November 17-18, the Bytom Global Devcon 2018 has been successfully held at Hangzhou International Expo Center (G20 venue).

The ultimate technology feast for blockchain developers has been officially kicked off on August 11th. The contest was held in main cities includes Hangzhou, Beijing, Shenzhen, Nanjing, Shanghai, Seoul, Boston and Silicon Valley. Over 100  development teams from all over the world developed their projects based on Bytom blockchain.

In the end, 16 top development teams from various countries including China, the United States, South Korea and Greece reached the finals, competing for a million bonus.

Finally, the Bytom-based decentralized digital asset trading platform Bytomswap  won the first prize and received 200,000 BTM bonuses.

In the Bytom Global DevCon, 16 top develop teams gave their incredible project roadshows, big name within the industry also discussed the recent hot spots in their presentations. Guests benefit a lot from five roundtable forums.

The successful holding of the Bytom Global DevCon shows the gradual development and growing influence of Bytom ecosystem. Blockchain developers from all over the world also show their passion in the competition. All this makes the blockchain “winter” not so cold.

Looking back at the competition, there are so many wonderful things that worth to be recorded. This article is mainly to talk about four key points throughout the event including the spirit of inclusiveness and open source; big name’s viewpoints; hot-spot technical discussions and fiercely contested roadshows.

1.Inclusiveness and open source

This competition is the first blockchain event that hosted by open source organizations and local technology companies in Hangzhou. Its success is due to two elements: inclusiveness and open source.

Duan Xinxing, founder of Bytom expressed his gratitude to Hangzhou for its inclusive spirit and payed a tribute to the open source movement.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the birth of Bitcoin. It can be concluded that Bitcoin is driven by the open source spirit of its own economic incentive mechanism.

“In 2008 and 2009, the common open source spirit bring developers together and enabled them to discuss peer-to-peer network technology, encryption technology, and PoS (proof-of-work) mechanisms in MIT crypto mail groups. People from different fields gathered together to create a great thing, and then jointly promote its progress which forms the development of today’s bitcoin and blockchain.”

Meanwhile, the development of Bytom also relays on the spirit of open source. The developers, testers, and coders from all over the world are all committed to the open source spirit and contribute their wisdom which enables Bytom to got there we are today.

2. Big name’s viewpoints

Many senior researchers and project founders gave their presentation in the Bytom Global DevCon, including Bai Shuo, chief scientist of World Blockchain Organization (WBO); Liu Quan, president of CCID Block Research Institute; Sun Lilin, founder of platON, Austrian economist Boer Feimo; Professor Chen Gongliang form Shanghai Jiaotong University (SJTU) and Hyperledger technology ambassador Dong Ning gave their presentation.

Bai Shuo: blockchain technology revolution and token revolution will get into the same destination

Bai Shuo is the form chief engineer at the Shanghai Stock Exchange and currently serves as the chief scientist of the WBO. He gave a keynote speech at the conference titled “The Technical Framework Choices for Blockchain Revolution”.

Blockchain community has been divided into two parties: the technical group and the token group. Initially, the two parties used to be completely incompatible, but things changes now.

“The technical group is focusing on adjustment and optimization while token group is working on effective self-discipline. If they take another step forward, they will get to the same point. Therefore, it is said that they took opposite direction but get into the same destination,” said Bai.

Bai also draws some suggestions on the framework of blockchain technological revolution. He proposed to use a combination of consortium blockchain and public blockchain. The underlying layer is the processing breakdown, and the upper layer is the public blockchain, the incentives in the processing breakdown and the derivative services on the public blockchain can use a set of points system.

Liu Quan: blockchain is neutral, technology itself is innocent

Liu Quan gave a keynote speech titled “Interpretation of Blockchain Policy”. He commented that blockchain is neutral, technology itself is innocent.

“What attitude China holds towards blockchain? I want to compare it with the relationship between Internet finance and the Internet. In China, internet finance has been suppressed, but Internet technology is still a key area in national development strategy. Same to blockchain, we should recognize that ICO is just one application of blockchain.”

In fact, both the national 13th Five-Year Plan and the 13th Five-Year Development Plan for IT Development have high lighted blockchain in China’s technology development layout. To some extent, China authorities are supporting the development of blockchain technology.

Meanwhile, over 30 locations in China have launched supportive policies on blockchain. Of late, blockchain has also been mentioned in the Beijing Financial Technology Development Plan (2018-2020).

Sun LiLin: Make Computing Trust-less

Sun indicated that, The demand for data trading is increasing, but the traditional methods of data trading will ultimately make the value of the data unpriced. This is because people cannot assess data from the size, amount and its provider. He believes that data needs to be evaluated through computing.

Computing can only be evaluated when data is either exchanged or shared. However, with the development of AI, traditional data exchange becomes more and more difficult and costly. As thus, Sun believes that privacy computing represented by MPC (Multiparty Computing) will be the next generation core infrastructure of data evaluation.

“Privacy computing is the proper business model for blockchain. Everyone can keep their data in local storage and still get the most value through collaborative computing without exposing the privacy of native data.”

