CreDA: The Genesis of Personal On-chain Data Wealth

On April 17, 2021, hosted by Shilian Finance, sponsored by Ruixin Mine, co-hosted by Bit Mining, Shilian Mining, Shilian Capital, and Shilian Community, co-sponsored by Kuang Duoduo, UBitMEX, SLA, ADS, BitGood, the 2021 Shilian Ecological Conference & Global Digital Mining Summit and Annual Awards Ceremony was held in Shenzhen, China. At this conference, Shilian Finance was honored to have the Director of Elastos Foundation, Sunny Feng Han, as a special guest to deliver a speech about on-chain data credit titled “CreDA: Birthing the Era of On-chain Personal Data Assets”. The following is a transcript of the live speech, edited and compiled by Shilian Finance:

Feng Han: As I mentioned earlier, the atmosphere of today’s conference has made me more convinced than ever that the bull market is here. From a global perspective, the bull market in 2021 will officially heat up from here on out. What has happened so far is only a warm-up or, at most, the initial stage of preheating, which is completely trivial. The price of Bitcoin has risen from around $3,000 last year to around $60,000 now. This crazy pump has shocked many investors; some of them even left the market. The price of Dogecoin increased more than 100 times. However, I’m almost 100 percent sure that Dogecoin will not be the champion this year.

Yes! The real bull market has just begun, and the prices of most crypto assets are still relatively low. It’s still a good time to enter this market. By the end of this year, if the market is still very heated, I believe many latecomer new investors will become the latest bag-holders. Therefore, timing your market entries is crucial!

Let me explain why the bull and bear markets in the cryptocurrency industry switch regularly. It’s simple. In contrast to traditional finance, cryptocurrency transactions are almost frictionless. As we know, it’s impossible for traditional financial stocks to be listed on the market without a few years of preparation. What’s worse, the threshold for many funds is $50,000, which is simply unaffordable for most investors.

So, the traditional financial market is a kind of semi-solid ‘land’ market. People on the field of the traditional financial market are long-distance runners. If there are big ups and downs in the traditional financial market, it’s called an earthquake. Due to the high coefficient of friction, the traditional financial market is as solid and strong as the ground. In my new book ‘The Wealth of the Quantum Era’, this is called solid-state finance.

Before entering the cryptocurrency world, everyone should first pay attention to the concept of ‘liquid finance’, which has an extremely low coefficient of friction, or is even frictionless. What is the frictionless state? If you don’t understand the nature of liquid, just go outside the venue, observe the ocean adjacent to Shenzhen and sense the tides in the ocean. The ocean is liquid. Do you perceive the huge difference between ocean and land?

As I said earlier, if there are big ups and downs in the land, it is called an earthquake. What do we call big ups and downs in the ocean? Waves. Waves are periodic, which you might still remember if you recall a little bit of wave dynamics from high school. If we use waves to describe the current cryptocurrency market, we can say that the market wave is now in a state of reaching its peak. The market was in a trough two years ago.

So, how can you be a smart player? If you join the market now, you will be a true surfer in the crypto space. Now, it is a good time to enter this market, so which asset you invest in becomes crucial. It’s not at all like what some say, “even if I invest randomly, I can make money”. Yes, you can make money by random investing, but you can also lose all your assets in one minute. Each of us has to use our minds to learn and think before any investment decision-making.

So, what can enable us to make money? Why does Bitcoin have a wealth generating effect? The most fundamental reason is that it quickly reached a global consensus on wealth and credit through distributed computing. In my book The Wealth of the Quantum Era, I sort this reality out with logic. In fact, the entire wealth of mankind is fundamentally a global consensus. In ancient times, the formation of wealth consensus took so long that everyone thought wealth was only natural, physical wealth and unalterable. Why is gold a kind of wealth? In fact, gold was almost useless in ancient times. It’s too soft to make into a knife or weapon. Ultimately, it was found that gold has stable physical and chemical properties, is the softest metal and so is the easiest to cut and divide. Eventually, we reached a consensus that gold represents wealth.

In China, the earliest consensus on wealth was shells, which had almost no use value at all. Please abandon the misconception that only useful things are wealth. If you still stick to the old concepts, then you don’t need to enter the cryptocurrency world, or even the stock market, for that matter. Wealth is not just something that has value, it is more something that allows the world to reach a consensus.

It must be clear that paper notes issued by banks are actually useless and simply a consensus endorsed by the governments of various countries. Everyone can see that, in the blockchain world, Bitcoin uses distributed computing and other encryption algorithms to form a wealth consensus at an unprecedented speed. This obvious truth is happening right now.

In just ten years, the market value of Bitcoin has reached trillions of dollars…similar to gold. There is another misunderstanding that people who make money here must lie to others and profit from them. Did people lose more than $1 trillion? Who can afford such a loss? This is obviously nonsense. Bitcoin is a new, real time consensus in the world.

Bitcoin has indeed become the gold of the internet, simple as that. So, what do you want to invest in in the future? What is the new global consensus? You might as well follow the same logic as I do. Ethereum is definitely strong and powerful. Smart contracts stand for automatic economy. Theoretically speaking, in the future, all banks’ business can run automatically without friction. Operating costs will drop sharply.

