Blockchain and NFTs take the Digital Evolution to the Next Level

Ishan Pandey: Hi Ian, welcome to our series “Behind the Startup.” Please tell us about yourself and the story behind ParallelChain?

Ian Huang: Hi Ishan, thank you for having us. I’m the founder and CEO of ParallelChain Lab. We develop blockchain technology at both platform and application levels. Before founding the lab, I spent most of my career in infrastructure engineering and management, particularly in the areas of high speed deterministic and stochastic network protocol and integration of synchronized and an asynchronous system with minimum latency — all of these had equipped me with the competencies to innovate our platform, a new blockchain infrastructure with expandable scalability; seamless and secure interoperability between sovereign public and private networks; and data privacy plannings from the get-go.

My entrepreneurial venture, and more importantly, my participation in the decision-making of corporate strategies at technology MNCs, had enriched me with perceptive insights into the multidimensional thought process of top management, which involves scoping and assessing a complex set of variables such as market acceptance, ROIs, tech stack, and business objectives. Such exposure also enabled me to understand what holds back or drives the decision in adopting new technologies; and how to leverage technical capabilities into practical use cases that bring tangible business impacts and values.

Ishan Pandey: Please tell us about multi-class validator design and how does it work?

Ian Huang: The rapid pace of innovation in the public blockchain ecosystem provided many resources and case studies to develop sound governance and tokenomics model for our protocol.

Dividing the set of validators into three classes with class-specific membership size, staking requirements and identity system enables the network to enjoy greater throughput and faster completion times without sacrificing censorship-resistance characteristics lost in many blockchains that prioritize speed.

In other words, this multi-class validator design that we adopted for the platform allows it to achieve high performance and good governance with accountability without centralizing the network. A detailed description would be beyond the scope of this response. I want to encourage anyone interested to read our tokenomics whitepaper for a deep dive.

Ishan Pandey: What are your views on metaverse and NFTs?

Ian Huang: Metaverse only recently became a hot topic following the success of projects like Decentraland and The Sandbox, but actually, we’ve been in what I call “the alpha state” of metaverse for the past several years, as there’s a digital platform for virtually every aspect of life: from the way we work, shop, manage our assets, to the way we identify our online identity to actual self.

Blockchain and NFTs take the digital evolution to the next level by integrating the properties of the physical world as we know it into the digital realm (metaverse). For example, rules of law are codes and smart contracts; the recognition of digital objects as personal property and the establishment of ownership of assets. In this context, blockchain serves as a vehicle that expands the social rules and value system -- things that civilization produces for the common good -- to the virtual space.

Anyway, before I go off-topic, my view is that metaverse and NFTs are taking us a quantum leap closer to mass adoption of blockchain technology, and the need for greater security and privacy in the digital realm is defining what the next generation of layer-one blockchains will look like and what technology will be necessary to drive it.

Ishan Pandey*: Please tell us a little bit about ParallelChain?*

Ian Huang: It’s two blockchain software suites with distinct technical properties, but which are designed to work well together:

• ParallelChain Mainnet is a Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) smart contract platform for decentralized applications where trustlessness and security is key.

  
  

• ParallelChain Private is a non-BFT smart contract platform for enterprise and private applications -- where data confidentiality is required for privacy compliance, and also as the network participants' interests can be conflicting (i.e. businesses can be partners and competitors at the same time).

  
  

  Our platform intends not to dislodge ‘the big two’ (Bitcoin and Ethereum) from their roles in the Web3 ecosystem. We believe these systems are delivering tremendous value as they are. Our goal is instead to foster business adoption of blockchain beyond speculation in cryptocurrencies.

  
  

This is where the interoperability between Private and Mainnet comes to shine. Our long-term vision is to see businesses worldwide, big and small, replace their most critical backend systems with our flexible and highly performant Private chains, all connected to a single global Mainnet that avails for their data at a blockchain-level security and fault tolerance not achievable by traditional databases.

Ishan Pandey: Do you think that DeFi protocols should be regulated?

Ian Huang: There is a general negative sentiment in the DeFi community regarding regulation, especially when centralized authority and control are the very things in the status quo that the space wants to be liberated from. However, I tend to see regulation as a form of recognition that endorses the acceptability of the decentralized economy and for it to sustain within an environment of order and accountability. So it’s not a matter of whether DeFi protocols should be regulated; but how to strengthen our role and influence over its development as the regulatory framework takes shape. After all, until there are clear regulations that provide legal security for protocols to operate and for enterprises to join, mass adoption will remain out of reach.

Ishan Pandey: According to you, what new trends are we going to see within the blockchain industry?

Ian Huang: I think 2022 and the time ahead will be about advancing connectivity within the global blockchain ecosystem and creating a frictionless Web3 experience for everyone. Over the years, we’ve seen generations of blockchain platforms geared for higher interoperability as well as solutions that facilitate cross-platform communications. Yet, the development so far has been public blockchains-oriented and centered around DeFi use-cases.

While enterprises are eager to capitalize on the blockchain movement, the current technical infrastructure is simply not ready -- the permissionless (decentralized) and permissioned (enterprise) ecosystems are isolated from each other, and the former lacks mechanisms to respond to enterprise needs such as data governance, confidentiality, and compliance (e.g., KYC and GDPR). The next-generation blockchain projects are tasked to provide solutions that facilitate a common environment where data can seamlessly and securely flow across public and private networks between users (businesses and individuals alike) and can be aligned to blend the virtual and physical lives.

This goes back to what I previously mentioned. The blockchain industry needs to navigate the regulatory landscape and make the ecosystem more friendly for enterprise adoption, starting with elements that are considered social goods, if not universal values, like accountability and user data protection. We believe that the trend of blockchain is abundantly clear that accountable checkpoints will be required and become necessary in the future.

Catch all the breaking news, and Don’t forget to like the story!

Disclaimer: The purpose of this article is to remove informational asymmetry existing today in our digital markets by performing due diligence, asking the right questions, and equipping readers with better opinions to make informed decisions.