Web3 Products That Fit Best for Rebuilding on Polkadot
1. Firstly Let’s welcome our guests and introduce yourselves. Then talk about the Web3 product you are currently using, and why you like it？
Zouyang: I am zouyang from Polkadot Research Institute. I came across Polkadot because of Xiaojie from Polkaworld. I was deeply attracted to Polkadot through my own research and convinced myself to join Polkadot Eco.
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My favorite Web 3 product, if I were to rewind a few months ago, I would say Axie Infinity, because it is really playable and a phenomenal Dapp. More recently, it’s StepN, whose main feature is that it incentivizes our daily behavior with tokens, and it’s very reasonable and does a good job of preventing cheating. It uses tokens to motivate people to start going out and exercising. It’s a great form of gaming.
StenN’s economic model still seems a bit parochial, where those who come later will be reaped by those who come before them. But so does the logic of traditional games, so how do they stay sustainable? The core lies in continuous updates, and with the daily activity of 500,000, there is still a lot of room for growth and opportunity for iteration on top of that. And currently, its influence is mostly in Asia, if the users in Europe and America grow up, then it will have more potential.
Yuki: Hi everyone, I’m Yuki and I’m mainly responsible for Moonbeam’s Asian developer ecosystem. My main job is firstly to help developers enter Polkadot ecosystem through Moonbeam and help them to develop Dapp better, and secondly to support developers in the ecosystem.
I’ve been using a Web3 product, Metamask, since I joined the community, and I don’t think you’ll think I’ve picked this product because I don’t want to offend anyone. In fact, I have followed the whole development of Metamask and it is very similar to the development of Polkdot. Metamask was founded at the beginning of Ethereum when VCs were not optimistic about Ethereum, and no one thought it would have so many users and daily activities later.
I think there are two things that I really appreciate. First, it has been sticking to its direction. When Ethereum was just founded, decentralization, consensus, etc. were not favored by most people. Instead, they firmly believe that this direction will bring changes to people. They launched metamask and kept going forward.
Secondly, it has a very good user experience. When I first got into the industry unlike many people who signed up for centralized exchanges, I signed up for Metamask first and in the process, I found a lot of tutorials online. So they will put themselves in the user’s shoes and think about the problem. Solve the problems that users will encounter in the actual process of using it.
Then, it keeps following the trend of blockchain development. In the beginning, Metamask was only for Ethereum developers, but with the rise of BSC, Polkadot, and other emerging public chains, it also implements switching networks, and Moonbean’s network can also be switched on it. This is very convenient for both users and developers, who can directly use more familiar wallets to participate in our ecosystem thanks to their technical support. So for both developers and regular users, it can meet their needs according to the development of the industry.
Finally, it gives a lot of room for imagination. At present, Metamask has opened a fiat currency channel for very few public chains, so with the development of multiple chains, can this be extended to other public chains. In addition, with the development of NFT, Dao, etc., is it possible to complete the operation on Metamask. All of these have great possibilities for development.
So to sum up, first of all, Metamask seems to be a very simple logic, but it is really an indispensable part for Web3 users. And it keeps up with the trend of blockchain development very well. Finally, how it goes to break the circle, so that more Web2 users can enter the Web3 world well, there is still a lot of room. These are some of my personal thoughts.
Polkaworld: The product I’ve been using lately is StepN. Before I used it, I also thought it was a scam and it was nothing more than an X to earn model product. But I was very surprised when my high school classmates came to ask me questions about StepN, which made me start to wonder, why is this product so hot? So I got my hands on StepN as well.
I think StepN has undeniably succeeded in breaking the circle. Its users are no longer old blockchain users, but newcomers who were attracted to the circle through NFT. The current “Jpeg” has no value other than the hype. It is not a good experience mentally and physically. StepN is still essentially the underlying logic of taking. Only Staking is very simple and straightforward, and you can have a return on your asset collateral. What is different about StepN is that after you buy the virtual shoes, you have to get the revenue through your own active movement. And it adds a lot of game attributes in the process, such as upgrades. And it makes people want to share their results. I even want to buy a pair of shoes for my mom. She should be very happy if she can earn money just by walking.