3.Hot-spot technologies

The most cutting-edge blockchain technologies, including side-chain, cross-chain, multiparty computing, artificial intelligence (AI), encryption algorithm, privacy protection have also been discussed in Bytom Global DevCon.

Side-chain: Bytom launches side-chain project, promotes blockchain business applications

The role of side-chain is to transform digital assets between different blockchains. Recently, there are some popular side-chain projects including Liquid, RSK, and Loom.

This time, Bytom has also launched its self-developed side-chain project—Vapor at the conference. According to Bytom’s core developer Wang Zhang, Vapor is based on the two-way peg (2WP) technology and SPV model. By introducing the middleman mechanism, the quality and relative security of the assets can be guaranteed through Vapor.

Bytom CTO Lang Yu added that Vapor has open sourced and subsequent iterations will follow. It will connect with the main chain of Bitcoin and Ethereum to become a universal side-chain project.

Multiparty computing: evaluating the data

Multiparty computing refers to data interaction in a circuit way without transforming of the original data or exposing data privacy. Different parties may participate in the entire computing process through computing nodes, in order to get the valued result they all wanted.

The current barriers of multiparty computing is the high complexity in computing and communication. In order to deal with this problem, PlatON is prepossessing the raw data and transforming it into a Boolean circuit then hand it to the compiler. Data exchanged on the network are all encrypted or hybrid circuits.

AI: the boundary with blockchain is blurring

“The boundary of blockchain and AI is merging,” said Bytom’s co-founder Chang Jia in the roundtable forum on Computationalism, Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence.

Chang Jia uses GPU mining as an example and indicated that the computing power that generates by GUP mining can be used in AI operation. He believes that blockchain and artificial intelligence can do more integration on data:

First of all, the decentralization concept decentralization subverts industrial giants’ business models.

Nowadays, Internet giants hold a lot of AI data. Users and enterprises contributes their own data while using these giants’ cloud services. However, most of them have received nothing in return, Instead, they are suffering from data leakage. Fortunately, the concept of decentralization of the blockchain enables data sharers to get profit from data sharing.

Secondly, AI empowers blockchain.

To some extent, blockchain smart contract is not a real ‘smart contract’ because it is not a real contract and not intelligent neither. Chang Jia said that if we can apply some AI breakthroughs to smart contract, we may develop a more advanced ‘real smart contract’.

Encryption algorithm: autonomous controllable information security in China’s financial field based on national cryptographic standard

Zhang Chengcheng, core developer of Bytom, shared his point of view on Bytom development based on the national cryptographic standard.

As Bytom is a domestic public chain that focus on the programmability of resources, it must use the encryption algorithm based on national cryptographic standard due to the regulation issues.

The national cryptographic standard is consisted by a series of cryptographic algorithms. Among them, the SM2 ,SM3 and SM4 algorithm are most commonly used. Bytom also uses these three algorithm in its national cryptographic standard test chain.

According to Zhang, the national cryptographic standard test network of Bytom has open sourced on the Bytom GitHub homepage and there is not much difference in user experience compares to Bytom’s main network.

The only difference is that the underlying encryption algorithms has been modified and replaced in order to meet certain standard in financial information security.

4.Roadshow: 16 development teams join the fierce competition, Bytomswap won the first prize

16 development teams demonstrated their projects in the two-day roadshow. They are: JoyPub, V-Story, Bluechain, Block Power (blockchain contract), FHT (HOS blockchain house rental), EONE (trading platform based on Bytom), Adipusi (advertising platform), AITFX, Bytomswap, JoyIOT, VolunteerX, CRT asset circulation platform, Fitness Energy, Carblock, 66 Wallet and 2100 (Bytom DevTools).

The jury scored 16 projects mainly based on their innovation degree, product completeness, blockchain integrating degree, value, user-friendliness, technical difficulty, and community governance.

The ranking list of the Bytom Global DevCon shows below:

Most of the projects in the roadshow are focusing on social contact, sewage treatment, electronic contracts, housing leasing, asset trading, advertising, agricultural insurance, vehicle trading and other real-life scenarios. It shows blockchain technology plays a significant positive role in helping real industry development.

The winner, Bytomswap, is a decentralized digital asset trading platform based on Bytom. The core developer Anil Kumar has worked in software programming industry for 18 years.

Anil highlight the two main reasons of choosing to develop on Bytom blockchain:

First of all, Bitcoin application UTXO is a trustworthy trading model as it guarantees the total amount of tokens issued on the network and the token supply can be estimated. While the BUTXO model, an advanced version of UTXO, supports simultaneous trading of multiple assets, that lays a good foundation for the development of trading platforms.

Secondly, the PoW Consensus mechanism and the simple Equity

Anil believes the future of Bytom is bright as it has made many improvements on the basis of Bitcoin and Ethereum, and it is very easy to launch tokens and trade digital assets on the Bytom blockchain. Anil indicated that, although the Dapp application ecosystem has just begun, in the future, there will be more and more excellent application projects generated from Bytom.