Interview with Columbia University Professor Max Li: The industry is over-financialized, and the construction of blockchain projects needs to "emphasize technology" and "look long-term"

With the development of blockchain technology and its value being recognized by more and more people, blockchain is also constantly entering colleges and universities. Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Columbia... Almost all top American universities currently offer blockchain courses. As early as 2018, Professor Max Li, who teaches at Columbia University, opened the school's first blockchain course "Blockchain Technology" in the School of Graduate Engineering, explaining the underlying technology of blockchain to graduate students. In the same year, Professor Li also brought blockchain courses to domestic universities, including Tsinghua University and Beijing Jiaotong University.

Sleeping 4 hours a day, working 15 to 20 hours a day throughout the year, while maintaining extremely high work efficiency, Professor Li is a veritable "work superman". In addition to teaching and scientific research, Professor Li is also an investor and an entrepreneur. He is also the co-founder of Nakamoto & Turing Labs, an American blockchain and artificial intelligence research consulting agency, and the manager of Aves Lair, a New York blockchain investment agency. Partner and the founder of Computecoin Network, the Web3 infrastructure, and the chairman of the Science and Technology Economic Committee of the US-China International Chamber of Commerce.

Recently, Cointelegraph Chinese CEO Tracy Zhang met Max Li on the campus of Columbia University and conducted an exclusive interview with him.

Blockchain is the first fully decentralized system in human history

Today, Bitcoin can be said to be a household name, but in 2011, people who knew it might be "few people", and Max Li was one of them. With two PhDs in electrical engineering and theoretical mathematics, Li had no problem understanding the technology involved, but this time, he missed it.

"The blockchain I first came into contact with was not a blockchain. It can be said that the blockchain at that time was Bitcoin." Professor Li said. In fact, digital currency itself is not a new concept. It can be traced back to the 1970s, but many projects in history ended in failure, so Bitcoin did not attract his attention at that time.

In the blink of an eye, in 2015 and 2016, with the birth of Ethereum and its growing ecology, Professor Li began to pay serious attention to the underlying technology of the blockchain. He believes that from a technical point of view, one of the core problems of decentralization is synchronization.

Li said that in previous systems, synchronization was only possible in a centralized manner. For example, in the communication system, there is a global clock. Before the user makes a call, the entire system needs to be synchronized first, and then the call and video can be realized later. For the Bitcoin blockchain, this is a completely decentralized and asynchronous system. There is no global clock and no centralized system for synchronization. Synchronized way to achieve synchronization.

"It can be said that in the history of mankind, the blockchain is the first completely decentralized system, and the synchronization of the system is realized through the consensus algorithm. It does not only have superficial applications such as digital currency, but there are many things that can be done in it. Things. Digital currency is just a landing application of blockchain technology.” Max Li said.

Traits of entrepreneurs in colleges and universities: focus on technology and focus on long-term value

Entrepreneurs from universities have always been an important force in the blockchain industry. CertiK, a blockchain security company founded by two professors from Columbia University and Yale University, and IOTA, an Internet of Things blockchain founded by a professor from the University of California, Berkeley , are projects that many people are familiar with.

In the eyes of Max Li, entrepreneurs who come out of colleges and universities often have a common characteristic: they attach great importance to technology, focus on technology, and try to solve certain problems in the blockchain field. "The projects done by university professors all have original things, whether it is consensus algorithms or other technologies." In contrast, marketing and community building may be the shortcomings of many university projects.

For entrepreneurship, income is a very important indicator. However, Li believes that from his own point of view, entrepreneurs who graduated from colleges and universities pay more attention to truly contributing to the development of the industry through projects, bringing long-term value and establishing their own reputation.

Technology + long-term value, this is also Li's philosophy of doing projects by himself. The Web3.0 infrastructure Computecoin Network is a project founded by Li. It started research in the laboratory as early as 2018, and then put it into business. It can be understood as a decentralized Amazon Cloud or Alibaba Cloud. The project utilizes AI, edge computing, load balancing and other technologies, blockchain technology is just one of them.

Li emphasized that as an infrastructure for the Web 3.0 era, it must be decentralized, and users have complete autonomy over their own data; at the same time, it can also reduce usage costs and make full use of decentralized idle resources. Greener and more sustainable.

Regarding why he chose this track, Professor Li pointed out that the current Web3.0 applications are all running on the Web2.0 infrastructure, which makes it impossible for Web3.0 applications to be used and implemented on a large scale. For example, Apple released a very advanced new mobile phone that can support 5G applications, but now it can only be used on a 3G network, and the application experience is very poor. Adapting Web3.0 applications with Web3.0 infrastructure is imperative.

The problem of over-financialization of the blockchain industry is highlighted

In addition to academics and entrepreneurship, investment is also a very important part of Max Li's work. Focusing on the two major tracks of AI and blockchain, Li has seen hundreds of large and small projects. Li said that he is paying more and more attention to projects that really use blockchain technology to solve practical problems, rather than projects with financial attributes.

Li shared some of his experiences at this year's Austin Consensus conference in the United States: There are hundreds of booths in the entire exhibition area, basically all of which are financial projects such as exchanges, lending and wealth management, DeFi, mining, wallets, etc., and almost non-financial projects. No. "This is the problem in the industry now. 99% of the industry is in finance, which is wrong. 10% of financial applications and 90% of other applications may be a healthy state."

Financial projects are also one of the most sensitive areas for regulatory compliance. Regarding the current regulatory status, Li said that whether it is a project party seeking compliance or a regulatory agency such as the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), in short, everyone is groping. "Cryptocurrency is too new, which means that two people don't understand it. They explore together, communicate non-stop in the process, and slowly over time, a relatively complete regulatory system can finally be produced. Enemy and friend, it can be said that Such a relationship."

On the other hand, from the perspective of the development stage of the industry, the encryption industry likes to make analogies with the early days of the Internet, but Li believes that there is a big difference between the two. "At the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 20th century, when the Internet emerged, it could be said that a hundred flowers bloomed. There were search engines, portal websites, and browsers. Many of them solved human pain points and brought human technological progress. , bringing about changes in our daily lives. In contrast, many blockchain projects in Web3.0, except for speculation, have not changed anything in our lives.”

In technology circles, there is a saying that a great technology company must live for 30 years. In investing, Li said, he pays close attention to how long a project's technology will allow it to live.

"My investment philosophy is, I want to invest in the next Twitter, the next Facebook, the next Google, a real technology company that can live for 20, 30, 40 years."