On November 16, BitWell and PlatON entered into a strategic partnership. Both parties will focus on system security, distributed ledger, data privacy, community users and other areas of all-round cooperation, aiming to effectively protect users’ private data and create a more secure digital asset platform.
On November 17 at 12:00 UTC, BitWell invited PlatON to be the guest of the Chinese community, and Jason, the community ambassador of PlatON, shared the topic of “The B-side of Data: Privacy and Security”.
Here is the full recap of the live broadcast.
Q&A
Catherine: Welcome to BitWellAMA, please introduce yourself to us first.
Jason: Hi everyone, I’m Jason, currently an ambassador of PlatON Foundation, I have more personal experience, engaged in the military industry, participated in a number of blockchain projects and design work, the main author of the preparation of a local government to guide the transformation and upgrading of bitcoin mining planning and the construction of a demonstration park of consumption, was the first batch of responding to the Prime Minister’s “dual innovation” call and came out. “He is one of the first young people who responded to the call of the Prime Minister, and has rich experience in the physical circle, mining circle and chain circle.
I’m glad to be here today to share with you about my understanding of PlatON and the privacy protection track.
Catherine: Thank you Jason for your introduction, let’s move on to the Q&A session.
Q1: As privacy-preserving computation technology comes under the spotlight and becomes widely known, enterprises in this field have been favored by capital. What makes you optimistic about PlatON as opposed to other privacy-preserving computation projects? How is PlatON different from its competitors?
Jason: Strictly speaking, privacy preservation has always been a hot direction that deserves attention, yet still not the most popular in the industry, considering hits such as DeFi last year and NFT and the metaverse this year.
But if you’re sensitive to market dynamics, you will find them like a flash in the pan.
By contrast, privacy preservation remains one of the major tracks in the industry for all these years.
On one hand, it falls within the category of infrastructure that underpins almost all upper-level applications, including DeFi, NFT, and the metaverse as we mentioned. It’s of extensive use.
On the other hand, privacy preservation poses a high threshold. Or I may say, it’s quite demanding and costs a lot in terms of capital and technology, leaving little room for speculation.
The two reasons contribute to its long-standing popularity while keeping it away from bubbles.
That also explains why I’m optimistic about PlatON.
As I said before, privacy-preserving computation is a hard nut. Among so many teams dedicated to this concept, few could really make it. They need to meet the following prerequisites:
- A stable, professional R&D team, especially in cryptography;
- Large long-term capital input;
- Capability of realizing technologies through engineering approaches;
- Capabilities of building application scenarios involving multilateral collaboration and resource integration.
The PlatON team is well-rounded in this regard, compared with many other similar project teams. So I’m quite interested in it.
It’s still a long way to go before the large-scale business application of the privacy-preserving computation, so we could hardly tell now who would be the ultimate winner. But at least, PlatON is promising.
Q2: As we all know, an underlying technology facility could not make it without an ecosystem. So in your opinion, what differentiates PlatON from its peers in ecosystem construction, and what are its advantages over other ecosystems committed to the underlying architecture?
Jason: I think PlatON serves as both a Turing-complete public chain and a privacy-preserving AI network.
There are many Turing-complete public chains, yet few focus on privacy preservation.
PlatON’s core competence lies in privacy preservation, and it outperforms others as a public chain.
Its ecosystem strategy could better illustrate my point. Before the launch of the privacy-preserving network, PlatON tends to get everything ready first.
We can also see PlatON’s efforts in the public chain as it is setting up an ecosystem step by step. At present, PlatON Hackathon PLUS is ongoing, attracting more than 30 teams to deploy their projects on the underlying level. Before that, there were projects in the Hackathon Grants.
Meanwhile, PlatON has been working to cultivate an ecosystem overseas, and is favored by global tech giants such as Google. Such success is obviously much owed to its nature as a privacy-preserving AI network.
Being the way it is, PlatON needs to focus on global products and business of privacy-preserving AI as well as the ecosystem.
