OKX University Interview ｜ Xiao Zhen: Discussing the Integration of AI and Blockchain and the Employment Views of the Younger Generation

Dr. Xiao Zhen graduated from Cornell University in the United States. After graduation, he worked as a researcher at AT&T Labs (formerly Bell Labs) and IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, where he received the "Research Excellence Award" during his time at AT&T. In 2008, Dr. Xiao returned to Peking University as a researcher and doctoral supervisor under the "Hundred Talents Program." His open course on blockchain technology and applications has garnered over 1.4 million views on Bilibili.

The "OKX University Interview" series aims to understand the perspectives of university personnel on the development of the Web3 industry through dialogue, while providing references for university groups entering Web3 employment and entrepreneurship. In this issue, we are honored to invite Professor Xiao Zhen as a guest speaker for the "OKX University Interview," hoping his insights will be helpful to you.

++The "OKX University Interview" series is a special program produced by OKX, hosted by OKX official community ambassador Mercy (@Mercy_okx), aiming to explore the industry perspectives of global university personnel and provide references for those starting businesses and seeking employment in Web3.++

1. You conducted in-depth research on underlying blockchain technologies such as Ethereum around 2018. Over the years, the Web3 and blockchain industry has gone through several development stages. What significant changes do you see in terms of technological evolution, industry ecology, and talent?

Our group's traditional field is distributed systems, and most of our past research focused on optimizations in areas such as network layers and consensus protocols. In recent years, blockchain has seen significant improvements in performance, with various Layer 2 technologies emerging. For example, Optimistic Rollup and ZK Rollup technologies have greatly improved network performance by executing most transactions off the main chain while maintaining a certain degree of decentralization and security. Of course, the degree of decentralization of some Layer 2 solutions is a matter of debate. A landmark event in recent years was the upgrade of Ethereum, most notably the transition from PoW to PoS, which significantly reduced energy consumption, aligning with today's global green and environmental protection concepts.

From the perspective of industry ecology, DeFi, Metaverse, and NFTs have experienced explosive growth. Peking University has established a Metaverse Technology Research Institute, where I serve as the deputy director, focusing on the integration of AI and blockchain technology. In the past few years, in addition to mainstream blockchain technologies and applications, emerging projects like Theta Network have also brought significant innovations and contributions to the blockchain ecosystem. Theta Network is a blockchain project focused on decentralized video streaming, addressing bandwidth bottlenecks, high costs, and centralization issues in traditional video transmission by introducing blockchain and cryptoeconomic models. Unlike traditional streaming platforms (such as YouTube and Twitch), Theta Network utilizes the idle bandwidth and computing resources of global users for decentralized video content distribution, thereby reducing the costs of content delivery networks (CDN).

From the perspective of talent cultivation, many traditional software developers and Web 2.0 developers have transitioned into Web 3.0, bringing rich engineering experience to the blockchain and Web 3.0 industry, promoting the specialization and diversification of blockchain application development.

2. You encounter students from different backgrounds in your teaching. How do you view the differences in contemporary young people's understanding of blockchain technology compared to a few years ago?

It should be said that a few years ago, the group of students who understood blockchain technology was relatively niche. The bull market in the cryptocurrency space in 2017 led many people to start paying attention to Bitcoin and blockchain. I offer courses such as "Blockchain Technology and Applications" and "Introduction to Metaverse Technology" at Peking University, and most of the students who choose my courses have a background in science and engineering. They are interested in the technical principles of blockchain, consensus protocols, and Web 3.0 application development. My course assignments include implementing basic cryptographic operations and consensus protocols of blockchain using Go language, as well as programming smart contracts using Solidity.

At the same time, some students with a liberal arts background are more focused on the application scenarios, financial attributes, and social impacts of blockchain, such as decentralized governance models, privacy protection, and digital sovereignty, which are transformative social issues. The interdisciplinary integration and community practice of blockchain have also made students more open and collaborative in their technical explorations, indicating that blockchain technology will achieve more profound applications and transformations in various fields in the future. In the past two years, with the rise of AI technology, I have also added content related to chatbots and AIGC to my courses, while discussing relevant legal and ethical issues. One characteristic of my teaching is the connection between theory and practice, with a dedicated section discussing cryptocurrency scams to prevent students from being deceived in the future.

Overall, contemporary young people's understanding of blockchain and Web 3.0 shows a more diversified trend. However, it is still a relatively niche field, and the number of interested students is not as high as that for AI, algorithms, and other courses.

3. What opportunities and challenges do you think current students face in entrepreneurship and employment in the blockchain or Web3 field?

The blockchain and Web3 fields are currently in a phase of rapid development, with more opportunities abroad than domestically. Mastering programming languages such as Solidity and Go is fundamental to entering the blockchain development field, and familiarity with development tools like Remix and Truffle, as well as the processes for testing and deploying contracts, is also necessary. Due to policy factors, domestic projects mainly focus on consortium chains. My research group collaborates with mainstream domestic consortium chains (such as Chang'an Chain, Spark Chain Network, Ant Chain, etc.). To enhance the system throughput of consortium chains and improve user experience, we have conducted in-depth analyses of existing consensus algorithms for consortium chains. The results indicate that traditional research aimed at improving system throughput by optimizing consensus protocols overlooks the impact of data distribution on system throughput, shifting the performance bottleneck from the consensus layer to the network layer. To address the performance bottleneck in the network layer, we proposed a new data flow framework composed of Predis and Multizone, allowing consensus nodes to utilize their idle bandwidth for parallel pre-distribution of block content, thereby confirming more transactions in a single round of consensus and reducing transmission delays through a compression method based on block construction rules. Additionally, the Multizone strategy further divides the network into multiple zones and combines multicast trees with erasure coding to reduce bandwidth peaks and data propagation delays in data distribution. Our collaborative results with Ant Chain have been applied in Ant Group's business scenarios with significant effects, earning recognition as an "Outstanding Application Project of the CCF-Ant Research Fund."

