Interview with Waltonchain CEO Mo Bing -Waltonchain will be the Qualcomm + Cisco in the blockchain industry, the ‘Google’ of blockchain
“Waltonchain is at the top of the world’s blockchain wave.”
Looking back to the company creation, Waltonchain CEO Mo Bing thought for a moment and cautiously used “quite fortunate” to sum up the current achievements.
The preparations began in March 2017, and the official launch was in May. In less than twelve months, a variety of child chains have been integrated into the Waltonchain eco-system and span industries such as garment production, collectibles trading and logistics management. The difference, when compared to other early blockchain-based projects, is stark. Waltonchain has already become a super ship of the future ready to set sail.
Even so, Waltonchain is rarely known to the public. “We advocate low-key activities and insist that real-world technological achievements come before marketing.” Even on the Waltonchain planning chart, Mo Bing set the plan for “Waltonchain Wide-scale Promotion” in June 2020, which is 3 years since the start.
Two days ago, Xiha Finance met Mo Bing in Shenzhen Bay Tech-Eco Park. Mo Bing strode into his office with great enthusiasm. His personal office was uncomfortably warm in the stifling heat of a Shenzhen summer, and the air conditioner was not running stable recently. He remarked, jokingly, “When we first moved in, I was told they’d given me the best and most spacious office, however it turned out to be the worst one!”
Mo Bing has a strong technical background, still, he has a low-profile and easy-going personality. He has applied for 18 invention patents and published more than 20 papers. He deserves to be called an industry expert. Since the introduction of Waltonchain, there have been a great number of people who approached the team wanting to work together. “People tell me ‘this project makes money’, ‘that project is profitable’. I will say I get it, but I won’t touch anything I don’t fully understand.”
When it comes to the vision of the future, the modest and low-profile Mo Bing suddenly comes to life with obvious confidence. “Waltonchain will be the Qualcomm + Cisco in the blockchain industry. Based on this, Waltonchain will become the ‘Google search engine’ of blockchain”.
Talking about competitors. “IOTA has innovation, but Waltonchain’s advantages are in the ‘software + hardware’ combination.” said Mo Bing.
IOTA came to the ‘IoT + blockchain’ field earlier than Waltonchain, and it is more famous.
However, Mo Bing is not afraid to talk about competitors. Instead, he takes the initiative and continues lightheartedly. “IOTA is the ‘Mr. Big’ in the Internet of Things blockchain space, and Waltonchain is the younger brother”, he said jokingly.
IOTA, or MIOTA, is a project initiated in 2014 by crowdfunding. By the end of last year, IOTA’s market value exceeded US $2 billion. The underlying technology of IOTA is the use of DAG (directed acyclic graph) instead of blockchain-based distributed accounting and shared ledger. Based on DAG, cryptographic functions are integrated.
“This technology has reached a very big consensus around the world, because in conditions of high concurrency of blockchain, the IOTA’s underlying technology can theoretically be infinite. With objects interconnected, it is more suitable for the Internet of things. This is its biggest innovation,” said Mo Bing.
In the field of the Internet of Things, the amount of concurrent requests is very big due to data writing by each sensor. As has been well documented in the pass, the Ethereum network was heavily congested. It was due to drawbacks in the concurrency mechanism. The reason why EOS is so highly anticipated is related to claims that it will be highly concurrent.
However, Mo Bing believes that, compared with other projects, the unique advantage of Waltonchain is the ‘software + hardware’ combination. “Even with IOTA, they are purely soft stuff at the bottom of blockchain. There is no hardware.”
Mo Bing was the Technical Director and an expert in integrated circuits at Korea University. He has more than ten years of experience in the chip industry. Therefore, when he created Waltonchain, he actually did a direct ‘blockchain +’ transformation. As the company has very strong ‘chip genes,’ some foreign netizens have labeled it ‘Qualcomm,’ as both make chips.
“I ended up giving us the definition of ‘Qualcomm + Cisco’ because our chips will enter the sensor field. The key thing is that data would not be directly manipulated. It is directly at the sensor side that a part of data is passed to your centralized server. Another part is sent to the blockchain, and I can use a data mark, or ‘digital fingerprint’ of the data, to verify the data’s authenticity. As long as your data is not changed, we can endorse you.” Mo Bing said.
