Author: MiddleX
Reviewer: Owen
The hotspots of capital interest are ever-changing. In this cycle of bull and bear, a number of start-ups were trying to make a profit in the Web3 space but lacked the conviction to leave for new capital hotspots. But in our point of view, the opportunity in Web3 is as big as an iceberg, and what is being explored is just the tip of it.
We’ve all experienced many hotspots in the Web3 world, from Bitcoin to Ether, IC0 to X2EARN, DeFi to Meta-Universe, and NFT to DAO, each one is a point of excitement. But our understanding of the power of Web3 should not dwell on those points. We. try to sort out a framework to understand the underlying logic of how Web3 is transforming the world.
Industrialisation has provided us with a world of material abundance. In such a world, companies, as an organizational act, are the main actors in the provision of social services. They are competing and innovating to make greater profits and to create better services for users. However, there are areas where we find some worrying situations
Some areas require a large initial investment, a strong network effect, or high admittance threshold, creating a monopoly situation for a small number of players who make excessive profits through exploitative pricing to the detriment of the public interest;
With the advent of the information age, information services have become an important type of service. However, the centralized subjects that hold a large amount of user data tend to keep it for themselves, creating a data island effect. Furthermore, these subjects are free to violate user privacy and even influence public sentiment and thought at the same time.
In some ‘network-as-a-service’ areas, there are almost only the players in the network but the rule-making right is in the hands of the centralized subjects who launched the network in the first place, and who derive most of the benefits from it.
Blockchain technology has given us a new option, that of decentralized services, which we call De-Service.
Cryptocurrency
Bitcoin was the first De-Services to attempt to provide a new type of currency, almost directly resisting the hardest part (the most consensus part) of the centralized world, with hellish difficulty. Although Bitcoin has not become a payment system as Satoshi Nakamoto imaged, it has become recognized as ‘digital gold’. Bitcoin has ultimately made a breach in the existing monetary system and put the theory of free money created by Hayek into practice, and played a good role as an example.
Computation
Ethereum is also essentially providing De-Service, which attempts to provide a universal computing platform, consisting of tens of thousands of nodes, where anyone can run a program on it and output consistent results through a consensus mechanism. This kind of computation is highly redundant, though, and you must pay a huge cost for the results to be credible. For solving this problem, L2 scheme represented by Rollup was proposed. The basic idea of it is “compute off-chain, verify on-chain” in which the “verify” must be “lazy” rather than recalculating on-chain. it was realized in two kinds of general solutions, one relies on the user’s economic rationality, requiring participants to provide a certain amount of deposit and will be punished if they make mistakes but rewarded for finding errors and challenging the mistakes, and the on-chain computation part in this solution only needing to be initiated when a dispute needs to be adjudicated. The other relies on cryptography, requiring participants to generate a proof of validity off-chain, and the process of verifying the validity of the proof on-chain which could be equivalent to calculating the whole process, with a very low cost.
Like Bitcoin, Ethereum has not evolved much from its original vision, instead of becoming the “world machine”, it has become the largest smart contract platform (which is not to say that smart contract platforms are not great). Except for Ethereum, new public chains are still paying efforts to become one of universal computing platforms, such as Dfinity, Golem, and iExec, which are trying to provide decentralized computing services and challenge traditional cloud computing services companies.
In addition to public chains like Ethereum that provide general-purpose computing services, some platforms are providing dedicated computing services that are specific to certain domains or specific to certain types of computing, such as decentralized video transcoding services provided by Livepeer, decentralized graphics rendering services provided by Render, and privacy computing services provided by Phala. We can foresee many more types of dedicated computing services in the future.
Storage
Filecoin is a De-Sevice system that provides decentralized storage services. Miners earn FIL by providing storage space to the system, and users of storage space pay FIL to access the services. Since the launch of its main network in 2020, Filecoin has amassed 400 PiB of storage from tens of thousands of storage miners around the world, with the vision of becoming a “global hard drive” that challenges traditional centralized cloud storage providers. Beyond Filecoin, there are a number of start-ups that offer differentiated services, such as Arweave offer perpetual storage, Sia offers large file backup storage, and Storj and Crust offer encrypted storage.
