Today, Web 3 has become a key word in people's discussions. Web 3 is also entering the mainstream with rapid and violent momentum, and Web 3 may usher in an unprecedented period of prosperity and development.

In the unstoppable trend of Web3, Generation Z have implanted their creativity, imagination and passion into various characters in the virtual world, and they have become a force to be reckoned with.

In the second Web3 New Vision event, Cointelegraph Chinese invited Manta Network BD/Columbia graduate student Ruihan, Scroll engineer Luozhu, Web3Shop co-founder Justin, and Scroll researcher Yicheng around the theme "Web3 New Vision: L1 melee, L2 outbreak, how to Grasp the New Opportunities in the Web3 Infrastructure Era" and talk together.

Web3 New Vision is a Twitter Space-themed event initiated by Cointelegraph Chinese. It will focus on various fields such as NFT&Gamefi, DeFi, DAO, infrastructure, etc., look forward to the development direction of Web3, foresee industry trends, and jointly build a Web3 ecosystem.

The following is the Chinese text of Cointelegraph (with deletions):

Tracy: Distinguished guests first briefly introduce their background.

Ruihan: I studied marketing and UX design as an undergraduate at Northeastern University in Boston, and now I am studying applied analysis as a graduate student at Columbia University. I entered the Web3 field at the end of last year. I explored many jobs in Web3 until I joined Manta Network a few months ago, and now I am a BD of Manta Network. We are Layer1's privacy protection protocol, committed to providing convenient privacy protection for defi, nft, gamefi and the entire web3, using ZKP (zero-knowledge proof) cryptography technology.

Justin: Hello everyone, I majored in artificial intelligence in the UK as an undergraduate, and then I majored in computer science at USC as a graduate student. After graduation, I joined Meta as a software engineer. In March this year, I worked with some of my friends on a Web3 project. We built a social e-commerce platform around the creator economy. By effectively bringing together user designers and manufacturers, we created a web that didn’t exist in the world. products, and completely hand over product copyrights and production rights to users. At present, the product has not been launched yet, and it is planned to conduct the first invitation-only test at the end of the month.

Luozhu: Hello everyone, I am Luozhu, and I am a researcher and engineer of Scroll. Scroll is a ZK Rollup made with ZK Proof (Zero Knowledge Proof) technology. I believe everyone should have some understanding, we are mainly used to expand Ethereum.

Yicheng: I am currently working as a researcher at Scroll, and I usually mainly research ZKP and underlying expansion technology. As Luozhu said, Scroll is a native ZKEVM solution. We released the Pre-Alpha testnet in July. Interested partners can register to experience it.

Tracy: I believe that many people would like to know how you came into contact with Web3 at such a young age, and joined the project or started your own start-up company. Please share your mental journey.

Ruihan: I entered Web3 through the marketing of my friend’s NFT project, and then I started to do some research on NFT projects, so I bought the first NFT: Mfers, and entered the Mfers family. I am also very lucky I entered a community with such a strong consensus at the very beginning. Later, I wanted to know more, not just NFT, but also other sections of Web3. At that time, I followed the Mfers friends I just met to participate in various hackathons, summits, and activities. Later, I was very lucky to enter Manta Network, and I am also very proud.

Tracy: You are still a graduate student at Columbia University. I believe you must have thought about it after graduation, such as finding some part-time jobs and getting in touch with Web2. Did you experience something interesting along the way that led you to Web3?

Ruihan: Three of my previous four internships were in start-up companies. I like the culture and atmosphere of start-up companies. Partner traits.

Tracy: Ask Justin to share with you some things in Meta, as well as his own mental journey.

Justin: Actually, at the beginning of 2021, I found out that I could buy bitcoin in my stock account. At that time, I bought some casually, and then it doubled in a short time. I found it incredible, so I went to study its technical principles. Not long after that, Dogecoin became more and more popular, and it didn't take it seriously at first, because it was not a serious thing after hearing the name. Then it doubled, doubled, five times, ten times, dozens of times. At that time, it was completely a black question mark face. Then I started to study the reasons, and learned consensus and meme culture from Dogecoin. Later, I came into contact with and learned a lot of new concepts of web3, such as DeFi, DeFi 2.0, NFT, Metaverse, DAO, etc.

