In addition, we have also seen a lot of new things in this new industry, not only open finance; but overall, I think this circle has not expanded. If you look at the MetaMask download data, it has been 1 to 2 million, and there has been no further growth. We are old friends with Dan, the co-founder of the MetaMask team. In fact, their downloads exceeded 2 million in 2017; It is equivalent to a bunch of geeks and programmers frying new concepts with each other. Maybe Old Money or sovereign wealth funds will only buy Bitcoin, and new projects lack the possibility of going out of the circle.

In this case, we still have the same idea as before: Can Mask Network connect the new world with the old world?

What we've been doing before is the first step,That is, can information on the Internet be connected with decentralized identities?Because if you don't have a decentralized identity in the Internet world, you don't have a public key in cryptography, you can't encrypt messages, transfer cryptocurrencies, and you can't play anything in the new world.

For example, on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, you do not really have your own identity. Your original identity is the property of Facebook and Twitter, and they can do whatever they want with your identity. If this is the case, let alone open finance, it is impossible for any decentralized company to develop. Therefore, the first step in Mask Network's selection is to create encrypted identities.

• Red envelope applet

Our connection with decentralized finance is actually very deep, much deeper than most Asian projects. In February of this year, we reached a cooperation with Maker to create a payment function that allows users to send and receive red envelopes directly on Twitter. We did not release the data of the “Red Packet” function at the time, but it can be confirmed that it is the largest source of traffic for Maker besides Defi.

We once verified a data, Maker's stable currency is DAI, now has 80,000 to 90,000 Holders, and only 40,000 Holders before "312"; among these 40,000 people, after chain analysis, you will find that only 20,000 live humans, and the rest are basically trading bots.

I'm actually surprised that Maker has so few users. After all, DAI is a very important project in decentralized finance. We have communicated several times with their founder, CMO, and Pan Chao, the person in charge in China, and we are very grateful for their support for our cooperation activities during the Chinese New Year. According to statistics, the red envelope activity of Mask Network & Maker alone attracted more than 1,000 real users (equivalent to an increase of more than 5% of live users), and also attracted Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum, to participate.

Of course, these people may not use Defi to do many things, because the user experience is still relatively complicated, but this proves one thing,The Internet/Web2.0 platform is the entrance, and this entrance needs a bridge, even successful projects like Ethereum and Maker need this bridge.

This matter has strengthened our confidence that no matter how big the decentralized Internet industry looks at the moment, it is very valuable if we can use our infrastructure to make this new world have more users, and all All projects require Mask Network.

Maker had a market value of US$500 million at the time, or many projects with a large market value in the industry. They may have achieved this market value through the size of TVL's asset pool and the favorable secondary market. But we also believe that there is a bubble in the industry at present, and we also agree that the bubble has a plus for the industry, because everyone needs the bubble to encourage the industry and projects. But if you think about it carefully, Twitter’s decentralized red envelope can attract many users, which shows that connecting from the old Internet to the new Internet is ignored by many people.

So, not only red envelopes, but can contracts and applications be spread on the Internet platform? So we cooperated with Gitcoin and made a donation function. For details, seeDecryptthis report.

Now affected by the epidemic abroad, many organizations and people need to donate and raise funds, not only for medical supplies, such as "Black Lives Matter" and other events. Due to the epidemic, these people and organizations cannot accept offline donations. I also dare not post Paypal's QR code on Twitter to collect money. So we worked with Gitcoin to develop a plugin that enables direct donations on Twitter.

This is also the first time that it can help these disadvantaged groups to raise decentralized tokens. In addition to this, Gitcoin has cooperated with the Red Cross and some non-governmental organizations of the United Nations. They can also use this tool to carry out public welfare activities, which is supported by Mask Network.

As we all know, DApp is currently the largest market in the blockchain industry, and both Defi and NFT can be classified as DApp. There are people participating in the development on different tracks. This incident reminds us of a question: "Can you make something bigger than DApp, so that the DApp market will expand by 100 times or 1000 times?"

So we developed a technical framework called DApplet (Decentralized Applet), which can be directly inserted into Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. Simply put, Mask Nertwork can put applets into Facebook or Twitter, and they will not know; or it can be decentralized through our technology, so that social platforms cannot block it. We should be the only team in this industry that has mastered this technical framework and is willing to open source it.

decentralized storage

• decentralized storage

You may ask, why use Arweave or IPFS? Although IPFS miners are getting a lot of hype these days, the actual experience of using these projects is not the best. I don't think you need to ask why you want to use these functions. As long as this function is easy to use, everyone will use it.image description

Arweave's decentralized file storage function has been integrated into the live Twitter plugin

• Market+Trade

Recently, Defi has attracted the attention of many people, including us, but one thing we are curious about is: Twitter CEO Jack is also a believer in decentralization, but why doesn't he add some functions related to open finance on Twitter?

After consulting with our internal legal team and some legal professionals, we found that there are many restrictions on the market function of the traditional financial secondary market. A centralized market will have a lot of regulatory requirements. You may need to become a broker or dealer first, get a lot of licenses to do these businesses, and there are even many additional restrictions. This is very important for an international social network. troublesome.

image description

Buy $UNI directly on Twitter

Maybe it's because we launched it at a better time, or because this demand is a rigid one. Mask Network has been supported by many practitioners and enthusiasts, including Uniswap founder Adams, MetaMask joint founder Dan, and former Coinbase CTO Balaji.

Everyone is surprised when they see this feature, why can I trade directly on Twitter? In fact, it is very simple. Mask Network allows users to directly publish encrypted text on social platforms, and then they can also conduct transactions directly. This is just that different functions are embedded in the same product, and what we can do in the future also requires users to help us think.

