纵向流动性：价值如何互联互通

Some people call the blockchain the value settlement layer of the Internet, so Web3 based on blockchain technology is called the Internet of Value. The blockchain itself, as a distributed ledger, is closely associated with "value". Its basic value is embodied in Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, and with the invention of smart contracts, people have discovered Its potential is much more than that. Blockchain technology constructs a brand-new trust system, so that anything with "value" can be transferred between networks.

The high degree of decentralization of the blockchain makes it difficult to tamper with, and the global consensus recorded on the decentralized ledger is where all value is generated.

A smart contract is a code published on the blockchain. Due to the characteristics of a decentralized ledger, it is also difficult to tamper with, but it can be upgraded to a certain extent. Smart contracts solidify code constraints on the blockchain, and through global consensus, make everyone abide by the same set of governance logic. Open source free and unified standards creatively make smart contracts composable, and value is connected from then on.

Tokens often refer to data units written on the blockchain defined by a contract standard. Through composability, it cooperates with other smart contracts to achieve ownership definition, profit distribution and other purposes through global consensus, thereby financializing the scene, thereby realizing multi-party governance and coordination in the scene, and exchanging value accordingly.

The carrier of value flow

The value flow carrier of Web3 is the basic element supporting the entire network value flow. According to the different levels of abstraction, we divide it into three layers. The bottom layer is the medium of exchange and value storage, which is the medium of value flow; the second layer is identity, relationship, and property rights, which defines the social trust. Basic structure; the top layer is decentralized organization and society, etc., which undertakes new human collaboration methods based on the second layer.

Medium of exchange and store of value

Fungible Token (FT) is the most direct value as Store of Value and Medium of Exchange vitalik.ca/general/2017/10/17/moe.html). As a value recorded on a distributed ledger, scarcity is the basis for it as a store of value, and a steady stream of buyers and sellers is the reason for the continued value of the token, and illiquid money is worthless. Therefore, as a medium of exchange, not all homogenized tokens are valuable. What needs to be established here is not only a literal global consensus based on the ledger, but also a global consensus based on psychological utility. This psychological utility, also known by some as internal coordination, describes how digital media as a whole reflects the internal & organic content verification system of.

It is the opposite of the hype-driven, narrative-driven, meme market. The main driver of investment interest is distributed peer-to-peer learning. The more memes are marketed and promoted, the more people call crypto a Ponzi scheme. But the deeper the content clues and thought snippets, the more outsiders and onlookers believe in its value.

A typical example of this is ETH. At this stage, the mission of BTC is more of a better store of value, while ETH has slowly become the hard currency of the blockchain world. What makes this happen is not hype, narrative, and memes, but a content consensus around ETH’s distributed peer-to-peer learning. The ETH ecosystem is constantly building and developing, producing more and more utilities, such as smart contract standards, Ethereum login, and more. At the same time, as one of the most influential KOLs in the blockchain world, Vitalik continues to lead the innovation of blockchain ideas, from [blockchain governance](https://vitalik.ca/general/2017/12/17/voting. html) to Extended Endgame and then to [Soul Binding](https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/01/ 26/soulbound.html) etc. The ethereum souls represented by Vitalik have a very high influence in driving industry cognition and ideological improvement. These in-depth content clues and thought fragments make the outside world full of confidence in the value of ethereum.

The value flow as a homogenized token, either as a pure medium of exchange like Bitcoin, or with various utilities like Ethereum, or as a pure stable currency like USDT for online circulation.

Bitcoin's model is The Store of Value Hypothesis (SoV). The SoV system design can be simple and useless but needs to be strong and stable. Flow in the Internet of Value in the form of a value storage medium. This flow can be slow and low-frequency, and performance is not its first consideration. It needs to have world-class autonomy, censorship resistance, and security. This type of monetary asset is also Monero, Zcash, etc.

The Ethereum model is The Utility Hypothesis. The utility system design needs to pursue performance and functions. It is based on smart contracts and is oriented to solve real problems in real life or the network world. These utilities include, but are not limited to, transaction throughput, speed, privacy, price stability, contract flexibility and programmability, and more. Likewise, it is pursuing world-class autonomy, censorship resistance, and security, although some believe this can be compromised. This type of monetary asset also includes Bitcoin Cash, SOL, BNB, and more.