Fortunately, I have more or less understood these popular concepts and gameplays in a short period of time. Then I thought, since I have a technical background, I should use my advantages to participate in the construction at a deeper level. In the second half of 2021, I went to the hackathon winners list to see my favorite projects, and chatted privately about whether they need developers. My logic is that the newly emerging projects have easily helped me screen the tracks and teams, and they have a high probability of getting financing at that time. It is also when there is a shortage of people, and I can enter a good team. Learn and build with everyone, and there will be some salary as my reward. So I quickly found a Solana DeFi project. I didn't know how to write smart contracts at first, so I started with website development and learned contract development with them. This probably opened up my blockchain road.

Later, I also joined the Mfers community, and was deeply attracted by the consensus culture of this community, and met a group of good friends in Web3. Then, out of love for this community, I made a derivative mferspet together with other friends in the community. Each Mfers can be customized, or cast pets for free. The overall website style and painting style are very popular in the community Yes, because this community project met many good friends of web3, and helped them develop many projects afterwards.

Tracy: When you go to buy Bitcoin in 2021, do you know what Bitcoin is before that? Why would you buy Bitcoin instead of other coins?

Justin: I just briefly understood the concept of blockchain before. For me, I will only be willing to learn more about it when I actually buy it. Like everyone, I only know the concept of decentralization, and I am not willing to understand the logic behind it until I bought it. I am also very grateful for that random purchase that allowed me to join this world.

Luozhu: I may be an atypical case. I first came into contact with Bitcoin in 2013. At that time, I remember seeing this word from the news. At that time, there seemed to be no concepts such as Ethereum or Web3. I am interested in the technology behind Bitcoin, especially its idea of rebelling against authority, so I went to learn more about the things behind Bitcoin and the blockchain. It was also the first time I wrote the first line of code since then, and I would make some interesting gadgets, but at that time I just made them to spoof others, or just for fun, to satisfy my curiosity, but now I will Focus on this one thing and deliberately practice improving yourself.

Yicheng: I first came into contact with Bitcoin and Ethereum when I was in high school. At that time, I mainly made investments with my friends. During this process, I was attracted by the concept of Blockchian and started to study the underlying technology. When I was in college, I worked with Luozhu on a small tool for on-chain data to help users value the market through on-chain data. At that time, this product was actually made out of curiosity, because I also used it when investing, and then found that the valuation logic of the blockchain market may be different from that of the traditional stock market. In the process of making this product, I came into contact with a lot of underlying technologies of Ethereum, and found that expansion is a very interesting topic, so I started to study ZKP, and then came to Scroll.

Tracy: Justin is currently an employee of Meta, and we can also see that Meta wants to better embrace the metaverse. I would like to ask Justin to share, how does Meta view Web3?

Justin: I remember that they have entered the blockchain field since 2017, and then 2019 was the time to build a global blockchain financial system. At that time, the establishment of the Libra Association was ready, but Zuckerberg was participating in some The meeting of the top Senate Democrats did not secure approval from U.S. regulators, and Libra will not be launched anywhere in the world until it is approved.

In October 2019, many companies such as PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard left the Libra Association and were hit hard. Afterwards, we quickly made strategic adjustments and simplified them. We couldn’t do a public chain, so we focused on using cryptocurrencies, especially the US dollar. To do it with the supported stable currency, there is the renamed Diem.

I've been in touch with engineers to inquire about what's going on and if there's an opportunity to join. The feedback I got is that their current overall situation is very pessimistic in terms of policy, and sure enough, it was sold for $200 million in January 2022. They have been working hard, but the size of the company and the number of users are restricted by many policies.