Mingshi: Hi everyone, I’m Mingshi from Astar and I’m the head of incubator at Astar. My most admired Web3 product is Audios, and before I talk about this product, I want to say a few words about what I think about StepN. I think one of the things that StepN does very well is that it really enables a lot of user participation. Compared to many DEFI products, the TVL of DEFI products looks very high, but the actual users are not many, still a few people involved. But StepN is different, it has a particularly large number of participants, and ordinary users are very well involved in the product. The second point that StepN does better is user experience, which many Crypto Native products can’t do, maybe because of the underlying framework or the product, the gap is very obvious. But I personally still don’t like StepN because it infinitely magnifies speculation. Few people will directly say that I came to Web3 World to make money, but that is one of the motivations, and StepN infinitely amplifies that motivation.
My favorite thing about Audios is that it’s a music streaming platform, first laid out on Ethereum and now on Solana. Users can listen to music on the platform, and artists can earn revenue while users are listening to music. It solves a problem that many infrastructure projects have not been able to solve. It can protect the privacy of IP while being censorship resistant, which is not easy. Many projects can only do one of these things. For example, IPFS is censorship resistant, but the files you upload to it are transparent and have no privacy, and Audios uses proxy re-encryption to first break up the music and encrypt it, and then store it in different nodes. From an engineering perspective, it has the intrinsic value of Web3. Secondly, Audios has a particularly good user experience, but it is not currently on fire, I think mainly because the music industry relies heavily on IP traffic, but it has not attracted the larger IPs on board, and for the larger IPs, the revenue gained from these on Audios is very insignificant. This is the dilemma of Audios. But I still really like Audios as a product.
PW: I’ve heard some arguments before as to why music NFT hasn’t caught on. First of all, music is a very complex industry, it’s not like a “small picture” where the artist is just involved. There are many industries involved in music. Secondly, music NFT doesn’t have a platform like Opensea, which makes it very easy to publish.
Ming shi: That’s right. Music is an industry that has been around for hundreds of years, and it’s very difficult to adopt a new distribution model. audios break the traditional model, and these music distributors are losing out, which makes this very difficult. Also the distribution tools for music are more complex and more complicated for the user to experience. It’s not like a picture format, where you can communicate visually.
2. the products that the guests just talked about are great, but none of them are laid out on Polkadot. so, do you think these Web3 products fit for rebuilding on Polkadot? Or, what kind of products do you think are more suitable to rebuild on Polkadot?
Zhouyang: Some products are very easy to replicate. For example, Chainsafe just got financial support from Polkadot to make a Metamask compatible plugin to Polkadot. Polkadot has a high asset ranking, but the activity level is not enough. The hotter public chains are Solana, BSC, Polygon, they have very high visibility, activity and can provide great financial support. VCs and exchanges etc. will also provide a lot of help for them. Project owners choosing them have a good chance of hitting the ground running.
And Polkadot is far from it. As a layer0, Polkadot puts a lot of effort on the underlying development. They hope to provide a secure service for Layer1 projects. The heavy burden of ecosystem development falls on Layer1. Now the overall market environment is not very good and the development of layer1 is slow. So for the time being, Polkadot does not have a living soil for good applications. It still needs time to cultivate this soil.
PW: When Polkadot is still immature it is exactly a good opportunity for layout. If Polkadot is already very hot, the threshold for developers to come in is not the same. I hope the guests can chat about whether the current projects that are already very hot can be rebuilt in Polkadot, and there can be some optimization on the technical level, etc.
Zouyang: From a technical point of view, it is very easy and these applications can be laid out. But I still make this point, technology is not the core reason. We also take StepN as an example, why it can be hot. The Polkadot ecosystem is obviously not yet able to provide such help to the project.
YUKI: I think it is a good direction that good Web3 products can be rebuilt in Polkadot. But if a developer finds that simply copying a new ecology doesn’t work. Then there needs to be an ecological local guide to help him.
