I met Chinese Web3 people in Dali: the future has already happened, it's just unevenly distributed

Most of the tourists in Dali come here for leisure. Cangshan is majestic and Erhai is quiet, and now it has received a look of no one else.

The "Summer of Tile Cats" Web3 meeting was distributed in more than a dozen venues with different shapes. Eager people shuttled, sat on the ground, and trusted each other. No one even cared about the giant spider that slowly crawled over the instep.

The concept of Web3 is already well known, but it is still difficult to say what it is, or what it is not. People are not in a hurry to make it clear, because the Nuggets' opportunity is fleeting.

What kind of talent will appear in Dali at this time? People who don't make money. Because the people who make the money are in Dubai and Singapore.

Get in early and be a giant

Flash rode an electric bike with his partner in the back seat, rushing from one venue to another in the ancient city of Dali. A few months ago, he quit his job in Dachang, "All in" Web3, hoping to gain something at the "Summer of Tile Cats" Web3 conference in Dali.

In Dali in late August, there were more investors than entrepreneurs. However, very few are willing to pay.

Flash from Beijing has a beautiful resume. He has worked in the world and China's first-class Internet companies successively, and has rich experience in data analysis. The entrepreneurial project is to create data analysis, operation and marketing tools for the B-side of Web3.

Web3 investors, according to Flash's analysis, are roughly divided into three categories. The first category belongs to the pure currency circle. They use Token as a return, and only look at projects that can quickly issue tokens, fast in and out. As a "token", Token can replace the past equity allocation, which is also a new form of venture capital in the Web3 world.

The second type of investors are traditional VCs from the Web2 era, who have seen a lot of Internet storms in recent years. They also tend to understand products that migrate Web2 logic to Web3.

The third category is "white prostitution". Although the word is indecent, there is a part of the investment "Xiaobai" who meet people everywhere and increase their knowledge. It is intended to fill the gap in the knowledge map and will never take the lead.

Since the spring of this year, U.S. technology stocks have plummeted, Bitcoin, Ethereum and other virtual currencies have also fallen, the stablecoin Terra has collapsed, and the bear market is surging.

In Dali, although he did not meet a suitable investor, Flash still "connected" with some friends. Some do on-chain airdrop tools or NFTs, and they need to get the user's portrait before they can send the coins. Some go overseas to make GameFi-blockchain games, and they also need corresponding data predictions.

They heard Flash speak or ask questions at the scene and surrounded him as soon as it was over. In the "traditional" Internet era, the data of large factories is precious and never shows to others. The internal data analysis department is also a master. Small factories simply "can't afford it" and can only find outsourcing. The experience of Flash has naturally attracted many people to ask for advice.

Before "All in" Web3, Flash had decided to leave the big factory. Several Internet giants in China have shown decline in the first quarter of this year. He examined several "future-oriented" fields, such as new energy, autonomous driving, and cross-border e-commerce. The new energy industry is not friendly to new entrants, and he himself has no relevant resources and background. In the autonomous driving industry, Internet programmers and manufacturing engineers are in charge of each other. The best time for cross-border e-commerce to enter the market is before 2018, and the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta are better geographically, and he does not occupy the right time and place.

"Only at Web3 do ordinary people have a chance."

Web3 is a concept in the development stage of the World Wide Web, mainly related to blockchain, encrypted currency, non-fungible tokens (NFT), and decentralization. The more vague the concept, the greater the space for imagination. If in the Web2 era, people look at the price-earnings ratio, then in Web3, they look at the "market-to-dream ratio" -- only if there is a "dream" can someone follow suit.

In Web3, the epidemic is fomo—fear of missing out.

Flash said, "I have faith in Web3." He pointed out that DAO (decentralized organization) is a new organizational method and production relationship; DeFi (decentralized finance) allows cross-border loans and facilitates capital Global flow; Token or NFT, which can be used as a proof of value for various assets such as equity and bills, is more meaningful than real currency; smart contracts (contracts on the blockchain) can solve the problem of trust.