Now that the public chain can no longer continue, Meta quickly made internal adjustments and invested heavily in the creator economy of Web3 and the infrastructure of the Metaverse, from strongly supporting NFT functions to establishing a series of creator tools to gather fan management and Release content, etc., as well as investment in VR and AR.

You may not be very aware of our efforts to invest heavily in cross-platform and cross-device. Even though it is difficult for us to appeal to other big companies to do some cross-platform things, Meta hopes to build many products, such as Instagram, Facebook, Messager, Oculas, etc., into The appearance of the metaverse, to achieve message intercommunication, interactive intercommunication and so on. In fact, people who understand technology can imagine that the workload required to connect WeChat and QQ is huge. We are always working hard to bring a better experience for everyone, so I can see the determination to embrace Web3 internally.

We have many internal interest groups. According to the data I have observed in the past six months, there were 1,000 people in the NFT group at the beginning, but now it has increased to 4,000-5,000. It is not necessary to participate in the construction, if you are interested, you can join. Our Web3 group has grown from 200 people to thousands of people, and the blockchain group has grown from a few hundred people to 1400 people. The overall growth rate is very fast. We will also launch a series of internal courses around Web3. Every Wednesday, we will invite the most powerful investment institutions or technical partners in the industry to share. The overall atmosphere is very good.

Tracy: Sounds like a very open atmosphere. Can you speak the language of Move with us? Is it an important technology in your whole team, and has it been used for a long time?

Justin: Move is actually a smart contract programming language developed by us when we were working on the blockchain internally. Our earliest intention was to build a global financial blockchain system. From the very beginning, we paid great attention to emphasizing security and flexibility . The design of Move is inspired by the Rust programming language, which makes the ownership of data explicit through concepts such as linear types. And Move puts a lot of emphasis on resource scarcity, storage, and access control. And the Move module defines the lifecycle, storage and access modes of each resource. This ensures that resources like tokens are not created without proper credentials, are not reused, and do not disappear. To sum up, the Move language starts with a secure financial system, and users can enjoy a lot of underlying security and high performance unconsciously. I think this is actually very useful for the new public chain after Move, especially security, developer friendliness, distributed storage capabilities and flexibility. Recently, teams such as Aptos have further enhanced Move to support a wider range of web3 application scenarios.

Tracy: As a Meta employee, will they require you to master the Move language as well? Or is it only for the blockchain sector?

Justin: It will only be used in financial products or some related projects. Other projects do not require you to know the Move language. Because it is a resource-oriented programming as a whole, it will only be used in some scenarios related to business.

Tracy: Ruihan, from the perspective of students, what is the Web3 atmosphere in your top universities? How do your classmates think about Web3, and have they considered Web3 in future job hunting?

Ruihan: Well, I think not only Columbia University, but also the blockchain groups of various universities in the United States, the atmosphere of Web3 is very good. Our links with Cornell University, MIT, Princeton University and other schools are very close.

I know that many people come into contact with Web3 through professors, because many professors do Web3 research, or do their own projects. On the other hand, student organizations, such as our blockchain student association Blockchain @ Columbia, have about 150 people in the TG group . Everyone will also spontaneously organize hackathons, and the atmosphere is also very good.

Our blockchain club study group will have a reading discussion every Tuesday. We invite professors to answer some of our questions, which is equivalent to a reading group. Then I think it is better because of the background of Columbia University, so we have received a lot of sponsorship. The Columbia University Hackathon held in March had A16z, Solana, Polygon, DYDX, including our Manta Network and many others. The participation and support of the head project also allows our students to get in touch with more projects. The Columbia Blockchain Student Organization also has a very close relationship with Manta, as do the blockchain associations of other schools. As far as I know, students from some schools will spontaneously organize to act as an intermediary, recommending students from the Blockchain Association and matching them with the recruiting Web3 companies.

Tracy: What was your story about getting into Manta, and is it in this form?