So while drawing more projects to it, PlatON is also going outside. Every coin has two sides, and for the time being, we can’t just jump to a conclusion about which method is better. It takes time to see.
With many years of technological development, PlatON is still in its infancy with its Mainnet launched within less than a year. I hope it can keep iterating on the way forward and roll out the optimal strategies in response to the market dynamics.
Q3: PlatON 2.0 clearly shows its product orientation: a decentralized privacy-preserving computation network, decentralized AI market, and decentralized AI collaboration network. So what’s your opinion on such a progressive roadmap? What’s the vision of PlatON? What kind of goals will it achieve?
Jason: It’s fair to say that PlatON has made huge progress.
Compared with whitepaper 1.0, whitepaper 2.0 shows clearer evolution ideas and more feasible application plans. Still, it has a lot to do.
The above three layers of network architecture advance in due order, and constitute an organic whole.
The first is a decentralized privacy-preserving computation network. A decentralized data-sharing and privacy-preserving computation network is set up to bring together data owners, data users, algorithm developers and algorithm providers.
The second layer is a decentralized AI market that, based on the privacy-preserving computation network, realizes the joint construction and sharing of AI assets and fast smart application development to provide products and services ranging from AI hashing power and algorithms through AI capacity to its production, deployment and integration.
The third is a decentralized AI collaboration network, which, based on the prosperous AI ecosystem thanks to the AI market, allows for large-scale AI collaboration and pools collective wisdom to execute complex AI services.
In the end, atop the architecture is a ubiquitous, accessible, and evolving AI brain powered by collective wisdom.
From then on, AI will no longer be a luxury serving scientists and elites, but a tool readily accessible to every one of us.
Q4: PlatON has released the whitepaper 2.0. The biggest change lies in the switch in the position from a privacy-preserving computation network and distributed economic infrastructure to a privacy-preserving AI computation network. What does that mean to you? Will PlatON embrace a larger market and more challenges?
Jason: I consider it a wise adjustment. As we all know, privacy preservation is a fundamental demand for all. It will be a must in the future digital economic era.
But in most cases, being useful everywhere is basically equivalent to being useful nowhere.
That’s how people would feel when they saw the previous position of a decentralized economic infrastructure. That was quite confusing.
In whitepaper 2.0, the position of PlatON is better-targeted, and goes down to AI, which reveals clearer goals and paths and is thus more practical.
From the perspective of business, big data and AI technology permeate down to all walks of life, but unfortunately, traditional big data or AI technology has hit the bottleneck due to data privacy preservation.
AI technology is basically trained in this way: first, we need to collect diverse and valuable data, and then, through training with AI technology, work out a model which will be applied in various scenarios.
Nowadays, it’s difficult for one institution to collect all the data as it is growing at an exponential rate. As a special asset, data will not be shared among enterprises since the data diversity directly determines the accuracy of the model and thus business costs and risks.
In respect of AI algorithms, the more data, the better; while from the perspective of privacy preservation, the less data exposed, the better. Such an inherent conflict has posed the biggest obstacle to further application of AI technology.
The privacy-preserving computation network and the product matrix it provides are dedicated to solving the fundamental problem facing the data and AI technology in the future. Only when data is made credible and usable yet invisible, will data owners be willing to put their data into circulation. In this way, data ownership and usage right can be separated from each other, the data value can be utilized, and the data owners’ benefits can be guaranteed, which will greatly catalyze the prosperity in the data market and AI development by leaps and bounds. That means a lot for both the market and society as a whole.
Opportunities always come with challenges. As far as I’m concerned, there are two major challenges:
First of all, technological breakthroughs. At present, many problems remain in the versatility and efficiency of technologies related to privacy preservation. If unsolved, they would seriously affect the practicality.
Second, the construction of application scenarios. The application of privacy-preserving computation involves the trust and collaboration of multiple parties. How to find suitable application scenarios, persuade stakeholders to join and coordinate them is another key.
