Ready Player Club brings together many outstanding entrepreneurs and practitioners in the Web3 industry. We believe that each member's journey, experience and unique industry perspective have the power to inspire and empower more people. Each member's rich experience and insights can bring great help to other cat lovers, especially those who are new to the Web3 field, and promote the development and implementation of the entire industry.
RPC Living Room is an interview program designed for RPC club members. It aims to create a platform for members to share and deepen their understanding of each other. In each interview, we will invite one or more members from a specific focus area to share interesting personal stories and industry observations through text or voice.
Guest Introduction
Does the Internet have memory? I believe everyone is gradually realizing that in the world of traditional Internet, information has a time limit and published information can be modified. Server failure or changes in the business of Internet companies may mean the disappearance of a large amount of content and data. So in the world of Web3, can decentralized technology guarantee the eternity and permanence of data? In this interview, we are fortunate to invite Xiong Wei, who is well known as outprog in the Web3 community on social media. Xiong Wei has been deeply involved in the decentralized storage protocol Arweave (AR) ecosystem and has very rich entrepreneurial experience.
He is the initiator of PermaDAO, the Arweave ecosystem co-builder community, and encourages more people to participate in the mission of eternal storage in the form that suits them best through the community.
Xiong Wei is also one of the initiators of the AR ecological project ao computer (AO). AO targets traditional cloud development services and aims to become a super parallel computer on the AR network, allowing any application to obtain high-performance decentralized data storage services.
He is also the founder of everVision Labs, a one-stop decentralized infrastructure provider for the AR ecosystem. He helps the development of Web3 on AR by providing various development tools and infrastructure to any project that wants to develop applications in the AR ecosystem.
Full Interview
1. Welcome Xiong Wei to this episode of RPC Living Room. In fact, you are a very active opinion leader on social media, especially in the AR ecosystem. Many people may be more familiar with your Web3 identity: outprog. Can you introduce yourself to everyone? Can you reveal the special meaning of the name outprog?
OK, let me introduce myself first. I first worked in a bank, responsible for the OA system, CRM system and some internal systems of the bank, including accounting and financial processing. I have a deep understanding of internal financial accounting processing. In 2015, I entered the blockchain industry. At that time, I saw the great potential of Bitcoin and Ethereum in accounting processing, and believed that blockchain had great potential as a ledger system.
When I entered the blockchain ecosystem, I used the name outprog, which I took when I was still working in a bank. Like many developers who have an account on GitHub and use code names, outprog is my developer code name. The origin of this name is that I hope to be able to think out of program, not just purely looking at and understanding technology, but also thinking about business, market and other aspects.
At that time, I had not started a business yet. I was just working as a developer in a bank, often communicating with business personnel about the needs of business systems. I found that the programs we developed were closely related to the business. Sometimes the business department was not willing to use the applications we developed, which would only cause them more trouble. Therefore, my goal was to become a software architect, which required me to think beyond programming to understand and meet business needs.
2. You are now an evangelist for the AR ecosystem and have multiple identities within the ecosystem. I believe many new RPC members are curious about your entrepreneurial experience. Can you share your entrepreneurial experience with everyone? How are the names AR, AO, PermaDAO, and everVision connected together?
Okay, let me share my experience in various projects.
Enter Web3
While working at the bank, I was mainly responsible for the development of financial systems and internal systems, including handling the bank's lending and debt business. This experience made me realize that the traditional financial system has become very large and complex due to human factors and various contracts and regulations. In particular, cross-border transfers of fiat currency need to be processed through a series of lengthy and complex institutions. Until I started to pay attention to Bitcoin. Because from the perspective of traditional developers, almost nothing is censorship-resistant. However, in October 2017, I wrote the demo code of Bitcoin myself and found that this trustless system can solve the trust problem between different departments and institutions in the traditional financial system. Bitcoin's trustless system can make the ledger credible between different institutions. This made me realize that this new system has the potential to subvert the traditional financial system that we have worked hard to build for thousands of years. So, from 2018, I joined imToken and devoted myself to the blockchain industry. While working at imToken, I developed the third and fourth versions of DEX Tokenlon and learned in depth the advantages and disadvantages of blockchain.