Not long ago, I launched FilDA (www.FILDA.io) with a few partners. Data reported last night shows that the assets locked on FilDA have exceeded $2 billion. This is already the scale of the assets of a small to medium-sized bank. If you want to establish a bank in the traditional world, you can’t do it without an office building, right? Additionally, you have to apply for a large number of permits or licenses before launching. In contrast, the FilDA platform has more than $2 billion in wealth but its team has only five members, all of whom work from home. FilDA’s business is functioning very smoothly. I’ve borrowed several million dollars from this platform, which is a really cool experience compared to the process of borrowing several million dollars from the bank.

Some may ask how DeFi will develop. Why did I launch FilDA? In fact, FilDA is just a cloned DeFi protocol. At the time of its inception, Compound was a real innovation, using Ethereum smart contracts to carry out borrowing and lending. MakerDAO is also an innovator. Aave, too, broke new ground and did a great job, with the value of the platform reaching over $7 billion.

However, we cannot just clone from other projects, we must ourselves innovate. We hope superstar projects originating from China will also rise in the DeFi sphere. I’ve been thinking a lot about DeFi recently. Though it was very hot last year, what functions or features are still needed to supplement the current business model of DeFi? In fact, DeFi currently lacks many features. No matter how popular DeFi was last year, it really just acts like a standard financial model, like over-collateralized mortgage lending. For example, a mortgage of one million dollars worth of BTC can receive 700,000 USDT. This financial model is 1,000 years old and outdated. So, what can we do? If you want to borrow money from the bank, does your credit card require collateral? Certainly not. It depends on credit.

The concept of credit has become the core of the banking business. Of course, the latest innovation is undoubtedly Ant Financial. How has Ant Financial evolved lending and become a fintech giant? They give credit based on user internet data. According to data from Taobao (a shopping website owned by Alibaba), Ant Financial has established a loan business of hundreds of billions of dollars and achieved a market value of 2 trillion RMB. This is indeed a milestone in human history and a true innovation. Honestly, it surpasses traditional banking in this respect. Moreover, by using everyone’s big data sets, the operation cost is much lower than that of a traditional bank. In conversation, Gao Hongbing, Alibaba vice president, said that the bank faces a huge challenge because it can only build its trustworthiness by constructing the most expensive buildings in the most expensive locations.

This is indeed the case. Just like so called Financial Street or Lujiazui, banks choose the most expensive places to build the most expensive buildings. Can you imagine the cost? Moreover, most of their staff are graduates of prestigious universities such as Peking University, Tsinghua University or other Ivy League schools. Their salaries rank on the top of the list, even though their jobs aren’t complicated at all. Ant Financial, on the other hand, based on data alone, has conducted hundreds of billions in financial services.

But please note that Ant Financial is about to reach its peak. Why? You may think this is because of the government’s opposition to Ant Financial, but I will give you another perspective. In fact, it has reached its peak. Logically speaking, the data on its platform should belong to each user, but Ant Financial holds it in their own hands. What Ant Financial has really established is comparable to the People’s Commune (government/ centralized real estate holding). Our history has shown us that the People’s Commune is a model that creates the least wealth.

What’s more, their ownership of our data is clearly an infringement of personal privacy, especially so, as they use that data for credit investigations. Therefore, the next evolution is easy to see. On-chain data will be a huge asset. Why? First of all, let’s ask, who does the data belong to? Blockchain provides the answer for the first time in human history. Obviously, data is a personal asset. The most fundamental thing about Bitcoin is that the numbers generated by the Satoshi Nakamoto code actually belong to the user. Although this is only a number in your wallet, the ownership is totally clear. It is signed using the private key making it is clear who owns it. Don’t underestimate this fact. Only privately owned data can make it possible to reach a new consensus, a consensus that may create more than $1 trillion of wealth in the future. If there was no such thing as data privatization and Satoshi Nakamoto’s great innovation of Bitcoin, consensus would not be what it is today.

The business model behind the financial logic is simple. How valuable is everyone’s house? Real estate deeds were first issued in China in 1998. If real estate deeds weren’t issued, and if home ownership was not clear or the houses were still allocated by companies, there would never be a real estate market worth $65 trillion in China. Every family and household would lose tens of millions or more in wealth. That’s why I have said that the People’s Commune is definitely not a place to generate wealth. Only a privatized market, a market with clear property ownership, and a market where property ownership is fully protected can produce wealth effects.

Bitcoin has proven that even if the ownership of a single number is authorized and privatized, that number can begin to produce wealth effects. Bitcoin’s asset scale will not be small; it has reached the scale of the gold market. In DeFi, all participants generate a large number of data assets and transaction data. On the blockchain, transaction data is basically non-tamperable, so the data quality is very high, while ordinary internet data can be tampered with at will.

No matter which centralized app you use, the company or entity behind that app can literally tamper with your data. In contrast, only the data on the blockchain, whether you are on Bitcoin, Ethereum or Elastos, is immutable and can not be tampered with. As Elastos is secured by 50% of Bitcoin’s computing power, the cost to tamper with the data on the Elastos main chain is in the tens of billions of dollars. In this case, isn’t our on-chain data the most precious of information resources? If we use on-chain data to conduct credit investigations and lending, we will see an on-chain Ant Financial.

During this year’s DeFi boom, many people keep asking me, if DeFi will still be hot next cycle? Yes, it will be even hotter!

What’s next to explore? I think the future belongs to credit based on on-chain data; the on-chain, decentralized Ant Financial.

So everyone please adjust your stance, adjust your mood, and enter the bull market! Thank you all!