Bandwidth
In addition to storage and computing, the third essential component of the Internet infrastructure is bandwidth. Meson Network, a De-Service system in the bandwidth. part, consolidates and monetizes idle bandwidth for long-tail users at a low cost, and thus provides a decentralized and efficient bandwidth market. Instead of dealing with sales from centralized bandwidth organizations, users will simply upload or access resources in the marketplace according to the standards and protocols in the Meson Network.
Web2 companies that provide streaming services such as video streaming and online gaming spend huge amounts of money on CDNs every year, mainly because of the need to distribute large amounts of content to users at high speeds. With the advent of Web3, more user data is being generated and the demand for range and delivery speed from the metaverse and GameFi is expected to grow exponentially, and the efficient CDN services provided by the Meson Network serving as the foundation for data delivery for the decentralized storage, computing, and dApp ecosystem. Meson Network currently aggregates over 30,000 nodes worldwide with a total bandwidth of approximately 40Tb/s and is providing data delivery services for platforms such as Matters, Mask Network, IPFS, RSS3, Arweave, and more.
Telecom
There is no shortage of De-Service start-ups in the Telecom field — — Helium is a globally decentralized hotspot network providing wireless networks for mobile devices, including IoT devices. Any entity can operate a mobile hotspot device and provide hotspot services to earn HNT. Helium’s ‘miners’ have deployed hundreds of thousands of hotspots around the world, which means that Helium has profoundly changed the structure of how Telecom networks are built, operated, and owned. Moreover, with the development of 5G and IoT, the traditional top-down approach of building networks by Telecom is no longer cost-effective, and decentralized hotspot networks like Helium will play an important role in building the next generation of mobile networks.
Map
De-Service by HIvemapper is a more agile, real-time map where the ‘miners’ install dedicated car recorders in their vehicles and submit road and street view data to the map system as they drive, earning $HONEY tokens Rewards. We are used to navigation products provided by big Internet companies, but these companies spend vast amounts of money every day to collect and update information. Hivemapper crowdsources the collection and updating of information to a wider audience who are not driving specifically to collect data in most cases but for the additional benefit of it. Hivemapper has almost fundamentally changed the way of building a map, reducing costs significantly. Furthermore, for Hivemapper, more sensors and IoT devices can be mounted on dedicated car recorders to provide the network with more diverse data on air, noise, weather, and more in the future.
Why Blockchain?
Why is De-Service only possible based on blockchain technology? The answer lies in two fundamental properties of this cutting-edge technology:
- Verifiable
- Non-permissive
These two properties allow us to create a system where
anyone can join the system and provide a service, or pay Tokens to request a service, with no restrictions on access;
It is verifiable whether the service provider has provided a service to the service requester. Verifiability is the ability of different people or institutions to reach the same conclusion by examining the same evidence, data, and records. To achieve verifiability in a system, all data records must be publicly accessible, consistent, and tamper-proof, which are characteristics that just blockchain provides.
The rules of the system are clear and transparent, no one can change or shut down the system without permission, and any change in the rules requires the coalescence of a consensus of the majority of participants;
If consensus cannot be built, a fork is formed for different consensus groups. To avoid forking, participants prefer to have a fair rule that can be accepted by the majority of participants.
Collaboration between participants is coordinated by tokens and a corresponding economic model.
Based on blockchain technology, Web3 creates a wide road for everyone to walk on not just for genius.
Finance
The DeFi Summer of 2020 created a lot of surprises for us with the emergence of many Web3 native financial innovations, many of which are now work as infrastructure.
Before the advent of AMM, the market maker was a walled-off industry that was difficult for the general entity to participate in. Because of the barriers in capital and expertise part, it was monopolized by large institutions, which reaped high profits and became a veritable “financial aristocracy”.