Moreover, his entrepreneurial direction is related to his previous experience, which is equivalent to "translating" the data analysis tool to Web3, which is easy to cut in and safe.

Web2 is a giant. Turn on your phone, and there's no app that doesn't belong to the giants. Flash believes that there will be giants in Web3, even if Web3 emphasizes openness, transparency, and equality, because according to the "time machine theory", what happens in one industry will happen again in another industry.

If so, where are the opportunities for ordinary people?

Flash laughed. "Of course, our project Cordy entered Web3 early, and also wanted to be a giant, GrowingIo of Web3."

Discord in China

The stool is going to be China's Discord.

Discord is the most popular social product after Facebook and Twitter. It is also a communication tool that can compete with Zoom and Slack. It is also an all-encompassing pan-interest community. It has more than 140 million monthly active users, one million communities, the largest community has millions of members, and the total number of app downloads has exceeded 500 million.

At present, China has no products that can be compared with it. YY Voice, like Discord, started to grow from the game "open black", but it has declined. In the Web3 world, the Greater Community is still blank.

Web3 can be understood in three levels, the first is the infrastructure layer, which includes public chains and centralized payment exchanges; the second is the middle layer, which includes protocols or decentralized exchanges; and the last is the application layer, where the product is fully integrated. to users.

His project Metaforo chooses to face users and has a series of community functions such as wallet login, rewards, off-chain voting, red envelopes, and Discord bot two-way information synchronization. In the forum, the early stage is all "dirty work". Operation and promotion are also the key to “on-chain”. The stool's business trip has been scheduled for next year. At the end of last year, the team received the first financing of 4 million US dollars, and the entire project was valued at 50 million US dollars.

The stool is preparing for a jiu-jitsu competition, which is a great way to relieve stress.

A week before going to Dali, he regained his hobby three years ago. Jiu-jitsu is a real competitive event, which not only improves physical ability, but also has a small probability of injury, so it is suitable for daily practice. The stool is sturdy. At first glance, he has undergone long and hard training. He has also worked as a fitness coach for a while, but he gave up because he lacked the entire time at his own disposal.

However, after he was lucky enough to book a seat at a Dali restaurant that was full of diners, he boldly "comes to a portion of each mushroom" and ate another bowl of rice. According to the plan, he should not consume more than 20 grams of carbohydrates per day. This meal is obviously "over the limit", which is his cuteness. Some people under the banner of "fitness" often "perform" self-discipline in front of friendship and delicious food.

Stool lives in Shanghai and used to be a front-end programmer. He has worked in a commodity ID management cloud platform based on blockchain technology; he has also worked in a blockchain investment company, researching PoS (Proof of Stake) mining pools.

The stool won the first prize of the hackathon. He spent two days writing a DeFi gadget to overcome the shortcomings of Synthetix. Synthetix is a derivative liquidity protocol built on the Ethereum network. It can issue different synthetic assets from the physical and digital worlds, including fiat currencies such as the US dollar, cryptocurrencies such as ether or bitcoin, as well as gold and silver. precious metals.

Synthetix is the current leader in synthetic derivatives. Stool found that Synthetix faced the problem of debt pool hedging from the very beginning. Due to the particularity of the structure, users may suffer systemic risks of debt pool fluctuations as long as their positions are inconsistent with the current debt pool ratio. To hedge this risk, you need to rebalance your position based on the debt pool ratio data.

He and the team opened up the pipeline of trustless processing of data on the chain, and finally put the data on the chain again, so that Synthetix has a built-in debt pool balancing tool to achieve "one-click rebalancing".

As the translator of Synthetix Litepaper, Stool introduced Synthetix to the Chinese world. Arthur Cheong, a proofreader from Singapore, has devoted himself to DeFi and established a fund.

The stool is waiting for his chance.