First look at Arweave
At the end of 2018, I started to pay attention to Uniswap and Compound protocols. These two protocols excited me because Uniswap realized automatic market making through a simple model, while Compound realized the deposit and borrowing functions of banks on the chain. I wrote articles specifically for these two protocols and shared my understanding with the outside world. However, from 2018 to 2019, the entire blockchain ecosystem was very sluggish. During this period, I have been reflecting on the obstacles to large-scale application of blockchain. The core problem lies in performance and the threshold of users for mnemonics and private keys. Many elites and talents in traditional fields cannot enter the blockchain field due to these barriers. During imToken, I found that many traditional users could not accept complex wallet operations, which also hindered the popularization of blockchain. In 2020, DeFi Summer began. I participated in the technical meetup held by Etherfans and Spark Mining Pool, and came into contact with Arweave and its smart contract Smartweave. As a permanent storage blockchain, Arweave's smart contract model is very similar to the Turing machine in computer science. This new model that separates computing and storage has given me new possibilities for blockchain. After several months of research, I proposed the storage-based consensus paradigm (SCP). As long as the storage is immutable, no matter where the calculation is performed on the computing end, the result can be guaranteed to have consensus. After seeing this opportunity, coupled with the market recovery, I left imToken in October 2020 and started my own entrepreneurial career. There is a very good article about SCP and Arweave, which is recommended to friends who are interested: permadao.com/permada...
Founded everfinance
Then I met my partner, who is a developer of the Bitcoin ecosystem and an early supporter of Bitcoin. He is relatively free and always does what he likes. He and I developed a payment protocol based on the Arweave system, which is our current product, Everpay. At first, we made this protocol just out of interest and hobbies. We thought it was very interesting, so we tried to do something. In March 2021, I wrote some comparative articles on Everpay and Ethereum, Layer 2 and sidechain technology in my column in Nianwen. After that, some investment institutions found us and hoped to learn more about our project. In 2021, our brand is called Everfinance. The original intention is to hope that anyone can use decentralized financial services anywhere in the world. Everpay is a payment protocol developed by Everfinance. The use of Arweave greatly reduces the cost of gas fees, allowing users around the world to use Everpay seamlessly. In May 2021, we reached the first round of financing, led by HashKey and SevenX, and Arweave officials also invested some funds in us. We started the project, and my former colleague Sandy (originally a developer from imToken) also joined us to form a three-person core technical team to advance the evolution of the product. In July and August 2021, we began to conceive new ideas on everpay and developed a decentralized exchange (DEX) called Permaswap. In September, we completed the development of DEX and started operations.
Upgrade everVision
In late 2021, I decided to go to Singapore to develop and expand communication and interaction with the Arweave community. In 2022, I came to Singapore and took the lead in organizing Arweave Day in Asia in October. At the conference, we rebranded from everFinance to everVision. Because we found that the Arweave ecosystem can not only do finance in the early stages, but also have a wider range of applications. We open-sourced all the tools and ideas of everpay so that everyone can use them. everVision provides infrastructure based on the Arweave storage consensus paradigm and will be officially operational from October 2022.
Creation of PermaDAO
Next is the original intention of Permadao. My experience in banks and imToken made me realize that the core of blockchain is to reshape the way people collaborate. From primitive society to the present, the ledger and currency system have been evolving, and blockchain is a decentralized ledger that can record everyone's workload and labor and exchange value in the form of tokens. Permadao's goal is to explore a new way of collaboration, turning labor into tokens for trading. We hope to promote the theme of permanent storage in the AR ecosystem through Permadao, and all AR-related work can get AR token rewards in DAO. Many friends contributed and obtained AR during the bear market, and as the market recovered, they also received generous rewards.
to the computer
The idea of AO actually came up as early as 2022. During Token 2049, Sam, SevenX and I discussed the idea of SCP (Storage Consensus Paradigm) at a dinner party, combined with a decentralized baseline layer. In June 2023, on the fifth anniversary of Arweave, I went to Germany to have an in-depth discussion with Sam and proposed a design version of AO. After several months of design and development, the AO global computer was born. The core theory of the AO global computer is SCP, which is to perform calculations off-chain and put storage on-chain to achieve the interconnection and collaboration of large-scale parallel computers. The user experience is almost the same as that of traditional cloud services, but behind it is a decentralized distributed system.
3. In the decentralized storage field, there are also solutions and ecosystems including Filecoin, Sia, Storj, etc. Why did you choose Arweave?
Filecoin belongs to the storage field. If you look at it from the perspective of Ethereum, it seems to be an independent track, including Filecoin, Sia, Storj and Arweave. However, the storage circuit is actually very segmented, with huge differences between each project, especially between Arweave and the other three projects. The core of Filecoin is to create a decentralized storage market. Users rent storage space to save files, and service providers receive compensation for providing storage and proof. From my perspective, Filecoin simply uses blockchain technology to implement a storage market on which users can conduct transactions. Arweave is completely different, it focuses on blockchain storage. Blockchain storage is similar to Bitcoin's ledger, which is decentralized, non-tamperable and traceable. In contrast, Filecoin is just a storage market and does not have these blockchain features.