Mask Network is a complex of all tracks, and it is the largest entrance to the decentralized world, because we are the first bridge that can connect with the centralized world - when talking with Uniswap, they all think this idea is so cool up.

After all, if compared with Facebook and Twitter, Bitcoin now only has a market value of more than 100 billion U.S. dollars, while Facebook has more than 600 billion U.S. dollars. Maybe Zuckerberg's assets alone can compare with our entire market.

In the final analysis, this industry is still too small. What we need to do now is to attract more people's attention and enter this industry. Only when we find the rigid needs of users and lower the threshold of using the decentralized world to the point that everyone can use it and everyone is interested in using it, can we attract more people to pay attention to this industry. So let us take the lead to bring together well-known projects in the industry and do some interesting things together.

Whether it is decentralized finance or storage, it is an indispensable function in the decentralized industry. What Mask Network wants to do is a collection, a bridge linking Web2.0 to Web3.0. Now, we are still cooperating with the Polkadot ecosystem. For example, Mask Network is also a member of Web 3.0 Bootcamp; Near and Solana also maintain a good relationship with us.

Suji: The projects mentioned above are very powerful in our industry, but compared with the Internet giants, they are all too small. Even though many projects have high market capitalization, these projects have only shaken the financial industry a little. Banks may be concerned about Bitcoin, but they may not be worried about the current DeFi, because this industry is still in the learning stage. The social network or the technology giant will not worry about these.

Then can we combine all the forces, whether it is Ethereum, Polkadot, IPFS, Defi, NFT, can connect to the new world through the bridge of Mask Network?

It took more than 10 years for Bitcoin to reach a market value of more than 100 billion. As long as Zuckerberg and Bezos join forces, it seems that the entire industry can be blocked. Therefore, we must unite, not to compete excessively with each other, and to cooperate with each other to truly realize the decentralized world.

Everyone thinks that giants are terrible. China has Tencent and Ali, and the United States has Twitter, but they are relatively kind giants. Others, such as Facebook and Apple, are even more terrifying. And if these giants move casually, the industry's infrastructure may be suppressed at once.

So, we learned about a project from the early days of the Internet: the Netscape browser, which was competing with Windows at the time. At the time, Microsoft was a giant monopoly that refused to open source. Even when Bill Gates was pre-installing systems for various governments in China, he threatened to refuse to open the code, threatening that Windows is the only operating system that ordinary users can use. But the birth and development of the Internet has changed everything - the early Internet was very difficult to use, you must install Linux and a programming terminal, and type codes in it to view the forum. Maybe only university professors and geeks are playing. Ma Huateng was a famous forum back then. Moderator; the early internet was as difficult to use as it is now in the new decentralized world.

Marc Andreessen, the founder of the famous A16Z Fund, was a student at UIUC at that time, and he learned the spirit of Tim Berners-Lee. Tim made the prototype of the early World Wide Web and the supporting browser in Europe at that time, so Marc said that I would also make a browser, Mosaic, which was later a very famous company - Netscape.

At that time, Netscape did such a thing. They did not support Microsoft's approach. Their idea was to allow users to go to an open new world and obtain any information through a browser running in Windows, and the operation was very simple. , almost no threshold is used. There are so many interesting things in this new world. In the process of gradual development, Microsoft is afraid!

Because the browser will grow bigger and bigger, and eventually become an operating system, and at this time Microsoft will become an empty shell. Users don’t need to buy Windows, because it will eventually become a free product. Under pressure, Bill Gates made the decision himself. Microsoft IE copied Netscape and adopted the improper method of pre-installation. Then there was a dispute between the two companies. A "big war" caused both sides to suffer. Finally, the US Congress held a hearing, and the Department of Justice forced Bill Gates to retire early.

(For details, see: "40 years ago, Gates wrote a letter, how has the software industry changed since then?" http://m.qdaily.com/mobile/articles/23804.html?share_from=app，suji yan contributed to Curiosity Daily in 2016)

Of course, our goal is not so exaggerated. However, the current situation is somewhat similar to the previous ones. Ethereum may be like the Internet back then. Although it is cool, the threshold for use is high; while the current Internet giants are very easy to use, but they are very closed. They can block or ban users at any time. It is forbidden to speak.

So I am wondering if I can do a relatively innovative thing on the Internet: directly use decentralized projects such as Defi, NFT, DAO, Ethereum, and Polkadot on modern Internet applications. In this way, we are equivalent to a huge bridge, and this bridge is still decentralized.

Suji: Our goal is to continue and long-term promote the development of decentralized networks and decentralize themselves - Ethereum and other governance tokens are some good examples. Of course, it is not convenient for me to disclose the plan now, and you can continue to pay attention to our movements.

Mask Network will make many specific attempts in community governance and voting. Speaking of governance and voting - these are very complex economics and political science issues. I discussed this issue with Glen, the author of "Radical Market", and also published a column devoted to the future labor of digital assets. In October of this year, we will cooperate with CAA-INS, the Institute of Internet Society of the China Academy of Art, for an event called The Web of Phronsis (https://www.caa-ins.org/archives/6881). They are a network society researcher The organization has also done specific research on voting. I also invited Vitalik, Glen, founder of Arweave Sam, director of EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation, who has engaged in legal battles with US regulatory authorities in many cryptography-related lawsuits, including the recent decentralized exchange controversy) Danny Come and join us.

There are many other plans for Mask Network in the future, and we will implement them step by step. And doing these things is just for one goal, so that more people can experience a brand new and more open Internet.

"The governance model of the people, by the people, and for the people will last forever in the cyber world."