Drifting in the Web3 world for a long time, the bear market and bull market always have reincarnation, and the stool has encountered setbacks several times. Just graduated from university, and the stool has also made a mobile phone case with a flash, although he does not understand the selling point of this product now. "No matter what, I will always make a comeback."

Going to the "third world"

At the foot of Cangshan Mountain, just after Dragon finished his speech at the "Asian, African and Latin American Web3 Session", several audience members who were working on dance applications enthusiastically consulted. Dragon has worked in Lagos, Nigeria for more than three years. In Africa, the application of singing and dancing is very popular. Like Lagos, local employees of many companies don their special costumes on Fridays and go dancing after get off work.

Dragon used to sell motorcycles and medicines in Africa, and also worked in Opay and PalmPay. OPay and PalmPay are digital banking apps for Africa, and both are Chinese-backed fintech companies. Opay has become a unicorn after receiving a $400 million Series C financing led by SoftBank.

The job of selling motorcycles is also dangerous. Once, he was responsible for distributing motorcycles to the recruited riders, similar to the two-wheeled Didi taxi model—the company provided the bikes and recruited the riders. Originally, only a hundred riders were recruited that day. However, hundreds of riders came, and as a result, some of the recruited riders were “preempted” by others.

Came all the way, couldn't make any money, people gathered around the door to protest, Dragon dismissed those who weren't recruited first, and waited a few hours to see who else had been recruited but didn't get the car and stayed and waited Say it, apologize, and then pay them to travel to comfort them home. In the collection work in charge of the western region of Nigeria, the collectors have also been beaten. He was besieged by local employees for a while because the outsourced three-party HR agency delayed payroll.

Dragon's last "job" was for Cassava, who has a background in Transsion and EVG. As the "King of Mobile Phones in Africa", Transsion will sell a total of 197 million mobile phones in 2021, a year-on-year increase of 13.07%, with a global mobile phone market share of 12.4%, ranking third, accounting for nearly half of more than 50 countries and regions on the African continent. market share.

Cassava is a token rewards protocol and wallet designed for the African market. In addition to providing rewards for traditional applications, Cassava also enables users to transact through wallets, manage assets including NFTs, access staking pools, participate in DeFi protocols, and interact with the Web3 platform.

Dragon is currently working on its own DeFi project in Africa. It wants to provide African users with stable virtual tokens anchored to the US dollar, reduce the impact of currency depreciation, and provide a wider range of inclusive financial services.

Before going to Nigeria, Dragon did some psychological construction, after all, Africa is far away and poor. He served in the military for two years during his college years, and the "hard conditions" were nothing, but only worried about spiritual loneliness. After waiting, the local sales assistants helped in many ways. Except for the frequent traffic jams in Lagos, Dragon couldn't find anything worth complaining about.

Lagos is a large port in West Africa, where most of the import and export trade is done. With a population of more than 20 million, it is close to Beijing and Shanghai, but the infrastructure is relatively backward, and slums can be seen everywhere.

Nigeria is Africa's largest economy and a "key country" in international relations. After Biden entered the White House, Secretary of State Blinken visited Nigeria many times, emphasizing its population size, economic size, political influence and development potential in Africa, and regarded it as a partner of the United States in maintaining security in West Africa. Major countries such as China and Russia have invested here.

Going to sea, especially to the third world for gold mining, is also a choice for Chinese Web3 people.

The original intention of Dragon is to solve some of the pain points in the lives of ordinary people in Africa. Locals from poor backgrounds have no legal status, and it is difficult to enjoy financial services; many families rely on the income of overseas workers, but the fees for international remittances are extremely high; the legal currency of some countries is unstable, and citizens need stable financial products.

A decentralized bank, using virtual currency as a capital pool, can provide more diversified services such as insurance, wealth management, and lending, avoiding high operating costs and liquidity shortages caused by centralized supervision.

Dragon only has some troubles in "art", he said "there is no end to art". For him, "Tao" means doing real things - how many users have been served and how much value has been created for them.