“This year we have been preparing our layout. We have already applied for more than 20 patents, and there are more than a dozen of software copyright objects. These may be the moats we have built for our core technologies.”
Talking about sharing. A more shared society can be achieved through technology.
Mo Bing has repeatedly stressed that he does not believe in human nature and believes in cold, error-free machines.
The combination of the Internet of Things and blockchain was once hoped to build a more shared economy. Just one of the reasons why Didi Taxi is more successful than ofo is in the real-user-level sharing. However, due to the fact that Didi’s data is kept on a centralized server platform, this intermediate effort causes participants’ resentment and creates additional costs for sharing.
In the opinion of Mo Bing, in a blockchain-involved shared society, the additional cost is not a major problem. What is more important is how to use data in a more civilized way.
He took an air purifier as an example: “When an air purifier is placed in the house, it not only purifies air, but also detects PM2.5 and uploads the data to blockchain. Although this data is generated by a machine, the purifier owner should be the owner of the generated data. There is authorization based on data rights recognition. If an environmental protection company wants to use the data of this air purifier, it should pay the owner of the machine for data collection.”
“A lot of companies will make a portrait of its customer. For example, if you often purchase some ladies products or fashion items, then it will paint a picture of you as a young girl, with or without children, married or not. In this case, our privacy right needs to be protected, and you have the right to know where your data generated from the big data analysis will be used. This privacy protection policy is an attribute of a more civilized society.”
Within this ecosystem, the company’s profitability comes from the “hardware and software” combination.
“Data is one example. Data collection may not be charged by the company; instead, it is determined by the user who buys the company’s products. Still, the company can make profit from hardware, chips and various ‘blockchain +’ smart sensors. In this way, we can become the blockchain industry unicorn.”
Therefore, once Waltonchain completes the “Qualcomm + Cisco” stage, the big data generated using the underlying technology of Waltonchain will be our key advantage. On this basis, Waltonchain will establish a huge blockchain database.
“Based on our understanding of this huge database, we can easily make a “Google” search engine on the blockchain,” Mo Bing said.
Talking about projects. Most blockchain projects are traditional angel investments
Since he first learnt about Bitcoin in South Korea in 2013, Mo Bing has been exploring the possibilities of the blockchain field. Mo Bing told Xiha Finance that Waltonchain has a special evaluation team to research, evaluate projects and invest in them.
When asked about how to evaluate a project, Mo Bing said: “I think, currently, blockchain projects are mostly at a traditional angel investment stage. A team may consist of three or four, often a dozen people, and it is set up to solve some problem. And for angel investment, we mainly evaluate team members.”
“Since there are many projects around the world, there are not many opportunities for us to reach out to project founders, thus the main channel to evaluate a project is to analyze its white paper and website. A white paper includes what they want to do; and we evaluate a project from the innovation perspective. This innovation perspective includes technical innovation and business model innovation.”
“Since technical innovation is not that fast, we are more willing to make medium and long-term investments in projects of this type. For projects adhering to business model innovation, we are more concerned about loopholes in patent protection, because you can’t say that some business model is uniquely created by one person. For this project type, we focus on short and medium-term investment. In general, we invest more in business model innovation projects compared to technology innovation projects, and we adopt a multi-point investment strategy.”
Mo Bing believes that at present, China is absolutely supportive of blockchain technology properties because “it brings a brand new transformation in production relations”. He also stressed that the main reason hindering the country’s support for this technology is that “the financial attributes derived from this technology may shake the foundation of a country.”
At present, the pace of Waltonchain’s expansion in the Internet of Things continues to speed up. This was somewhat more than Mo Bing’s expectations were. “To be honest, I didn’t expect it to grow so fast. I think our entire team is quite fortunate.”
When asked whether he is worried about the latecomers, he thought for a moment and said: “ In this business world with fierce competition few are able to be at ease. Even giant companies may collapse overnight. We tend to watch our competitors closely and we never forget the humble beginnings of our journey. If you keep in mind your original intention and do the absolute best you can, you will one day realize your dreams.”
Article in Xiha Finance : http://www.xhcjtv.com/news/1700.html