Q5: According to PlatON’s whitepaper, we can see that the team is quite familiar with the Scalability Trilemma in the blockchain, which can be hardly balanced in theory. What did PlatON do in this regard?
Jason: Instead of slashing the nodes to improve scalability or making itself completely decentralized like Bitcoin, PlatON has made a trade-off: to realize the PPoS consensus through DPoS and VRF algorithms, that is, to allow any token holder to elect validator candidates by voting and randomly draw a limited number of consensus nodes according to weight.
Then the self-developed high-performance Giskard consensus protocol is adopted. Block generation and block verification go in parallel, which greatly improves the block generation rate while guaranteeing one-third of the fault tolerance of BFT.
The limited number of nodes guarantees performance, and random selection ensures security. At the same time, a large enough base of consensus nodes can be maintained, thereby effectively avoiding over-centralization. In this way, PlatON has provided an innovative solution to the “Scalability Trilemma”.
Q6: PlatON’s two products, PlatON To B and PlatON To C, are similarly aiming at the trillion-dollar-level market. In this situation, how will PlatON seize the market share? And do you think LAT will become a financial instrument for global data circulation, transaction, and pricing? Why?
Jason: From the perspective of privacy-preserving computation, PlatON To B and PlatON To C target different markets and will adopt different market strategies.
To an extent, PlatON To C is more tolerant of defects in product functions and performance but with higher usability and entertaining requirements. So I think in the case of To C, the focus should be put on community activity and ecosystem construction to form an independent closed-loop system, as I mentioned in the previous answers.
On the other hand, PlatON To B is more demanding. It calls for usable, easy-to-use, and durable products. In this regard, I suggest the teams stretch their resource advantages in the primary industry to integrate strategic resources and preliminarily set up application scenarios. In the early stage of the project, the goal should not be profits but the timely engineering experiments on technology in the application scenarios. That not only helps to form an iterative approach in R&D but also sets an example for the following procedures. When the project wins a good reputation among users, it will be gradually promoted and eventually occupy more market shares.
As for whether LAT can become a financial instrument for global data circulation, transactions, and pricing, a mere verbal statement is no guarantee. I can only say that if the privacy-preserving AI network could come into reality, it would have the potential to become such an instrument. All this requires joint efforts and will be witnessed by every participant.
Questions from the community
1. Recently, we’ve noticed PlatON’s announcement of its full compatibility with Ethereum. Could you please share your views on the potential planning and vision of PlatON in the future ecosystem construction?
Jason: Full compatibility with Ethereum is not an ultimate goal, but a start.
It costs a lot for an ecosystem to grow. Too much detail orientation will spread ecosystem builders too thin, so we need to focus on the key points. To be specific, we need to figure out the demand of ecosystem participants in their position.
What they need, in my opinion, is as below:
To begin with, is it convenient to join this ecosystem? Such convenience means fewer extra trial costs, and will convince those bystanders to get on board. That’s the aim behind PlatON’s full compatibility with Ethereum;
Still, that’s not enough. The next step is to incubate excellent projects. Such support involves capital (e.g. grants and investments), channels (quality media, partners, users, etc.), and technology (e.g. basic tools, SDK, and development guide).
All these efforts are to spot and keep promising native projects and also to show its thirst for good project teams, thereby drawing in more projects.
Last but not least, differentiated competition is based on its core competitiveness. Examples include Flow that focuses on NFT and gaming, Solana which features high-TPS DeFi, and also PlatON whose selling point lies in privacy-preserving computation. So it’s imperative for the team to improve relevant functions and provide more comprehensive support for projects.
The above are my suggestions on the future ecosystem construction. I’m confident that with efficient ecosystem construction, PlatON will stand out from public chains.
2.Can you give us a short introduction to your cooperation with Google?Jason: This is a very important new thing recently, while the official have not disclosed the details of the cooperation. From my view, it will mainly focus on the following aspects, the follow-up will be carried out in turn.
a. Product cooperation, mainly in tensorflow framework and cloud security.
b. joint promotional activities, such as hackathon, aimed at promoting the cultivation of relevant talent pool and industry warm-up.
c. Exploration of privacy computing direction, including the development and construction of application scenarios, as well as academic discussions on related technologies.