AMM erases all this, as anyone with any volume of money, can provide liquidity to the AMM Pool and earn transaction fees. the essence of AMM is nothing more than a set of transparent algorithms and rules that run on the blockchain and therefore have verifiability, without any participant wondering whether the output of the AMM algorithm follows the algorithm’s rules.
Furthermore, the decentralized lending and borrowing protocols, income aggregators, derivatives protocols, insurance protocols, and the various combinations of products create an open and transparent financial system with no access restrictions for any user or funds, all of which have the opportunity to benefit from any investment. Although, just like traditional finance, DeFi is subject to various scams, money markets, high leverage, and gambling, there is no doubt that openness and transparency are the first steps toward fairness.
De-service Movement
We believe more in Serve to Earn than Ponzi X to Earn. The creation of blockchain technology gives us a great opportunity to connect certain resources or services together to build an open, decentralized network with transparent rules, in which. free resource. exchange and value creation are allowed.
If the service is provided by a centralized institution we call it Ce-Service, the service provided by a network made up of such resources and rules we can call it De-Service.
A large part of Ce-Service will be replaced by De-Service in the future and they will co-exist, cooperate, and even combine together as one, not “all or nothing”. For example, traditional telecom companies tend to cover densely populated areas, and Helium has a significant cost advantage in sparsely populated areas, and thus they work together for providing maximum network coverage.
So what does De-Service come into play?
Firstly, the De-Service model offers direct cost benefits and economic efficiencies, which allow better integration of unused resources or long-tail resources, creating a sharing economy that reduces the cost of services and enables users. to pay a little. The Token Economy further supports the De-Service network to be more flexible, responding the changes in demands, and avoiding wasted resources.
Secondly, in the De-Service model, the service providers are no longer traditional companies, but rather ‘nodes’ that actually own part of the entire network and make a profit from the services they provide. These ‘nodes’ are located in different geographical areas of the world, across different jurisdictions. Still, they share the same set of rules and have an equal opportunity to provide services for profit in the network. So, we believe that the De-Service model will promote capital distribution worldwide, slowing down the trends toward the rich and the poor. In addition to that, there has competition between nodes, avoiding the De-Service system to establish a situation of exploitative pricing and monopoly profits.
Thirdly, the data in it is anonymous and public, promoting the combination of different service systems while protecting the privacy of the participants.
De-Service systems also face many challenges.
First of all, the establishment of any bilateral marketplace is subject to the problem of “Prior supply or Prior demand”. It may go through a long or short token/money subsidy period to gather enough resources before gathering enough consumers. For example, Filecoin is still in a subsidy period and only a small part of the token rewards given to storage providers are paid by users of the storage service, the majority is paid by the network through inflationary rewards.
Secondly, a sound Token economy model is very necessary for sustainable growth. On the contrary, may accelerate the loss of resources and cause the network to decline.
Thirdly, a reasonable governance mechanism is needed to support sustainable development. It is impractical to govern purely by code, decentralised services need decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) to operate. Governance includes several important components ① Governance of rules, adjusting rules to fit the network development ② Management of the treasury of protocol, many De-Services have their own protocol treasury to support the long-term development of the network, so this money will be spent through governance ③ Self-censorship, review of non-compliance acts within the network to make it be a. long run network. For example, if someone is using Filecoin for storing violent pornography things, this should be intervened by governance mechanisms.
Lastly, the De-Service system needs to do its best to counter its own decentralization. Although it is freely accessible and therefore fully competitive, a few groups or participants within a particular region will likely take the lion’s share of the benefits from the network because they have certain resources or technical advantages, which may lead the system. to. become highly dependent on certain groups and will no longer be neutral.
Which First？
Which areas will give rise to De-Service first?
The virtual realm will precede the physical real
Standardized services will precede personalized services
The field/part where the centralization problem is significant.
Closing
De-Service is a vast and far-reaching social movement generated by blockchain technology, which is exploring and shaping a new type of production relationship for the information era. At the same time, it gives us a perspective to re-examine our world. We have reason to believe that the power of Web3 is continuing to bigger and that its transformation of the world has only just begun.