USDT falls into the category of the utility hypothesis, which needs to maximize the utility of price stability. Its biggest feature is that it turns electronic currency into encrypted currency, so as to achieve platform-level and even world-class resistance to censorship. Anyone, anywhere, anytime, as long as they can connect to the network, can always have legal currency (such as US dollars) forever. Equivalent cryptocurrency. This impact is far-reaching. In the traditional world, there are various restrictions and obstacles in exchanging national currencies into legal currencies such as the US dollar. Stablecoins break these restrictions and make currency circulation more free. This is a highly potential scenario. This type of currency also includes USDC, DAI, BUSD, and more.

Identity, relationship and property rights

Blockchain will be the only source of truth in the digital world. Tim Sweeney of Epic Games has publicly stated that the metaverse can only exist if there is a true digital native property rights system, and the blockchain is providing such underlying capabilities. In the book Inevitably, Kevin Kelly states that "We cannot prevent free copying on a large scale. Doing so would not only destroy the dynamics of wealth creation, it would bring the Internet itself to a standstill. Free-flowing copies are already on the Internet. The nature of this global communication system has left its mark. Network technology requires unconstrained replication. Replicas must flow.”

Reproduction of the digital world is inevitable, it is part of the nature of the Internet. The Internet adds value to free replicas through native so that they become commodities that can be sold, and blockchain through global consensus provides Originally free copies define property rights and derive definitions of identity and relationship.

The technical means to achieve these include Non-Fungible Token (NFT), Soul Bound Token (SBT) and Decentralized IDentify (DID).

NFT is a revolution in digital ownership, it is defined and "minted" by smart contracts, cannot be copied and tampered with, and can be used as physical collectibles and images, music, games The "digital fingerprint" of virtual assets such as props. It defines the property rights, relationships and identities that can be exchanged. People can purchase NFTs of encrypted art works to declare their sovereignty, purchase PROOF Collective or BAYC to obtain membership in the corresponding clubs, enjoy corresponding value-added services, and can also purchase StepN’s running shoes NFT to Owning a pair of digital running shoes, you can use it to "run" and get corresponding rewards, etc. However, identity, relationship, and property rights are not all tradable, and they cannot define the totality of social ownership.

SBT implements the definition of non-tradable ownership, which is the gateway to a [decentralized society](https://papers.ssrn .com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4105763). Identities and relationships such as personal contributions, positions, and skill certifications are non-tradable and describe a person's abilities, experiences, and identity as much as they describe a person's "soul". It has many application scenarios, such as wallet's social recovery, skill certificate, on-chain unsecured lending, decentralized governance, etc. . Combined with NFTs, they make it possible for everyone to disaggregate, trade, share, and own rights in the digital world.

DID defines the identity of an individual in the digital world. It is the basic component of the sociality of the digital world. It makes the flow of value not only stay at the financial level, but also extends to the social credit level. Lacking a native Web3 identity, today's DeFi ecosystem cannot support activities that are ubiquitous in the real economy, such as undercollateralized loans, or simple contracts like apartment rentals. SBT is a small step in creating this kind of social identity, composability and the construction of composite meaning is what DID can apply to the ground The essential. Composability requires a unified standard, and the construction of composite meaning includes predictive models based on user data, composite artificial intelligence, and programmable composite privacy.

The digital construction of identities, relationships, and property rights is far-reaching, allowing Web3 to transform society broadly, not just the financial system. All social structures today can thus be built in the digital world and avoid witch attacks, collusion and material over-financing.

Decentralized Organizations and Society

The improvement of social trust level conducive to economic development, its [influence mechanism](https://books.google.com.hk/books /about/%E4%BF%A1%E4%BB%BB.html?id=FJ9LAAAACAAJ&redir_esc=y) is that trust directly affects the size, organization, transaction scope and transaction form of a social and economic entity, as well as the indirect effects of social The scale and intensity of productive profit-seeking activities. As the basic technology, blockchain technology has built a trustless value network system through the successful definition of identity, relationship and property rights, as well as the realization of economic incentives through tokens, and the realization of governance logic through smart contracts. This cryptography-based value network provides an organizational mechanism for a new society. These networks are bound by protocols, and protocols are bound by mathematics. Relevant parties can participate in the protocol governance in a trustless manner in accordance with the methods stipulated in the agreement, and cooperate with each other, jointly produce and distribute profits, so that for the first time, humans can coordinate a large number of related parties in a real-time and trustless manner on a global scale, greatly It reduces the cost of trust seeking of relevant parties, thereby reducing transaction costs, expanding social division of labor, production and transaction scale, stimulating economic vitality and promoting economic development.

Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) is the embryonic form of this new social organization mechanism, and Decentralized Society (DeSoc) is the end point of this organizational mechanism. In 2022, a variety of DAO organizations will sprout up. The trustless collaboration within these organizations needs to improve organizational incentive rules, reward contributions and punish evildoers. Asset disposal, organizational development, etc. need to be decided through proposals and voting to ensure that the organization Everyone inside has a voice. All behaviors are made public, and the rules will be encoded into the decentralized autonomous organization through code.

In the traditional world, modern civilizations such as literature, thinking, science, laws and regulations are all created on paper media. Every word written on a book records the culture and rules of the traditional world. It is difficult to tamper with and spread through books. reach a broad consensus. In the digital world, code logic is digital regulations, and the traditional Internet can only provide platform-level centralized credit and security commitments, which is highly vulnerable. Governance rules defined by blockchain technology, just like the legal provisions in the real world, need to be approved by the People's Congress. Even hackers cannot tamper with the rules. Civilization products such as literature, thinking, science, laws and regulations can exist in the digital world in new forms. It is written on the blockchain, just like written in a book, which is real, tangible and endless.

At present, many conditions are not met. The lack of infrastructure conditions makes the current DAO still maintain a strong centralized operation. At the same time, although many construction contents are open, they are difficult to trace, verify, and can be tampered with, such as records of members' contributions, certification, profit distribution, etc. These contents At present, it still requires a lot of labor costs, is inefficient, and there is still the possibility of fraud.

There is still a lot of work to be done in this new form of collaboration between decentralized organizations and society. In addition to technology, there is a need for a lot of exploration and innovation in governance models.

The stack of the value network

We try to delineate the stack of the Web3 value network:

1. The bottom layer is the blockchain technology itself. It has been innovating continuously since its birth. The most mainstream view is that the first-layer blockchain network is combined with the second-layer blockchain network to modularize the blockchain. , thereby improving blockchain performance.
2. The second layer is the state converter and middleware, which connect the protocol built on the blockchain and the blockchain itself, state converters such as EVM and the second-layer network CariroVM, ZKEVM, ZKVM, etc. Middleware mainly includes storage, indexing, nodes and message passing. Storage solutions are constantly being upgraded and innovated, ranging from IPFS to Filecoin to Arweave to Ceramic, etc.; indexing tools are mainly the index of data on the chain (such as The Graph) and the index of storage tools (such as Kwil), the main purpose of which is to directly The data used is converted into a data set with a friendly format and easy to use; the node provides some hosting services to facilitate developers to quickly test and build their own protocols, and provide some functional APIs such as storage service APIs for developers to directly call, improve development Speed; Messaging tools are designed to open up on-chain and off-chain communication and between different blockchains, including oracles (such as Chainlink) and cross-chain protocols (such as Connext) in general.
3. The third layer is tokens and smart contracts, which are the continuation of value flow scenarios. Tokens can be used as value storage and exchange media, and the combination of smart contract standards and tokens makes tokens have governance utility. The code contract logic deployed on the blockchain has innovatively optimized the circulation of tokens from the perspective of liquidity, such as AMM-based DEX (such as Uniswap), collateralized lending (such as Aave), insurance and derivatives (such as Everlasting). Renewal contract exchange GMX, dYdX) and so on.
4. The fourth layer is the user terminal, which is the entrance to the value flow scenario, including deposit and withdrawal solutions, wallets, and Dapps. The difference between Dapp and the third-layer protocol here is mainly that it refers to the application itself, which is not composable, while the third layer mainly refers to the protocol itself, which is composable. At the same time, Dapp also has More complex interactive scenarios, such as GameFi with a lot of playable content and interactions, and SocialFi with a lot of user interaction content, are protocol-independent.
5. The fifth layer is the decentralized organization. It is not only the use of the Internet of Values ​​by individuals, but also the collaboration of a group of people under the Internet of Values. It requires more cooperation between people. These cooperation methods are not yet available. Not clear, we call these collaborative Dapps DAO Tools (eg Dework).