3.As an ordinary user, how can I participate in the PlatON project? And what should I do to maximize the benefits?
Jason: The way everyone looks at earnings is not consistent, some want to make money, some want to technical learning, some want visibility, varying, I can not answer everything, can only tell you some of the conventional ways to participate.
a. become the main network node, for a certain technical strength and economic strength of the team or individual, you can choose to build a node and become the verifier node through the form of canvassing or self-polling.
b. Participate in commissioning, that is, what we usually call staking, entrusting the LAT in their hands to the candidate nodes, electing them to become the outgoing block nodes, and can obtain the corresponding staking revenue.
c. Become a developer and contribute to the ecological construction in terms of development and testing, including but not limited to basic technology research, tool development, testing, code auditing, documentation, etc. For more information, please refer to the LatticeX Foundation Grants Program. Participants who make contributions in this area can obtain the relevant support from the Foundation by applying for GRATN, including financial and personnel support.
d. Become a community builder, either in an informal way, such as weibo, telegram groups, forums, etc., to participate in daily topic discussions and interactions, and contribute creativity and vitality; or in a formal way, such as applying to become a community ambassador, by participating in ambassadorial tasks, such as content publication, online and offline activities, etc., to promote the construction and improvement of the ecology, you can also get the corresponding rewards.
e. Participate in activities such as hackathon, including the subsequent joint hackathon with Google, etc. There are special technical guidance, prize pools, and also rich channels to help promote and enhance the visibility of individuals or teams.
4.PlatON aims to be a next-generation computation infrastructure, primarily focusing on scalability and privacy preservation. How is it different from its counterparts? What are the differences in the services provided for users?
Jason: As you said, PlatON focuses on privacy preservation, and what sets it apart from many other similarly Turing-complete, platform-based public chain projects is the wide range of smart contracts it supports. In addition to the popular EVM, PlatON is also compatible with the following types of smart contracts:
WASM contract: WebAssembly-based (WASM) contracts support development in high-level languages such as C++, Rust, and GO, which are compiled to the format that the WebAssembly engine can execute.
Privacy-preserving contract: The input data of the privacy-preserving contract is stored in the local data nodes and secretly shared to multiple random computational nodes, which then perform privacy-preserving computation via off-chain secure collaborative computing to realize decentralized data allocation, automatic transaction clearing and settlement, and accurate tracking and auditing of the entire process on the chain.
Verifiable contract: Verifiable contracts support complex, strenuous computational logic without affecting the performance of the entire chain.
5.The hottest topic in the crypto circle seems to be the metaverse. As we all know, Facebook has just changed its name to “Meta”, and Microsoft has released its metaverse strategy. But everyone has a different understanding of the metaverse. Apple thinks the metaverse is the combination of VR and AR technologies. What’s your opinion? Will the blockchain be the underlying technology for the metaverse? What role do you believe PlatON can play in the macro-structure of the metaverse?
Jason: The metaverse is a good concept but also an abstruse, vague, and insubstantial one.
In fact, I’ve been emphasizing that we can only know what the metaverse really is when it eventually takes shape. Any premature consumption will go in vain.
So everyone is looking at the metaverse through a tunnel vision. We see it from what we like or are familiar with, depending on our own perspective.
But in any case, the metaverse is bound to be part of the digital economy.
The global trends in planning and technology advance have shown one thing in common: data must be the most precious production factor in the era of digital economy.
Therefore, from my point of view, PlatON will serve as a shared infrastructure in the metaverse industry or the digital economy. It can provide computing power to comprehensively support data circulation, transaction and protection, authentic right certification and value aggregation, and also serve a variety of applications at the upper level, such as DeFi, digital twins, or digital collections.
More details : https://platonworld.org/platon/strategic-partnership-bitwell-platon/
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