Since July 2020, we have learned that Arweave has Turing completeness, which requires that the data it stores cannot be tampered with and is traceable. Tamperability means that once the data is written, it cannot be modified, which is a basic feature of blockchain. Traceability involves the publicity and timestamp of the data. If the data can only be obtained by certain centralized institutions, such as archives or banks, although it is traceable, the acquisition cost is high and it is not public enough. Arweave's data is public and time-traceable, similar to Bitcoin's transaction records, which ensures the integrity and transparency of the data. Projects such as Filecoin focus more on the storage market, but cannot guarantee the blockchain characteristics of the data, so we cannot develop projects such as everpay on this basis. If we use Filecoin for data storage, once the service provider stops renewing or no longer provides services, our data may be lost, and its immutability and traceability cannot be guaranteed. Arweave has all the characteristics of blockchain, the data is immutable and traceable, and it is suitable for building consensus data. These characteristics enable it to support projects such as everpay and AO.
4. You have been in the Web3 industry for nearly 6 years. Can you share with us some of the major moments and changes in your entrepreneurial journey?
The release of AO is a significant moment in my entrepreneurial journey. In the past few years, I have been promoting the SCP (storage consensus paradigm) theory, while Sam, the founder of Arweave, is more concerned with the permanent storage of data. The launch of AO really brings SCP to the forefront. Previously, Inscription has implemented a similar system on Bitcoin using the storage consensus paradigm. The emergence of AO makes the Arweave ecosystem more complete, making it a system that integrates inscription and computing.
The release of AO has a huge impact on Everpay. Everpay was originally just a payment settlement system, and interacting with other systems requires cross-chain, which has a certain threshold. The launch of AO solved many payment problems, so we decided to stop the update and iteration of Everpay and transplant the core technology to AO. At present, the AOX cross-chain bridge has been online for more than two weeks, with about 3,500 users, and is the only cross-chain bridge in the Arweave ecosystem.
Another important turning point is Permaswap. Originally based on everpay, Permaswap has new possibilities after the launch of AO. Because AO is very suitable for artificial intelligence and agent finance (AgentFi), in the future Permaswap will not only be a decentralized exchange (DEX), but will also be integrated into financial scenarios such as lending and stablecoin contracts, becoming the underlying financial protocol platform of AO, on which developers can easily implement their own financial businesses.
5. Encouraging projects to use AO for AI application development seems to be your focus recently. AI application is a very broad topic. Can you explain to everyone in easy-to-understand language what are the characteristics of AO? Why is it suitable for AI development?
Everyone knows that AI has received great attention in the Web3 market, but in fact, no matter which blockchain it is, it is currently difficult to truly achieve AI-driven optimization. At most, it is just like GameFi and SocialFi, putting part of the assets on the blockchain. Such AI applications are of little significance.
AO's design uses a model called Actor Model, which was originally used in the Erlang programming language and originated around 1972, during the last AI explosion. Scientists proposed this concurrent computing model for AI computing. Due to the improvement of modern computing power and the emergence of GPUs, coupled with the development of AO, this design model has now been proven to be very suitable for AI computing.
Sam provided a LLMA3 multi-model code on AO in his personal Github repository, which means that large models can be run directly on AO. Unlike other blockchains, AO can directly perform model training, which is a major breakthrough. It is expected that there will be more announcements about AI at the Arweave 5th Anniversary Conference on June 6.
It is worth discussing that AO is a decentralized all-member computing network that cannot be shut down. If AI computing is placed on AO, we may realize an AI network that cannot be shut down. This is a bit like Skynet in "Terminator". Because the network is decentralized, AI can run on it and make money on its own. If it makes enough money, it can continue to run; otherwise, it will "die" because it cannot pay the computing fees.
In this context, we believe that AI on AO may produce a completely new kind of life. The combination of Arweave and AO provides the "DNA" of AI, because the data cannot be tampered with, is traceable, and can be derived and grown on it.
6. Many Web3 projects are actually using traditional cloud services. A large number of decentralized computing infrastructures, including Render and io.net, are challenging the status of Web2 centralized platforms. How do you think AO can stand out? What breakthroughs can it bring?