Ruihan: Yes, I participated in the Columbia University Hackathon in March this year and met Victor for the first time. At that time, Manta also sponsored the Hackathon. I think the atmosphere among the students has a major benefit. Everyone is very happy to introduce each other and recommend various resources. At the same time, they also like learning and organizing games. There are a lot of exchanges between friends or other schools. Please friends Giving lectures, exchanging experience with each other, sharing experience, etc., very active.

Tracy: Do you think the Columbia Blockchain Association has become a relatively mainstream organization, or is it a niche one?

Ruihan: There are about a few hundred people in our club. I think it is definitely not very popular. There are more people in the circle, but it is relatively small outside the circle. Regarding how students think about the work of Web3, I think it depends on whether it is native or not. The friends like our guests are actually quite native to Web3.

In fact, there are many things that can be done in Web 3. From the point of view of NFT, which is widely adopted by the mainstream, you can enter the NFT community to be an NFT project party, a contributor to the community, an organizer of Dao, and at the same time, you can also do investment research, do VC, consulting, etc. Everyone can play freely and explore different identities and different plates in this space.

Tracy: Ruihan's analysis is very reasonable, that is, the new generation doesn't like a fixed thing, but is willing to continuously expand their boundaries and explore the surrounding areas according to their hobbies. If you go to work in a traditional industry, it may be a radish and a pit. A position is like a screw. You can only play a role in this position, and you will not see your own advantages in other aspects. In Web 3, you find yourself and you feel that you can be a generalist.

Ruihan: This sums it up very well. It is a generalist. You can do different things in the community at the same time, including barriers that are not as high as outsourcing or traditional industries. The reason why many of my classmates want to understand the Web 3 industry is because their original industry is too complicated, with great limitations and saturation. Including the recent North American recruitment freeze, Facebook did not send a return offer to interns. In Web 3, you can infinitely explore the boundaries of life and your own abilities. I think this kind of flexibility, including the mixed energy that everyone in this industry has, is very powerful.

Tracy: Luozhu, can you share with us your daily work as a ZK engineer.

Luozhu: ZK engineers are mainly those who write code and implement various ZK applications. They generally use a relatively low-level static language like C++ or rust. The full name of Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) is Zero Knowledge Proof. It has two basic functions. The first is to prove that a certain statement is true; the second is zero-knowledge, that is, on the basis of proving that a certain statement is true, it will not reveal any relevant evidence.

Therefore, for the engineers who write the front-end circuit of ZKP, they have to design and implement various goals that need to be proved, and even optimize the corresponding various circuits. For example, Scroll and EF (Ethereum Foundation) jointly develop ZK EVM. For us Scroll, ZK EVM will be a core component in ZK rollup. For EF, this is a very ambitious goal. Not only will they achieve compatibility with this very low-level ZK EVM, they will even use this ZK EVM to replace the original layer 1 EVM.

Recently, Scroll's official push has launched the pre alpha test network, which is open to developers who have filled in the registration form before. If you want to experience it, you can also fill in the form and register. For all rollups, including Scroll, our goal is simple, to expand Ethereum, and to improve the performance of Ethereum without sacrificing decentralization and security, and to improve its execution as much as possible efficiency.

The TPS of Ethereum has been in the range of 5 to 15 since the beginning. As long as a relatively popular NFT project develops, it will have a gas war problem. If you take the current route and migrate all layer1 applications to layer2, Ethereum can probably achieve a performance of about 3000 TPS. After the development of POS and sharding, combined with rollup on this basis, Ethereum can theoretically reach more than 100,000 TPS, and this is based entirely on the basis of not sacrificing the decentralization and security of Ethereum Efficiency improvement.

All rollups are very important for the future of Ethereum. We are essentially building a completely decentralized digital platform. I think this is a very interesting thing, and in Scroll you can feel that you are creating the future every day, every line of code you write will run on every machine in the future, and what you do will become a decentralized world civilization The cornerstone of the square.

ZKP is a very magical and wonderful thing. You can feel very pure mathematics and fun while researching. I think this is a very interesting field. I'd love to see more people join the field.