I think every product has a silent period. The outbreak does not just happen. It needs a long time to accumulate in the early stage. Just like we were not too optimistic about commercial housing before, suddenly one day you find it is very hot. We still have to give it great patience before it is not hot. We still have to give it great patience before it is hot.
As for mature applications that are not suitable for deployment in Polkadot, Moonriver has encountered many such examples. Many developers have contacted us and are considering such a problem. They can either deploy directly on moonrive or moonbeam, or they can start a parachain by themselves. Then the cost of the first way would be very low. If it is the second way, they need to learn new technologies, and whether it is necessary to do so in the current product phase is an important consideration. Generally, when the project reaches the middle and late stage, it needs to develop its own ecology vigorously, and this time it can go to develop a parachain. Before that is possible to try our platform.
Sushi and Uni have already deployed their applications to moonriver, and it is proven that a successful business model will work well everywhere, and the TVL is still relatively high in a short time. But each ecosystem will have its own culture, and the types of token holdings of Polkadot users are different. Projects need to think about how to adapt in this ecology, such as how Polkadot XCM protocol can be used to complete the interaction with other chains. So a good product copied to Polkadot is like stepping on the shoulders of a giant, and you need to think about what you want to get from the new ecosystem.
Traffic is really a problem for Polkadot. Our eco-partners have often responded to us that Polkadot is particularly low-profile compared to BSC and others. But I think the market value of KSM and DOT is very high, which shows that there are a lot of supporters behind this. And it’s very positive in terms of developer activity, and the number of new developers added. But when the whole market environment is not very good, and all ecologies are relatively smooth, it will look like Polkadot ecology is more smooth. I think it’s an illusion.
So when you recognize the technical solution and you think you are doing something that is laying a good foundation for the future, you can stick to it. When we are fully prepared, marketing campaigns, successful IPs, etc. will follow.
Mingshi: There are a lot of Ether-like projects on Atar with some optimizations! For example, Astral DAO is a very interesting stablecoin with a clearing mechanism very similar to Liquid, which is the second largest stablecoin on Ethereum. The biggest problem with Liquid is that it only supports a single ETH as collateral, because the price of ETH is unstable, so it needs a 110% pledge rate, so the asset utilization is not very high. Astral Dao, on the other hand, can support more collateral, such as BTC, or even stable coins. When Atar goes live with Wasm, there will be similarly adapted projects for Wasm.
I think many products are well suited to rebuild on Polkadot. when Gavin Wood was building Polkadot, he wanted each parachain to have its own characteristics and to do its own job. The current state is still very different from the vision, and the various parachains appear homogenized. The project I mentioned earlier, Audios, is perfect for Polkadot. If it migrates to Polkadot to be a parachain, the performance of the whole parachain can serve it and solve the problem of blockage. The parachain can also meet its module customization.
Polkadot ecosystem is really suitable for many Web3 products, including some infrastructure projects. Even some of the projects I have been involved with have expressed their reluctance to come to Polkadot ecosystem because of low traffic and no VC support. Early investors of public chains like Fantom, Solana, etc. are still investing in ecological projects, while many of Polkadot’s early investors have withdrawn. But the core reason is still that the technology is not perfect, and the XCM protocol is not yet fully run through. The underlying driver of the blockchain industry is still technology, so when the technology is perfected, some other factors will be overcome. We still need time to wait for the technology to be perfected.
In this process, Astar is also working hard, including cooperation with Polkadot’s external traffic, to increase the liquidity of the ecosystem.
PW: We’ve touched on this in previous discussions. The technical advantages do not make up for the lack of traffic. Of course, we are not saying that this is a foregone conclusion, just that the process is very long.
There are several factors that influence the developers to come to Polkadot
First: it needs to be economically open. Currently, access to the polka ecosystem requires access to a parallel chain of projects like Asar, Acala, Moonbean, etc. This is clearly not economically open. If there are other public chains competing at the same time, developers will definitely choose other economically open ecologies. The good point is that parachains can provide an economical and open development environment.
Second: In the short term, technical advantages cannot make up for ecological disadvantages. But in the long term. Technology can drive the ecosystem.