Regarding Web2 solutions and GPU infrastructure, I would like to make a supplement here. First, let's take a look at the architecture and technology of AO. The SCP (Storage Consensus Paradigm) mentioned earlier is to separate the computing layer from the storage layer, making the storage layer permanently decentralized, while the computing layer maintains the mode of the traditional computing layer. Therefore, there is no essential difference between AO's computing resources and traditional computing, except that a permanent storage layer is added to make traditional computing traceable and decentralized. There is no type of restriction on the computing scalability of AO, and we can implement multiple computing modes such as EVM and WASM on AO. By storing computing logs and processes on AR, AO's computing power is almost the same as traditional computing. In this way, we can further expand GPU computing and even adapt computing models such as NVIDIA's CUDA, showing its wide scalability.
As for the competition with traditional cloud computing platforms, I think this is a false proposition. Projects such as Filecoin and io.net propose decentralized storage and computing power in an attempt to compete with traditional AWS, but the real value of blockchain lies in consensus and trustlessness, rather than direct competition for computing costs or storage costs. Most of the nodes of Bitcoin and Ethereum run on traditional cloud services, which shows that blockchain has no direct competitive intention with traditional cloud services. On the contrary, blockchain provides a trustless consensus mechanism, which is its core value. We chose AO instead of traditional cloud computing precisely because we need to establish consensus and ensure the permanent existence of data. Traditional cloud computing cannot provide this trust, so blockchain becomes a better choice. We are not trying to reduce costs, but to achieve the immutability and traceability of data, which is also the core reason for choosing AO.
The core of decentralized computing lies in the transformation of the way of collaboration. New collaborative methods such as DAO do not rely on authoritative institutions, so that the systems and applications on AO will not be terminated due to the closure of a cloud service provider. Even if an AWS node is shut down, we can restart the business on other cloud services. This is the core point of decentralization. When expanding computing, AO is not trying to replace traditional computing, but to use it as a layer of abstraction to provide trustlessness and permanent storage capabilities. For example, Ethereum has become a decentralized application chain through PoW, but its infrastructure still relies on traditional cloud services. Similarly, AO's decentralized computing is not to compete with traditional computing power, but to provide developers with more business scenarios, such as NLP and driven games.
Similar to the comparison between Filecoin and Arweave, other projects such as IO.net, Render, and Akash use more decentralized technology to allocate computing resources, and have not innovated to achieve censorship-resistant, non-closable, or trustless computing methods. Therefore, there is a big difference between the two. In the Arweave ecosystem, there are projects such as Apus that are building AO nodes for GPUs. In the future, these nodes will also run on AO. As a protocol, AO was designed by Sam and hopes to be more decentralized. Global developers can freely develop GPU computing, DPIN, and social applications on the AO protocol, which is completely open and does not rely on large VC financing, but is built in a decentralized way from the beginning. This model makes AO highly decentralized from the beginning.
7. After sharing above, your entrepreneurial ideas have become very clear: create AO based on Arweave, and then create a series of applications based on AO that are in line with the spirit of decentralized storage. So far, what applications do you think are most likely to help AR and even the entire Web3 ecosystem attract large-scale users?
From AR to AO to AI, the application we are working hard to build is Permaswap. Permaswap adopts the idea of storage consensus paradigm (SCP) when it is built, which makes its technical architecture completely different from Uniswap on Ethereum. Although it also adopts the AMM model, the difference is that Uniswap's funds are concentrated in a smart contract, which operates and provides liquidity according to a single algorithm, which is less efficient. In the AO architecture, we use the agent finance (AgentFi) model.
In traditional finance, funds are deposited in banks and managed uniformly by banks. This method is inefficient and the process is cumbersome. In DeFi, assets can be automatically pledged and circulated, which improves the efficiency of fund utilization. On AO, all funds are managed by users themselves and managed by their own robots or AI. Each fund can have its own strategy, which will greatly improve the intelligence level of financial assets. Because AO has better performance and architecture, users can inject contract code into their wallets. In this way, each user can design the rules of the proxy robot in their own wallet. If the user likes the rules of Uniswap V3, he can simply load it into his own proxy with one click; if the user likes the rules of Curve, he can also easily load the corresponding code.
Furthermore, the agent financial model makes assets smarter. Funds are not just passively stored, but can be actively operated, calculated and optimized through AI, which greatly improves the liquidity and utilization efficiency of funds. Looking back on our financial development history, from traditional finance to DeFi, and then to AgentFi and AiFi on AO, the utilization efficiency and intelligent operation of funds have been continuously improved. In the future, Permaswap will become a financial infrastructure, providing underlying support for AgentFi and AiFi, and developers can build various applications on it, including social, games, DeFi, content creation, and many other applications. The assets and logic of each application can be interconnected through the protocol to form an efficient financial ecosystem.
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