At the same time, young people should also accumulate development experience from foreign public chain projects. Our group's collaboration with the Theta Blockchain public chain is very helpful for students to gain a deep understanding of the working principles, consensus mechanisms, and transmission protocols of public chains, laying the foundation for future entrepreneurship and employment abroad. A major difference between public chains and consortium chains is the incentive mechanism; designing a reasonable token economic incentive mechanism requires a deep understanding of cryptoeconomics (Tokenomics). A good blockchain project often requires interdisciplinary knowledge, needing talents from computer science, finance, law, and other fields, while accurately grasping user experience and diverse market demands, possessing strong product thinking, and designing innovative blockchain applications based on user needs. Here, I want to emphasize that regardless of where one works in the blockchain industry, it is essential to comply with the relevant laws and regulations of the respective country. Products with financial attributes are subject to strict regulation in many countries, and one should not be obsessed with speculative activities or the "money-making effect," but rather focus on creating impactful projects.

4. What key factors should students prioritize when choosing entrepreneurship or employment in the Web3 industry?

I think the first consideration should be whether the focus is on the domestic market or the overseas market. There are significant differences between the entrepreneurial and employment environments in the Web 3.0 industry in mainland China and abroad: there is strict regulation on cryptocurrencies and the blockchain industry in China, explicitly prohibiting virtual currency transactions, so one cannot rely on issuing tokens or ICOs for financing or profit when starting a Web 3.0 venture in China. Products like decentralized finance (DeFi) and NFTs are also subject to strict regulation domestically; for example, NFT transactions cannot have a secondary market. This has also led to greater difficulty in financing domestically, with venture capital institutions taking a cautious stance towards startups in the Web 3.0 industry. China supports non-financial applications of blockchain, known as the separation of coin and chain. Most domestic blockchain companies focus on consortium chains and are at the forefront of applications in supply chain finance, food traceability, judicial evidence preservation, data security, and other fields. There are many high-level talents in the internet and Web 2.0 sectors in China, but the number of Web 3.0 companies is relatively limited, and they mostly concentrate on technical development and underlying protocol research, resulting in fewer employment opportunities in blockchain-related positions. Many domestic blockchain companies rely on government projects to support their main income.

In contrast, some overseas countries (such as Singapore) adopt relatively lenient regulatory policies towards Web 3.0, with legal regulations being relatively transparent and stable, which helps startups develop within a foreseeable policy framework, with lower compliance costs, facilitating rapid progress in financing and marketization. It is worth noting that the regulatory policies in the United States are becoming stricter, and issuing tokens through ICOs is no longer as easy as it was six years ago. However, the financing atmosphere in Silicon Valley is still very good, with mature venture capital and incubator support, and a high level of acceptance of Web 3.0. Many venture capital institutions are actively investing in the Web 3.0 field, making it relatively easy for startups to obtain funding support.

5. Web3 and artificial intelligence (AI) are the two major technological trends today. How do you view their integrated development?

This is a very good question! The research group I lead is precisely focused on both blockchain and artificial intelligence. In recent years, our group has collaborated with Theta Labs to publish a series of papers at internationally renowned academic conferences, applying AI technology to the fields of blockchain and distributed systems. For example, a paper on blockchain sharding published earlier this year significantly reduced the proportion of cross-shard transactions while maintaining load balancing through blockchain sharding technology based on deep reinforcement learning, greatly improving the performance of blockchain systems. Our group has also developed a series of AIGC demos in collaboration with Theta Labs, such as sketch to 3D, which can convert user-drawn sketches into high-quality 3D models in just a few seconds. This technology has broad application prospects in industries such as film, gaming, and precision manufacturing. We have also innovatively proposed a method to enhance the robustness of computer vision models, which is significant for building virtual reality systems like the Metaverse.

Overall, the integrated development of Web 3.0 and artificial intelligence (AI) has very broad prospects. Web 3.0 aims to create a decentralized internet ecosystem, giving users greater data ownership and control, while AI provides more precise interactions and experiences for Web 3.0 applications through data processing and intelligent analysis. The two can complement each other in areas such as data processing, decentralized services, and privacy protection, adding new functionalities and application possibilities to their respective ecosystems. Through smart contracts and blockchain technology, developers can create a decentralized AI model marketplace, making the model training and usage processes more transparent and traceable. Developers can distribute trained AI models for use by users in decentralized networks, eliminating reliance on centralized platforms and fostering fair competition in the AI model market. The decentralized data storage and privacy protection features of Web 3.0 can compensate for AI's shortcomings in data security. By utilizing decentralized storage, users can control their data storage and usage rights, allowing AI algorithms to still access training data while protecting privacy.

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