3. We discussed earlier that ecosystem development is predicated on good technical performance. However, we have found that the Astar and moonbeam are experiencing congestion. So why is there a lag problem and will this problem be solved in the future?
Yuki: First of all ditto to everyone, Moonbeam and Moonriver have rarely received network lag issues lately. There was a time last year when some DEX, MM were concentrating on a time period to promote and do events, there was indeed congestion for a short period of time. At that time, we have two solutions. First, change the time of the event. The second solution was to raise the Gas fee. moonbeam has a very low Gas fee, and even if the fee is raised, it is still very cheap, but it can solve the problem efficiently.
As for the reasons for lag. The first is that relaychain performance needs to be improved. Currently the KSM network is in its early days, our team is seeking stability and we are following the development progress of KSM and DOT completely. When the Parity team has perfected the relay chain, the parachain performance of the entire Polkadot ecosystem will be greatly improved.
The second problem is the parachain itself. Let’s start with its own improvement. The previous confirmation takes two times, then we try to improve to one, keeping breaking our own limitations to shorten the waiting time.
I’m also often asked by the community, BSC and Solana claim to have very high TPS, can Polkadot achieve high TPS. we first need to understand what is the reason behind the performance，is it at the expense of decentralization? Polkadot is very adamant about decentralization and security. Short-term speedups definitely require centralized servers, and we’ve seen many examples of this risk, such as AWS downtime. The damage this causes is far outweighed by the benefits of speedups. So we still need to slowly speed up on the basis of decentralization and security. And take the opportunity to work on improving your performance in the process as well. Of course, if community members are experiencing lagging issues, it’s still important to get in touch with us. Our dedicated engineers will help you solve the problem. Troubleshoot some bugs and problems caused by improper operation.
Mingshi: I’ll start by explaining the reason for the congestion. It is not because the parachain doesn’t have enough TPS. Users don’t interact with the chain directly. Rather, the user’s transactions are submitted via RPC to the operators of each node, and those operators submit the data to the chain and generate direct transactions with the chain. So if you experience lag on Astar, it’s because the public endpoint of these node providers is not particularly stable. Or they are caused by limited bandwidth.
How can this problem be solved?
If you are sending transactions and find that it doesn’t work very well. If you are an EVM application, then you can just switch the public endpoint to the private one of the featured nodes. Some Astar developers have used Astar’s endpoint directly to save time, which can also cause lagging issues. We’ve asked the eco-developers to make improvements. So the experience will be better in the future. Another good news is that Alchemy, the biggest node in Web3, will become the node service provider of Astar, so you can choose its service in the future, so the stability and speed will be greatly improved. The user experience will be very much better.
4. What products do people like it be rebuilt on Polkadot ？
MIngshi: We are very much welcome all kinds of products to come to the Polkadot. Because Astar’s vision is to build a multi-virtual machine platform, different products can choose the most suitable development environment for them. For example, Metaverse and Gamefi can choose WASM. Traditional game developers use more rust and C++, this is the most suitable for them. The best DEFI products are based on EVM and we support EVM.
Yuki: As a platform, we firmly welcome all developers. We support EVM and have very good developer documentation, so we hope to help developers develop products quickly. Also, if developers want to go to other parachains in Polkadot, we have prepared the documentation to allow them to move to other parachains smoothly. Then for projects that want to interact with other ecosystems, such as AMAX, Solana, etc., we will also develop various bridges to help developers. So we hope we can help all developers, as long as they come to us with their problems, we can solve them well. We welcome all types of products to choose us.
Zouyang:I think the Dapp chain would be a good entry point. We have noticed that many successful Web3 chains are hoping to break away from the public chains and make their own side chains after their success. Because the public chain may become bottleneck to their development due to the performance, token price, and other factors. And the parachain of Polkadot can completely meet their needs for personalization, and the whole chain would completely serve you. It meets exactly the needs of the Game. So I think we can start with that.
PW: I hope there will be better Web3 games, like Happy Farm, or Growing games. And then better there are gamefi like StepN, X to earn model, which are very positive games！
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