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It was a cold, snowy day in January 2020 when your correspondent first visited the Conflux Network office in China. Located in the heart of Beijing’s tech zone, the Conflux office is known for having it mascot, Confi, a blue beaver cartoon character, displayed everywhere.
Conflux is a Level 1 public blockchain that claims to solve what its founders say is the Ethereum trilemma: security, scalability, and decentralization. It does this via a so-called tree-graph consensus mechanism. Basically, Conflux wants to incentivize generations of parallel blocks, which increase throughput, and unify the data through a graphical tree structure before settling the final transaction on the main blockchain. It’s a different paradigm than the more common sharding, state channel, and Layer 2 approach.
When I visited, the company was busy developing its mainnet while making a series of announcements with provincial governments. Now, 10 months later, with his mainnet recently launched, I have (virtually) sat down with Fan Long, co-founder of Conflux and professor in the computer science department of the University of Toronto, to discuss the positioning of his. company in an increasingly competitive public blockchain landscape.
Made in “Yao’s Class”
This year, many promising Layer 1 protocols have been published or made serious progress, including Polkadot, 0x’s Matcha, Near and now Conflux. Each protocol markets its own competitive advantage. For Conflux, its message has always been centered on being incubated by the “Yao Class”. Professor Andrew Yao has received the prestigious Turing Award and is the Dean of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS) at Tsinghua University, one of China’s most elite schools of technology. Recruit a few highly selective thousands of the 10 million students taking the Chinese university entrance exam.
Trained at both Yao’s Class and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Long first tinkered with the idea of Conflux in 2017 after graduating from MIT and returning to China to hang out with his friends, most of them. which she graduated in the same place.
After hearing a lecture from Professor Yao, just as a joke, Long and his friends began to examine how a blockchain could be scaled and subsequently published an article on the subject. It was only when investors started knocking on their doors that Long decided to turn his research project into a real company.
“Conflux is truly a revolutionary technology that will shape our society simply because it enables a new way of building trust,” Long told me. “It is a significant way to use my experience in programming languages and security”, two areas in which he concentrated his studies.
Due to its academic roots, Conflux was born with a golden spoon. It stood out in 2018, when most projects had unsurprising white papers. Using this legitimacy, Conflux quickly established itself as a government-approved public blockchain, making announcements with interim governments. It felt a little safe at a time when many crypto companies, such as OKEx and Huobi, were facing much stricter regulatory scrutiny.
Play a different game and focus on compliance
The biggest challenge with any public blockchain is ensuring that people actually use it. “We are playing a completely different game than most of the chains in the world,” Long told me. “Many chains are playing the decentralization game centered on anarchist communities. But for us, if blockchain is to evolve to the next stage, it needs to comply with regulations with real-world applications. “
This, as Long later pointed out, does not mean that a blockchain must stop being permissionless, but it must be compliant. So how can it be compliant with Chinese regulations at the same time – and without authorization and resistant to censorship?
For Long, the question is still unanswered, mainly because the blockchain regulatory landscape is still evolving. “Similar to the US government, the Chinese government doesn’t know how to deal with a revolutionary technology like blockchain,” he said. “There is no instruction booklet, no strict rules. That’s why for us, the first and most important tactic is to maintain a communication channel about what we are trying to work on so that there are no surprises. “
Sure, the communication channel should be left open, but for me the real question remains: what if the government decides to use its hammer and destroy certain features and initiatives? Would Conflux sacrifice its lack of authorization?
Long didn’t have a good response, and perhaps that’s why Conflux’s initial use cases focus on apps that don’t touch sensitive data. An example provided by Long was using Conflux to record the details of a building’s life, from its design to its construction and maintenance.
Sounds like one of those blockchain-enabled use cases around 2017?
Be the Ethereum 2 layer
Perhaps Long is also aware that developing blockchain use cases in the real world could be a long march. The Conflux team, on the other hand, wants to provide a Conflux-based infrastructure that allows the flow of resources between public blockchains.
“We are looking at Ethereum very closely and trying to integrate applications that are hampered by transaction fees,” Long said. “We also built a ShuttleFlow cross-chain bridge so that users can map their BTC and ETH assets 1: 1 on the Conflux network, making Conflux work almost like an Ethereum level 2 solution.”
By building this cross-chain bridge, Conflux can tap into Ethereum – once these assets become fluid, they can enter the Conflux ecosystem and be used for all the DeFi games that Ethereum is so good at.
This appears to be the solution for many public blockchains, but the bridge is particularly important for Conflux, as it has no resources of its own. As the only public blockchain without tokens, Long and his team are taking time to design what a native Conflux token would look like.
“There will be a sign for governance and we are talking with the large centralized exchanges. But the challenge is that we want to stay in line with the government until the regulation on token issuance becomes clearer. “
Conflux is in a unique position. It looks like a real Chinese public blockchain, but with a technical prominence and a global team. As most real-world use cases of blockchain have so far yielded little fruit, Conflux has shifted its focus to the burgeoning DeFi community by establishing “Open DeFi,” an alliance aimed at linking Eastern and Western DeFi projects.
It looks great except he’s not the only one building a bridge. Huobi, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, has also announced its DeFi alliance with major DeFi blue chips.
Conflux will continue to face stiff competition from both blockchain networks and exchange players. From time to time he might play the Far East card. But the real question remains whether its network can be used, both as Layer 1 and Layer 2 of Ethereum. Meanwhile, at least it has a cute, blue, beaver mascot.
You know?
“梭哈” which means “show your hand” in Chinese. It is widely used by Chinese degens as a way of saying “all inclusive”. It was all inclusive on DeFi farms. Now maybe, it’s all blue chip DeFi.
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