A Techie CEO Who Traveled Through Bulls and Bears Meets Arweave

Thanks to SmartDeer for inviting our founder for this amazing interview. This article is written by Emily from SmartDeer and translated by Viya & Romain from everVision.

“If I were to introduce Web3 to someone new to the industry, I would tell them that Web3 is a decentralized network based on the blockchain that could disrupt traditional industries, including what you’re doing right now, and that it’ll have a huge impact on our collaboration.” So says outprog, the founder of everVision, which specializes in Web3 infrastructure development.

This simple introduction is actually outprog’s own journey. Originally a developer in the banking industry, he decided to go into the blockchain industry doing some research on Bitcoin: “We spent over a decade at the bank delving into the consistency of these accounts, but with Bitcoin, I could theoretically spend two or three weeks by myself using PoW algorithms to implement a system that would never need to be cleared and settled to solve the problem. This was something that surprised me more than anything else, and it was still a pretty big shock for me. ”

After joining Web3, outprog relied on the trust that the underlying technology will bring change and strong self-drive, continue to learn the most cutting-edge technology, never stop grinding even during the bear market when everyone leaves Web3 to return to Web2. It was during this bear market that found Arweave and saw the potential to solve the existing technical bottlenecks in blockchain.

Once again, after recognizing the new technology, outprog quickly jumped onboard and created his own startup called everVision (formerly everFinance), hoping to make blockchain technology truly accessible to all.

SmartDeer talked to this techie CEO about his personal experience with Web3, hoping to bring some new insights to anyone interested in this industry.

One Man, Two Weeks, Solving a Ten-Year Problem

SmartDeer: How did you first come across the blockchain concept?

outprog: It was around 2014 or 2015, the price of Bitcoin rose to 6000 RMB in a small bull market, and the market was very lively, so I paid attention to this industry and participated in some mining after I learned about it, but I was not mining Bitcoin but Ripple at that time. Later on, the Ripple I mined was stolen, so I didn’t look into it in depth. The main issue was that I couldn’t change the wallet password at the time and my wallet account password was the same as my CSDN account. My CSDN account got hacked which led to the loss of all my Ripple.

SmartDeer: Why did you decide to go deeper into Bitcoin in 2017?

outprog: After the incident on 4th September 2017 in China, a lot of exchanges encountered difficulties, which led to a big price spread between mainland China and Europe and the United States. Some of my classmates were studying aboard in Germany, and they teamed up with me to trade. It was also for the profit motive that I started to enter this space again. After trying it, I would wonder why this stuff was repeatedly banned. After banning it, every few years it would come back again, and the price would be even higher.

So I started to learn more about Bitcoin in October, 2017. I wrote my own Bitcoin source code based on the technical docs, and I made the code work in two or three weeks. I was doing development in a traditional banking industry before, and I was way familiar with the financial system. After I ran the code, I realized that the blockchain industry might subvert a lot of the things that I had done in the bank.

Every year, the bank will have a year-end settlement, and 30 to 50 systems from different departments have to do their account settlement on that day. Different systems have their own ledger, and sometimes financial data from different calibers and through different ways of output, there will be a big difference in the amount of money, and there may be a difference of 50 million RMB in a day, so this kind of account cleaning is usually done all night long.

We spent more than ten years in the bank to study the consistency of these accounts in depth, but with Bitcoin, I spent two or three weeks by myself realizing that the system never needs clearing nor settlement using PoW algorithms, which is quite surprising to me, and still quite a big shock frankly speaking.

SmartDeer: If all departments use one ledger, is it possible to solve this problem without using Bitcoin?

outprog: It’s not possible to achieve this, because the accounts that are entered into the database are always open to human modification, which is why traditionally there is a need for reviews, by an auditing unit that would go through the paperwork and reconcile the accounts one by one. When I was at the bank, I went to the head office to send people reviews, a dozen people closed to the audit of the file room, checked for a whole month. The cost of this is very high, because everything can be modified, you can only through the logic of the relationship between the correlation, as well as these evidence, to know if this thing is really correct.

If we say one more thing, our laws and regulations, why are there IPO pre-listing audits, these are going to cost a lot of money, and all these costs are to get the accounts aligned. For example, if I buy a house, if I don’t have a housing authority to register it, then I don’t know who owns the property. So each local housing authority has its own policies and methods, and then the housing authorities have to check with each other. In the past, there was no domestic real estate network, it was very difficult to buy a house in a different place, you have to go to the original housing authority to get records of buying a house, or you have to go to the original bank to check whether there is a loan, in order to be sure whether the first suite, all these are things that happen around the world, it’s all a matter of reconciling the accounts.

SmartDeer: What was the future potential of this technology probably looking like to you at the time?

outprog: From that point on I thought blockchain was going to disrupt everything. That’s what I realize now, but maybe it’s more disruptive from a technical level at the moment, and there are a lot of actual traditional applications that haven’t reached the level of disruption. If a country directly replaces all the housing management registration with blockchain, and all the fiat currencies are also placed in the blockchain, it is possible that many traditional organizations do not need it.

