, which is also the foundation for future entrepreneurship and employment abroad. The main difference between public chains and consortium chains is the incentive mechanism. Designing a reasonable token economic incentive mechanism requires a deep understanding of crypto-economics (Tokenomics). A good Blockchain project often requires cross-disciplinary knowledge, including computer science, finance, and law, and at the same time needs to accurately grasp user experience and diverse market demands, with strong product thinking to design innovative Blockchain applications. I want to emphasize one point here: whether working in the Blockchain industry at home or abroad, you must always abide by the relevant laws and regulations of the country. Products with financial attributes are subject to strong regulation in many countries, so you should not be obsessed with speculative "money-making effects", but should focus on building impactful projects in a down-to-earth manner.
4. What key factors should students prioritize when choosing entrepreneurship or employment in the Web3 industry?
I believe we should first consider whether the target market is domestic or overseas. There are significant differences between the startup and employment environment in the Web 3.0 industry in mainland China and overseas: Mainland China has relatively strict regulations on the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry, explicitly prohibiting virtual currency trading, so domestic Web 3.0 startups cannot rely on issuing tokens or ICOs for financing or revenue. Decentralized finance (DeFi) and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are also subject to strict regulation in China, such as the prohibition of secondary markets for NFT transactions. This also leads to greater financing difficulties, and venture capital firms tend to be cautious about Web 3.0 startups. China supports the non-financial applications of blockchain, i.e., the separation of currency and chain. Domestic blockchain companies are mostly focused on consortium chains and are world-leading in areas such as supply chain finance, food traceability, judicial evidence, and data security. China has a large number of high-quality Internet and Web 2.0 talents, but the number of Web 3.0 companies is relatively limited, mostly concentrated in technical development and underlying protocol research, and there are not many blockchain-related job opportunities, with many domestic blockchain companies relying on government projects to support their main revenue. In contrast, some countries (such as Singapore) have relatively lax regulatory policies on Web 3.0, with relatively transparent and stable laws and regulations, which helps startups develop within a predictable policy framework, with lower compliance costs and faster progress in financing and commercialization. It is worth noting that the regulatory policy in the United States is tending to be stricter, and ICOs are no longer as easy as they were six years ago. However, the financing atmosphere in Silicon Valley is still very good, with mature venture capital and incubators supporting it, and a relatively high acceptance of Web 3.0, with many venture capital firms actively deploying in the Web 3.0 field, making it relatively easy for startups to obtain funding support.
