On April 6th, the "2025 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival" was officially opened in Hong Kong. He Yi, Chairman of Wanxiang Blockchain and CEO of HashKey Group, delivered an opening speech titled "Public Chains: A New Generation of Financial Infrastructure". He stated: "Public chains, as a new financial infrastructure, can enable programmable transaction settlement through smart contracts, changing the currency creation process while achieving disintermediation and transparent mechanisms. In the future, new payment and settlement systems can be built through mediums like stablecoins and CBDCs. The new capital markets and financing models created by new asset issuance can achieve value co-creation."
Below is the full speech:
Thank you all for coming so early to the event. I know that the event preparation went on until two or three in the morning yesterday, and everyone has gotten up so early today, which is indeed very hard.
The theme this morning is about blockchain, and everyone has discussed Crypto and Token extensively. Under this theme today, I want to reorganize from a financial perspective how we should understand blockchain as a distributed ledger, and establish an analytical framework from a financial perspective.
So, my topic is "Public Chains: A New Generation of Financial Infrastructure".
[The rest of the translation follows the same professional and accurate approach, maintaining the technical and professional tone of the original text.]So we see a process where after World War II, there was first the dollar backed by gold, then the petrodollar as a commodity settlement currency after the dollar decoupled from gold, and now truly moving to the third step, in the virtual world, in the metaverse world, they continue to strive to ensure the dollar's status as the mainstream payment and settlement currency, from gold-backed dollar to petrodollar, to tokenized dollar.
(7) New Asset Issuance System
Based on this new financial market infrastructure, a new asset issuance system is actually being constructed. All Tokens are divided into five categories: payment Tokens, such as stablecoins; reserve Tokens, like Bitcoin; functional Tokens, like ETH; security Tokens, RWA, tokenized money market funds. There's another category that I'm not sure is appropriately classified, and later when I saw a16z's classification of all Tokens, we coincidentally both separately listed MiniCoin as a category, which also makes sense and is not entirely unreasonable. These five types of Tokens are necessarily issued based on blockchain and the new financial market infrastructure. So if we look back since the Industrial Revolution, a Nobel Prize-winning economist once said: "The Industrial Revolution had to wait for a financial revolution, because without the cooperation of a financial revolution, the Industrial Revolution might not have happened" - this is the result of a lifetime of research by a Nobel Prize-winning economist.
We indeed see that any industrial revolution is accompanied by a revolution in financing methods. The British Industrial Revolution primarily relied on bank credit support. However, the second Industrial Revolution in the United States was supported by the US stock market, transitioning from credit capital to stock capital. The third Industrial Revolution in the US, called the informatization revolution, was inseparable from Silicon Valley's VC risk capital. You could say that without VC risk capital, there would be no Silicon Valley, and therefore no current US technological revolution.
Now we've entered the fourth Industrial Revolution, called digitalization/intelligence. Doesn't the fourth Industrial Revolution also need a new financial revolution to support it and promote its development? What we're seeing now is actually Crypto, crypto finance, which will become the most core financial innovation supporting the fourth Industrial Revolution - this is the change in capital markets.
(8) New Financial Market System
Actually, based on blockchain's new financial market infrastructure, a new financial market system is being constructed. We call traditional finance CeFi (Centralized Finance) and blockchain-based finance DeFi (Decentralized Finance).
What does CeFi rely on? Continuously increasing leverage to maximize investment returns. But DeFi is different - DeFi is over-collateralized lending. If you borrow on DeFi, you must over-collateralize, and after over-collateralization, DeFi can still provide 8%, 10%, or even 15% returns. How? DeFi's returns come from improving capital circulation efficiency.
We know that the fastest lending on DeFi, from occurrence to completion, takes how long? Only one second, three seconds - the so-called "flash loan" on blockchain, which is an extreme case, not meaning all are flash loans. But only on blockchain can a loan be completed in just a few seconds. If a loan can be completed with principal and interest recovered within 10 seconds, how many times would your capital circulate in a year? By improving capital circulation frequency, low-risk returns are obtained without changing risk attributes, or under reduced risk attributes.
(9) New Asset Trading System
Actually, based on blockchain technology, we are constructing a new asset trading system. The US has two stock exchanges, the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ, which have both announced plans to establish a 5 × 23 hour trading system, though they cannot yet achieve 7 × 24 hour trading. I believe this is the future trend of stock market reform, and I also believe that the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and mainland exchanges may eventually have to adopt a similar 5 × 23 hour trading system.
But the Crypto market and Tokens have been 7 × 24 hour trading since their first day, so it is a new trading system. Moreover, there are two types of new trading systems: centralized exchanges and decentralized exchanges. Centralized exchanges take digital native assets offline for trading. At the same time, Trump's MEME coin fully proves that asset issuance and trading can be completed entirely on-chain in a closed loop, that is, "Onchain", fully demonstrating the feasibility of such a business model.
(10) New Wealth Distribution System
The new payment and settlement system based on blockchain is also a new wealth distribution system. AI may independently create commercial value without human command and operation. So how should the created value be distributed? AI itself doesn't need to drink or eat Cantonese cuisine, so the wealth it creates must be distributed for others to use. This distribution method is the UBI (Universal Basic Income) studied by the economics community 20 years ago, distributing the enormous wealth created by AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) through UBI.
So we see two representative figures in the US, one is Sam Altman, the other is Elon Musk, both of whom have AI in one hand and Crypto in the other. Sam Altman even has his own blockchain network, his own world identity card, and has issued his own Worldcoin. This system will be used to distribute the enormous wealth created by AGI in the future.
(11) New Business Governance System
Based on blockchain technology, we can establish a new business governance system. We know that blockchain is first open-source and open, and it is permissionless. Anyone using ETH, or wanting to deploy an application on ETH, doesn't need anyone's consent or approval. From a business application perspective, the blockchain system is a "plug-and-play" system. At the same time, based on blockchain's characteristics, it can enable large-scale effective collaboration among global strangers, which is an innovation in business organizations.
Based on a public and transparent ledger, its information disclosure is vastly different from listed companies. Theoretically and technically, blockchain-based business applications disclose information by Block. Once any Block's data is packaged, the information is actually on-chain and immutable, traceable, and globally accessible to anyone on the blockchain.
My sharing ends here, thank you everyone!