After reading this stuff, I was no longer interested in traditional spaces, and as a tech nerd, I realized that a lot of things I did didn’t make much sense from a technical point of view. Therefore, after studying Bitcoin in October 2017, I immediately decided to leave my job and join the blockchain industry, invested in a lot of blockchain companies, got an Offer in November or December, and officially joined imToken in March of 2018.

Enter the industry with self-motivation, don’t care about crypto prices but only learn technology

SmartDeer: What was the Web3 job market like at the time?

outprog: I also searched and searched in various channels. If you were studying blockchain, you would come across some of the leading websites at that time. If you were studying Ether, you would go to EtherFans to read whitepapers and so on, and imToken posted a job ad that I saw on Etherfans.

At that time, I didn’t have a clear direction, I just wanted to hop on the train in this field. In retrospect, I probably invested in a lot of ICO projects because that year ICOs were pretty popular, and at the end of the bull market it was still very popular. I was also very lucky that I didn’t go to those ICO companies, and I probably wouldn’t have been able to learn anything if I had.

SmartDeer: Was it difficult to find a Web3 job at that time?

outprog: I don’t really have blockchain experience, I’ve only written about bitcoin, but I don’t know much about each segment of the blockchain, because when I was in the bank I would do a lot of systems and tasks on my own initiative, and I had a little bit of exploratory spirit. It just so happens that the imToken business has just started and is still in the exploratory stage, so I joined in to explore this area.

In fact, all the things about Web3 were re-learned after I came to imToken, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that in a bank, we have to spend a lot of time to communicate with the business department to match the requirements, and we don’t have a lot of time for development every year, so a month of development at imtoken may be equivalent to a year of development in a banking, so the density of the things we have to learn is also very high.

At the beginning, it was very painful for me to learn, and it took me 6 months to figure out what the Ether gas fee is. However, as I followed my colleagues and seniors to work on the system, I slowly got the hang of it. After 6 months of bottlenecking and figuring out the direction, I went to read medium’s technical articles to study and research.

SmartDeer: Have you kept up with new technologies during your time at imToken?

outprog: When Uniswap came out in the second half of 2018, I was one of the first ones to study it, and I was even more excited about it, and when I studied Compound, a bank on the blockchain in 2019, I was even more excited about it, because five people could write two or three hundred lines of code and run a bank on the chain, and it was a very shocking product.

After these products come out, I went to study the code, basically will not go to look at the coin price, after entering the industry did not do anything else, is to study and fixed investment eth on the end.

After all, to make products, token loans behind that version of the smart contract are my writing, because it is a new technology, the company also did not write Solidity, I went to read the documents, learning and writing, and then improved those bugs, in fact, is the need for a very strong self-driven ability.

SmartDeer: How long did it take you to learn a new language from the documentation and finish writing it?

outprog: Very quickly, actually. It’s funny, when I was working on the new version, my wife was about to have a baby, it was 2018, and I still had a week before I had to go on maternity leave, so I worked overtime to write it in the evenings for a week, and it took me 5 days, and then I finished it and submitted it all at once. The contracts were done by me, but there is still a lot of back-end work that the team spent a lot of time on, probably 90% of the time is spent on non-smart contract stuff.

Decentralized storage technology that made the tech geek determined to start a business

SmartDeer: When did you first want to start your own business after joining imToken in 2018?

outprog: Actually it was a coincidence, the whole market was very low in 2019, ethereum was down to 500 RMB, the team I was on was also very low, everyone left, some people rested, some people went back to web2, and finally I was the only one left in the team. In March/April of 2019, Compound, a domestic partner of imtoken, had its tokens stolen, amounting to almost 30 million dollars, which made everyone’s even more depressed.

Coincidentally, two months later, I attended an ethereum meet up organized by Spark Pool, and learned about Arweave, which is the public chain that our project is based on. At that time, I felt that this system seemed to be able to solve some of the technical problems on the blockchain by means of storage, such as the high user threshold and expensive transaction fees. So in a very depressed state, I suddenly saw a bright light and realized that this technology might be a breakthrough point, so I started to think about the direction of entrepreneurship.

SmartDeer: Why did Arweave catch your eye so quickly, and how can SCP (Storage-based Consensus Paradigm) solve the problems that blockchain already has?

outprog: Having a Computer Science degree myself, I know a lot about computer principles. The ideal computer model is a Turing machine (computer) and a paper tape (hard disk), to which we read and write data, so it can be said that all programs and applications are ultimately data. After discovering Arweave, I realized that I could replace the paper tape of the Turing machine, i.e. the hard disk of the computer, with a blockchain, which would mean that all my applications would become blockchain applications.

Inspired by Arweave, I found that the decentralized applications are not very much related to pow and pos algorithms, but as long as we follow the model of the computer, and replace its underlying storage layer or hard disk with the blockchain, then the applications based on it will have decentralized characteristics.

For example, now these information science, whether it is Alibaba or Tencent, in fact, we play the essence of the system is data, these data into the centralized server room, to read to everyone, or to collect data to sell, is this process. Now we go from the root to solve this problem, the upper layer of the application, but directly to the set of systems in the lowest layer of the storage layer replaced, so that all the data becomes decentralized, then all the applications based on this data is decentralized.