Tracy: Luozhu, your twitter profile says you are a rocket scientist. Can you explain why you wrote it like that?

Luozhu: In addition to the blockchain, one of my bigger hobbies is researching rockets. I will care about space and rocket engines, especially rocket engine support, such as the use of 3D printing rocket engines, and rocket recyclable technology. Yicheng and I have a rocket laboratory. When we are bored, we will study some space knowledge, and we will invite some friends to communicate. We will make a feasible rocket to test launch, and then backtest through the collected data to continuously iterate the small rocket we play.

Tracy: Yicheng, besides studying ZK, what other interesting hobbies do you have? What are your thoughts on the Web3 concept?

Yicheng: Blockchain provides a value network. ZK technology will become the medium for the value transfer of the entire network and the guarantee of computational privacy. In the long run, ZK technology will be used on a large scale, and it will become a very general technology. Why now Starkware chooses to make its own ZKVM? In fact, it was completely impossible to do ZKEVM two years ago, but it became possible because of cryptography and other breakthroughs. The ZKP technology is still in a very early stage and has not yet been standardized. I think there will be more breakthroughs in the future, which will become very important technologies in the entire network in the future.

ZKP can guarantee the authenticity and privacy of calculations. Personally, I am very optimistic about ZKP technology. The biggest bottleneck of ZKP at present is that the proof time is very long and the consumption cost is very high. This can be solved through hardware acceleration. This is somewhat similar to the Bitcoin mining network, which can achieve higher computing power through continuous hardware upgrades.

As for hobbies, Luozhu and I have a laboratory, we will study privacy and expansion, and we may develop some tools in the future.

Tracy: Can Justin share some more experiences or interesting things about Web3?

Justin: A project that has impressed me a lot in the past year is the Constitution DAO platform. It assembled more than 17,000 people in just five days and raised $45 million to auction off a printed copy of the U.S. Constitution. This is very cumbersome and complicated in the traditional world, but it is so easy to accomplish under blockchain technology. Remember, this technology is still very early.

Through this incident, we have seen that blockchain technology enables a group of very consensus-minded people to collaborate, and with the help of an open and transparent blockchain, things become extremely easy. This is actually a very imaginative thing. If Web3 is popularized to more people, the tools will be easier to use. It is easy for millions or tens of millions of people in the world to cooperate and raise even billions of dollars to do something that everyone is interested in. Because people can write consensus, incentive methods and any details in an open and transparent contract. Then proceed on the immutable blockchain.

To sum it up, Web3 can easily allow a group of strangers to trust each other to collaborate on one thing on the blockchain. I'm pretty sure that with the popularity of blockchain and Web3, greater things will happen. My original intention of doing Web3Shop is to hope that Web3 will endow co-creation with greater potential, and hope to integrate the thinking of co-creation into most of the products in our lives.

Tracy: Do you think the cc0 field agreement will help Web3 to have greater development?

Justin: I think it will. Although this is a negative value for many blue-chip projects in the short term, in the long run, it will inspire more creators to create things without being bound by copyright, which will change the world. Both art and commodities are actually a kind of content, just like all content on the Internet. Everyone is not only a producer and creator of content, but also a consumer of content. We can imagine that the future is no longer an economy dominated by industrialization, but centered around more creators, that is, each of us must create, and in turn, creation can also stimulate creation, transform the world, and make the whole world a better place. With more nodes, it can meet more needs. What it really does is to allow the economy to build more nodes internally. If the original established industrial route is followed, its node must be a product produced by several large factories in the past, but now it has become many small personalized brands, and there must be more scattered creators joining in later. His The more nodes and more cycles in the entire economy, the more innovations and the further expansion of the economy.

Tracy: From the perspective of the development of the entire industry, in addition to the ZK track, what other tracks and fields do you think you hope everyone can attract enough attention and attention to?

