After "graduating" from Ant, they flock to Web3

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

In the tech world of 2023, there are almost heavyweight news every day; it is the year of generative AI and also the deep bear year of 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. Meanwhile, financing in the AI sector reached $25 billion in the first half of the year. One of the largest venture capitals in crypto has undergone a paradigm shift, stating that it will no longer focus solely on the cryptocurrency and Web3 fields, but will expand its areas of interest to include 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 in Web3 seems to be more lively than before. During the bear market, there are still discussions about compliance, ZKP (zero-knowledge proof), and Bitcoin ETFs. Some people also choose to enter the market at this moment.

"When I communicate with colleagues at Ant, I often draw parallels between AI and Web3; their development trajectories are quite similar." Jerry Li compared, over the past sixty years, there have been three waves of artificial intelligence, each time with funding in the billions to tens of billions, with peaks and troughs continuously alternating, until something emerges out of nowhere. "This new large-scale technological revolution requires several rounds of cycles to truly bring about leapfrog development."

Jerry Li has had several notable labels: former chief architect of AntChain, former director of R&D at Apple China, top scorer in the college entrance examination in Shanxi Province, and now he adds another one — a newcomer in Web3.

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 level of P10.

"The industry is still too early; compared to AI, it hasn't reached the development of its last round. Currently, the total market value of the entire cryptocurrency market is still less than half of that of Apple. "Jerry feels that compared to his former employer, the Web3 pie still seems too small.

Of course, compared to AI that has been around for over half a century, Web3 seems to still be in its adolescence.

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

Rebellious and unstable, the growing pains that Web3 is experiencing have made "parents" shake their heads. After the market crash in November last year with a market value of 32 billion USD, regulators in various places began to tighten the reins on this "little rascal."

At such a critical 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 asked about the reason, Jerry quoted a famous saying from Ant: "Because I believe, I 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, nothing can be transported.

In the public chain track, there are long-established Web3 founding 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 were born with a golden key.

Nowadays, choosing a relatively crowded track, I talked to Jerry about his views on the "first mover advantage."

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

The biggest difference between Artela and other chains lies not in the current "involution" of Scalability, but in Extensibility, 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 often used in the Web3 community. In other contexts, it can also 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 "Ant Gang" in the internet era is the shaper of Mass Adoption. In their context, Mass Adoption is closer to building another "Alipay" in Web3.

Of course, it is filled with experience. Artela's CTO Qiu Honglin (alias: CP) previously worked on the underlying architecture support for Ant Group's digital collectibles platform. He stated that he had already achieved over a hundred million daily active users through the New Year’s collection activity. "At that time, we had already achieved stable on-chain transactions at the billion level, while Ethereum was only in the millions. From a certain perspective, it can be said that Ant Blockchain 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 a hobby incubation group.

"They say that if anyone from Ant Group wants to talk about blockchain, by the time they ask the second person, my name will definitely come up." CP's hair is slightly curly, and when he speaks, he has a hint of a Cantonese accent. It often feels like a casual chat, but upon closer listening, the content is very professional and detailed. Ant Chain holds the most patents in the world, and CP alone possesses hundreds of blockchain patents.

Regarding Extensibility, CP gave an example: "In games, besides the player input on the front end, there are also back-end elements, such as map refreshes, time and weather, or when a big boss dies, the little monsters nearby will also be eliminated. In the case of blockchain, there are no back-end tasks, because all executions in blockchain must be interacted with by users."

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

For the blockchain, which currently finds it a bit difficult to play board games, achieving smooth interactions requires higher demands on the computational layer. "We aim to achieve one hundred times that of EVM." Thanks to the experience accumulated in AntChain, CP added, "In fact, current test data indicates that we are already approaching two orders of magnitude in terms of computation."

But they do not want to replace Ethereum; projects on the Ethereum chain can be transferred to Artela with one click. CP's "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, products like Jiebei and Huabei are innovations that went from 0 to 1. We have all experienced the process of turning a vague concept into a concrete commercial product and understand the complexity behind it." CP believes that taking the same path again in the era of public chains presents many challenges, but fortunately, there are experienced references.

Most of the team members at Artela come from Ant Group. "A team of a dozen people works almost at the same pace as a team of twenty." Established just a few months ago, Artela secured $6 million in seed funding, led by Shima Capital, with participation from A&T Capital, Big Brain Holdings, SevenX Ventures, Dispersion Capital, Amino Capital, and others.

Artela's testnet was launched in September, and currently, it adopts a targeted invitation system for its ecological partners. Defi and Fully On-chain Games may both become focal points for future development. CP stated that Artela does not intend to engage in public chain activities such as airdrops or conventional strategies, but rather wants to explore innovations with ecological applications. They will be focusing on development in the coming months, aiming for a formal public test around December.

It can stably achieve hundreds of millions of daily active users, and there is no doubt that Ant Chain has already reached the ceiling in certain areas of Web3. However, their activity is somewhat vaguely isolated from Web3.

Just as the decentralized nature of Web3 should bring about "open source" rather than "patents", there is a certain "mismatch" compared to the mainstream direction of public chains in foreign technologies and the non-coin blockchain, also known as consortium chains, which are more suitable for the domestic context. Ant Chain 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, although the industry was not yet mature, Ant regarded blockchain as a core strategic initiative. "At that time, Ant said it would focus its investment, but actually, 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 thing still had a lot of potential, especially in the context of globalization, having financial applications, I think it is particularly valuable."

Jerry, who serves as the chief architect, has studied the white papers of Bitcoin and Ethereum. As his research deepens, he increasingly believes that blockchain is the next stage of "using technology to serve finance."

In the same year, the "big brother" of Ant Chain joined Ant Financial, serving as Vice President and President of the Fintech 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 evidence... Meanwhile, applications based on the industrial end are fully taking off.

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

CP also became a popular engineer in the company. Jack Ma mentioned CP during the second World Intelligence Conference, along with his widely circulated matchmaking anecdotes.

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

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

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

Taking cross-border remittances as an example, a relevant person in charge from Ant Group stated that there are no technical barriers to cross-border remittances, but the level of support for this technology varies by the policies and regulations of each country, making such projects closer to customization. "At that time, we cooperated with Standard Chartered Bank, which has always been our long-term partner."

Even during the Spring Festival, digital collectibles platforms with over a hundred million daily active users face the problem of unsold collectibles and difficulty breaking out of their niche. The digital collectibles launched earlier were mostly cultural and artistic products, which are hard for young people to find trendy. "But my dad likes it very much; this is the only product I've made that he has consistently used." The work content of CP is highly regarded by family members, perhaps because it is one of the easiest products to understand.

"Although Ant Group is very advanced in fintech, the domestic regulatory framework is still mainly focused on 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 follow the path of public chains, but currently, there is no soil for public chains domestically." Jerry is more optimistic about the future of public chains.

The consortium chain, which strips away the concept of digital assets, makes it impossible to talk about rights and incentives. "The consortium chain only handles data-level aspects; to truly reconstruct production relationships, I think we are still far from that stage."

"To truly run a commercial scenario, having a blockchain is not enough. There are still many technical supports in various stages that are not in place, making it quite difficult to achieve end-to-end operation. The current application scenarios actually only require a database along with permission settings. If one insists on using a blockchain, it...