SmartDeer: From the surface seems to be well understood, if everything exists on the blockchain, then everything made based on the storage is traceable, very technical and esoteric indeed.

outprog: In fact, have you ever thought that when you look at the screen, the screen for you to show these symbols of text are actually 1 and 0, these 1 and 0 are written on the hard disk. If the data on the hard disk is modified or any operation is done, the corresponding things on the screen will change. So if my hard disk can not be modified, only to constantly add new things, then all the things you see on the screen, whether it is a picture or a video, will be non-tampering and can be traced.

In fact, in the end, it’s all about solving all the problems from the root, just like we had to solve the account problems at the bank before, because the accounts can be modified by others.

Source: outprog’ speech slides on Arweave Day in Asia 2023

SmartDeer: I also saw that you have written an article about Breaking the Blockchain Trilemma with the Permaweb and SCP, how does this breakthrough happen?

outprog: The first impossible triangle of blockchain is security, the second is scalability, and the third is decentralization. SCP is a modularized concept that will completely separate computing and storage, and after the separation, it will form a three-tier architecture, with permanent storage at the bottom, services at the middle, including API interfaces provided by some service providers for applications, and applications developed by developers at the top.

First of all, let’s talk about security, which is guaranteed by file storage. Because some data exist on the blockchain, on behalf of my data can not be tampered with by anyone, so as long as all the transaction data to the storage layer, it means that the centralized company can not be any operation on it, so the data is 100% safe and trustworthy.

The second point is decentralization, to have decentralization, first of all, is to access, that is to say, this system’s platform will not be monopolized by a third party, will not be the only it can run this system. In fact, it relies on the underlying storage, and the middle standardized service layer to achieve. When we do the application, the application to use all the interfaces to be made into a standardized interface, the interface generated by the content of the fixed rules, assuming that a company used this standardized protocol, even if there is no open source their own excuses, after it closes down any other person can achieve the same agreement, for the user service.

And finally extensibility. Since these are standardized, it means that if I start company A, and implement this service with the technology of company A, and then start a company B company C company D company, each company can provide the same service, there is no problem at all, and here it is horizontally scalable, and countless companies can be made to provide services to everyone.

Source: outprog’s speech slides on Arweave Day in Asia 2023

SmartDeer: So it was after you learned about Arweave at that event that the idea of starting your own business came to you right away?

outprog: Actually, I came to the blockchain industry from banking, and the idea of starting a business may have already sprouted after I learned about the concept equivalent to coincide in 2019. I found that this path has a lot of advantages in terms of technology, so I started to study it, and I also discussed it with Spark Pool for two or three months, and we went to study some details of Arweave together, and we slowly precipitated some things. After the theory is clearly studied, there is a bottom in my heart, just like I came from the bank to the blockchain, I also studied the code first, and then made a deeper understanding of its theory, what can be done and what can’t be done, and after determining that, I will choose this industry very quickly.

SmartDeer: How was the core team formed in the early days after you really decided to go for it?

outprog: In the industry, we often have meet ups, so we also know some technical people. My partner at the time, xiaojay, was actually a FIRE, he hadn’t worked for many years, but he was always very interested in blockchain technology, so I pulled him along, he went to do the front-end, I went to do the back-end, and the two of us started to do this.

We went to create this business is actually more casual, not the beginning of the thought of financing, we just think this technology is very interesting, to realize a product. In less than four months, after we had made a working product, I wrote some articles to introduce the difference between everPay and other products, and after publishing them, many VCs saw them and contacted us. We thought we could expand the team after we raised money, so we went ahead and raised money.

SmartDeer: After the funding, what was the route of development?

outprog: It was March, 2020 when I published the articles, May close off the second round of financing. We began to slowly expand the market staff at September, in fact. At that time we want to operate our business in the Chinese mainland market, but there are a lot of restrictions in China, including laws and regulations are also more and more stringent, so in 2021 we went to Singapore.

On the other hand, the Arweave Ecosystem has been evolving in the course of our entrepreneurial journey, that is, the SCP and Permaweb applications on it are also evolving very well, so it is only logical that our product has become a financial service in the Arweave eco-system. Permaswap is the only DEX (Decentralized Exchange) currently available in the Arweave ecosystem.

At this stage, we have lowered the user threshold to a very low level, so that ordinary users can easily access the entire system. We have been growing very slowly throughout the year from 2020 to 2021, and the volume of transactions may only be 1,000 a day, but in June and July this year, it reached 300,000 transactions in a single day. The core of the breakthrough of the whole transaction volume lies in the fact that we don’t have gas fee, and then small amount of high-frequency payment, and some applications can issue tokens on it after integrating with us or have various interactions with the users and so on, which generates the new incremental volume.

SmartDeer: What is the vision of everVision?

outprog: The name “everPay” implies our vision, that anyone can use it anywhere, everyone, without limitations.

We have only one vision, so that 1 billion users can really use the blockchain, and can really spread these things that we are now exploring theoretically, and we hope that one day everPay gets used as a way to pay for anything and everything.

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