Luozhu: For the blockchain, I will pay attention to two directions for a long time. The first direction is about the future of Ethereum, including the current ZK rollup, POS, and those things written by Vitalik in the roadmap. For me, the technology of Ethereum is only a small aspect. I am more concerned about how their technology will affect our society, politics and daily life in the future, and how will it impact our current world?

The second direction is the mathematics behind cryptocurrencies and blockchains, especially ZKP. I like to understand the mathematics and principles behind ZKP. Completely new, even disruptive, proof systems may emerge in the future. The development of AI or big data technology can greatly promote the establishment of centralization, similar to some previous farming technologies. But cryptocurrency is a completely different thing. The development of this technology can bring about the increase of many personal rights and even defend many personal freedoms.

I think the blockchain is a very small subset of human science and technology, and I care more about some cutting-edge knowledge in other fields. Blockchain resists authority. I like its idea, but no one can guarantee that this path is right, and no one can guarantee that it will succeed in the end.

Tracy: When Liu Cixin commented on Facebook’s shift to Meta, he said that if human beings indulged in the metaverse or VR world before moving towards space civilization, he thought it would be a disaster. What do you think of this matter?

Luozhu: I talked about rockets, gene editing even more than NFT and DeFi, because I think these things may be difficult to understand and abstract, but these things are very important things to me, and we have an obligation to let more people come understand this matter. In this way, more people will log into these fields in the future. There is a term in biology called bio-adaptive terrain. Why should we maintain biological diversity? Why don't we weed out inferior genes like genocide?

Because of bio-adaptive terrain. For us, in the environment we are in now, exploring space is the best choice, so we devote all our time and energy to exploring space, but if the environment of our world is something we don’t know, our already The scope of knowledge cannot reach this height, assuming that some changes that we cannot understand have occurred in this universe, which are similar to the changes in the biological adaptive terrain I mentioned, and we need to enter the virtual world to avoid this disaster.

This is similar to how we are now exploring other planets and exploiting resources from other planets. Maybe at that time, the entire human civilization can be saved from extinction. I think the most important thing is to stay humble, stay open, and learn as many different fields as possible, even er, they seem disjoint.

Tracy: Which fields and tracks do you pay more attention to for Luozhu and Justin?

Luozhu: I have not paid attention to NFT and GameFi, because I think they are still very early. In the future, you can pay attention to some application-level innovations, because many applications are derived from some relatively cutting-edge theoretical breakthroughs. With the rise of tps brought about by the rise of rollup, more innovations will erupt in NFT and GameFi in the future. I personally look forward to it very much and will also pay attention to this application innovation.

Justin: I am most interested in the track of the creator economy, because I think this is the place that can best unite human power and provide innovation. But it is essentially attached to the blockchain with strong scalability, large scale, high security and privacy. This is why the public chain and zk are so important at this stage.

Tracy: For young people who want to enter this track, do you have any experience or advice to share with them ?

Yicheng: I think information acquisition is very important. If you are really interested in blockchain technology, you can pay attention to some cutting-edge technology forums, and you can see some more cutting-edge content without losing authenticity. Twitter is also a very cutting-edge field of learning knowledge, and everyone has done a better job of Twitter's information management and information flow review.

Justin: In this field, you don’t limit yourself to a certain role. Here you can achieve anything you want to achieve. The only way is to participate, and then see clearly what you are interested in, and then you can work in different roles switch between. If you observe, you will find that the more you are in the stage of social division of labor, the uppermost elite group will not divide labor. According to their needs, they will be financiers for a while, captains for a while, and farmers for a while. They choose from all over the world. Raw materials, moving people around, moving goods around. Web3 is a good place for you to experience different roles.

Ruihan: I especially agree with what Justin said. The best way to participate or learn about a field is to get involved. Now this industry is still in its very early stage, and there are many things you can do, and the barriers are not particularly high.

However, understanding the concept of decentralization of Web3, increasing personal rights, resisting authority, and the spirit of freedom are barriers in themselves. Most people do not have these spirits. If you break through this barrier, you will find that the world is very broad. What you can do There are many things.