The entire value Internet stack supports the value flow scenario. There are still many technical solutions that are not perfect, and the mode of cooperation between each component is constantly changing. We realize that there may be some adjustments in the classification of some modules. And there are great innovations happening all the time in the crypto space, which may be hard to include in this chart. This is a dynamically adjusted version of the stack model for peer discussion.

Realization scenario of value network

The flow of value is generated in the interaction between entities and entities, which can be people, robots, digital items or even a fixed piece of smart contract code. In this process, it involves the definition of identity, relationship and rights, resulting in sociality, and the link connecting this sociality is trust. The blockchain-centered Internet of Value is reducing the cost of trust, including investment, consumption, certification, and credit endorsement.

Transactions are the most basic realization of value networks. When it comes to transactions, we immediately think of consumer behaviors such as food, clothing, housing, and transportation and financial behaviors such as investment and loans, but blockchain is not born to undertake financial transaction scenarios in real life, it provides the truth of the digital world. In the short term, real-life legal tokens and financial transactions will not and do not need to be optimized and replaced. When we look at the protocol or application of a transaction scenario, we should think about:

1. Is the transaction scenario problem it solves real-world interaction or digital-native?
   1. If it is a real interaction, is this issue important at this stage? Will it bring large-scale applications?
   2. If it is digital native, why does this transaction problem need to be solved?
2. Is the problem it solves optimized or innovative compared to competing products?
3. Is its implementation safe? (such as low degree of decentralization, immature technology, etc.)
4. Does this specific transaction scenario need to guarantee privacy?
5. ……

Pan-entertainment is a transaction-based derivation of value networks. The entertainment here includes games, fan economy, content consumption, etc. Any entertainment related to the community and financial behavior can be included. Compared with transactions, the main services of entertainment scenarios are not related to the blockchain. Blockchain will only be used in financial scenarios. However, what is often overlooked here is that the data generated by users in the process of using these applications should also be counted as financial scenarios. Data is one of the factors of production, and its capital attributes determine its financial attributes. The traditional Internet grabs a lot of benefits from the data capital provided by users. The traditional technical architecture and application logic make the centralized entities have no motivation to use the interests originally belonging to users. It is returned to users, and the lag of laws and regulations has led to the monopoly of data by centralized entities and the lack of awareness. When we look at the application of a pan-entertainment scene, we should think about:

1. What kind of financialization problem is it solving?
2. What does its decentralized solution look like?
3. How does it handle user data?
4. Does it provide a new profit distribution mechanism?
5. What is the distribution of power in the application? How do entities interact?
6. ……

Coordination is the ultimate goal of value networks. By redesigning money, providing a multitude of public goods, and inventing governance mechanisms based on cryptoeconomics, blockchains coordinate the division of labor, production, and life of humans and goods in new ways. This is a medium- and long-term goal, although a non-standard form has been seen - a decentralized organization. Most of the current decentralized organizations are non-standard, they have strong centralized attributes, but are not as serious as corporations and governments, like a gang, with strong leaders and a common vision driven. This is mainly because people have not yet explored an efficient decentralized collaboration method. This process is an evolutionary process, and problems need to be encountered to solve problems, so that more DAO tools are born to provide weapons for decentralized coordination. When we look at an application that coordinates scenarios, we should think about:

1. What kind of coordination problem is it solving?
2. Is it decentralized and how efficient is it?
3. How does it handle user data?
4. ……

The blockchain brings rules and truth to the digital world. In the modern age where the real human society and the digital virtual society are further integrated, the changes brought about by this technology are predictable. At Zonff Partners, we believe that Web3 will create a value layer for the Internet, where human beings can truly own and freely dispose of their own assets in the digital world, data will become assets that can flow, and trust between entities will be guaranteed by the network, thus forming A more efficient form of human coordination that increases productivity.

Thanks to Wang Xiang and Peng Yang for their suggestions and review of this article.