“Huarui FinTech Salon” (No. 2), jointly hosted by Shanghai Huarui Bank, International Monetary Institute (IMI), Renmin University of China(RUC) and RUC FinTech Institute, was held on August 30 afternoon online. The theme of the salon was “Blockchain technology development and its application trend”. The keynote speech was delivered by Cao Feng, Member of the China FinTech 50 Forum (CFT50). The following experts attended the salon: Deng Di, Chairman of Taiyi Group; Sun Xi, Senior Expert of Ant Group Research Institute; Yang Dong, Executive Dean of Blockchain Research Institute, RUC; Wu Entao, Managing Director of South China Sea Cooperative Innovation Development Fund. The event was moderated by Qiu Zhigang, Senior Research Fellow of IMI and Professor of School of Finance, RUC.

Cao Feng delivered a keynote speech. He pointed out that blockchain is a rapidly evolving technology, which integrates with other technologies. He said that metaverse and DAO are the most popular technologies and presented some features of metaverse. First, persistence. Second, real-time experience. Third, a fully functioning economy. Fourth, unprecedented connection between data and value. Fifth, users create value and also enjoy it.

In addition, the metaverse has many other connotations beyond blockchain. The annual trend for 2022 is the multi-chain era and cross-chain. This year there is also the transformation of Ether 2.0, which means the transformation from the BeaCon chain to the ongoing transformation of the Ethereum mainchain from POW to POS, and to Sharding. Layor 2 (L2) is also an important technology. NFT is now also widely used.

Cao Feng also pointed out that another important issue comes from the Decentralized Society, which raises the issue of Web3 social identity because the existing Web3 still lacks the original language to represent social identity. The paper argues that the core is to find Soul to solve the decentralized identity problem through technology. Soul is an account that can hold the SBT (Soulbound Token) and is a unique identifier to demonstrate that SBT is not transferable. Soul has all the capabilities of Web3 and differs from the current blockchain Wallet. The economic value of Soul mainly comes from the relational properties of the identities, which is similar to a proof of experience profile. It is still unknown whether Web3 Soul will ever be truly used. The blockchain is the infrastructure of Web3 in the network layer.Web3 can even be regarded as the blockchain. In fact, the most important thing about Web3.0 is who will own the Web. Finally, Cao Feng said DAO is also an important development direction. In the future, the value from the community may achieve the conversion of the Company-owned paradigm.

Then, the participants carried out extensive discussions on the keynote reports and related issues, expressing their views on topics such as blockchain, metaverse, and so on.