Ethereum is the most concentrated decentralized software platform with blockchain applications in the world. Hundreds of Ethereum applications have been born. In less than a week, the Ethereum network, which is regarded as one of the underlying infrastructures of Web3.0, will undergo historic changes - from a proof of work algorithm (PoW) that relies on centralized mining operation to a proof of stake algorithm (PoS) that relies on staking ETH as a verification node. This process is called "Ethereum Merger".
Ethereum merger directly leads to the elimination of graphics card mining machines that mine ETH assets from the chain, which coincides with China's policy of banning crypto asset mining, and has eliminated a group of miners again. This is also one of the reasons why the prices of a large number of mainstream graphics cards have been halved recently.
online game players are only non-mainstream groups affected by the Ethereum merger. The mainstream groups paying attention to this matter are still concentrated in the field of encryption, including ETH miners, investors, developers of Ethereum chain applications, and even investment institutions focusing on Web3.0. In the crypto world, the merger of Ethereum has become a major event in the industry. People want to see what changes this blockchain network, which has even changed the consensus mechanism, will bring to the crypto industry and the development of Web3.0, which is still in its super early stage.
For an invisible and intangible blockchain network, data is becoming a window for all parties to watch the merger of Ethereum. The light of opportunity projected from the data window is not only attached to the Ethereum chain, but also not only about investment. The regulatory and business opportunities generated around blockchain data are hidden in the development process of blockchain, and are even related to data security before and after the arrival of Web3.0.
relies on data to watch Ethereum merger
In the past week, Daniel has looked at ETH's pledge data every day, "It can help me judge the market confidence in Ethereum." Daniel is one of the many investors in ETH. One of his two computers is specifically used to view K-lines, and the browser of the other computer is full of various crypto asset indicators web pages. ETH's various indicators have become his focus recently.
The data mentioned by Daniel is a change in the staking of ETH on the Ethereum beacon chain. It is the data feedback from network verifiers after Ethereum switched to the PoS mechanism. The blockchain data analysis platform under Ouke Cloud Chain, blockchain browser OKLink, shows that on September 1, the number of new pledges on ETH2.0 reached 94,997 ETH, which hit the fourth peak of ETH pledge this year, but compared with the "top three tops", the average daily pledge volume has been significantly reduced.
Data platforms like Ouke Cloud Chain OKLink blockchain browser are an important source of information for Daniels to obtain Ethereum merger. After Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin predicted in August that "the merger will happen around September 15", the countdown card was placed in the most prominent position in the Ethereum sector by major data platforms, and even a merger area was set up.
In addition to looking at the merged data, another participant in the Ethereum network, Leo, is also looking at the computing power data of other PoW mechanisms blockchain networks. He is an Ethereum miner. After the network does not support mining, the whereabouts of the mining machine he has in his hands has become a big problem.
At the beginning of last year, Leo spent a lot of money to update his graphics card mining machine configured overseas, but he did not expect the merger to really come. In March this year, he pledged a small part of the ETH he mined on the Ethereum beacon chain. "I still want to see what Ethereum that does not mining can bring to participants," but what should he do with his mining machine?
"New graphics cards are falling sharply, and mining cards cannot be sold at a price. If you don't sell, you can only find a network with the same origin as the Ethereum PoW algorithm to continue mining."
Leo noticed that the recent computing power indicator of the Ethereum homologous network Ethereum Classic (ETC) using the PoW algorithm has changed significantly.
htmlOn September 7, Ouke Cloud Chain OKLink blockchain browser data showed that ETC's entire network computing power increased by 4.44% in just one week, and the difficulty of mining across the entire network increased by 5.59%. Some people believe that Ethereum miners are moving towards Ethereum Classic. "But ETC is less than $40, which cannot support miners' costs." Leo stared at the progress bar of the Ethereum merger, waiting for the terminal difficulty value to trigger the network merger on September 15. That was the last moment when he could mine ETH. He planned to decide where the miner would go after the merger was completed.is not only a small miner like Leo, but also listed crypto mining company Hive Blockchain is also evaluating the impact of the Ethereum merger on itself. The company is already considering mining other PoW network tokens.
In last month's financial report, Hive Blockchain revealed that it will sell mining ETH and expand its plans to mine BTC. As of August 31, the company's ETH position had dropped from 25,000 ETH to 5,100 ETH. The company has approximately 38,000 Nvidia graphics cards, including A4000, A5000, A6000 and A40 models. It has found new positions for these graphics cards to continue to work, "for cloud computing and artificial intelligence applications, as well as rendering for engineering applications, and scientific modeling of fluid dynamics."
Another group of people who are not part of the encryption circle are watching the Ethereum merger "small break station". When interpreting the news of graphics card price reduction, all Up owners who focus on computer hardware will mention the Ethereum merger event that will be eliminated with graphics card mining machines. The network computing power data map has also become an important explanation material. They predict that once the merger is completed, tens of millions of graphics cards will flow into the second-hand market, and computer hardware players are caring, "waiting for the mine boss to stage a flying man in the air (a metaphor for losses)."
data service provider ambushed on the eve of Web3
hardware players are probably the group with the biggest impact on the non-crypto circle of Ethereum merger. But no matter who is watching the Ethereum merger, data is an important means. This invisible and intangible blockchain network always conveys its changes and development through the continuously generated on-chain data.
All the secrets of Ethereum are packaged into every block of it. Every transaction data that occurs on the chain, the smart contract data built on the chain, and the interactive information of these contracts form blocks, which are publicly stored on the chain, and anyone can check it, but no one can tamper with it.
Ethereum nodes are like small servers, processing network data every second. They are Ethereum's "workers" to support the operation of the network through collaborative work. At present, there are 8,851 "workers" on the entire Ethereum network, which are distributed in more than 70 countries and regions around the world, including the United States, Germany, Russia, , Ireland, , Canada, and Hong Kong.
Among these workers, there is a type called "full node", and each full node stores the complete and latest data of the Ethereum network. In May 2020, the Ethereum full node size exceeded 360 GB and maintained its growth at 30 GB per month, and has now increased to over 899 GB, while the "archive node" size that stores the height of each block has reached 11 TB.
This data volume is only half of the total data generated by industrial enterprises every year, but these 11 TBs contain all the current information about Ethereum, which is regarded as the "Web3.0 infrastructure". Some people predict that when the 2.0 version of Ethereum arrives, on-chain applications will truly explode and data will enter the stage of information explosion. What are the uses of
?
"Ethereum data can almost become a window to examine the underlying layer of Web3.0 in the future." Mugi defines this as this. He is the product manager of Ouke Cloud Chain, a blockchain big data service provider, and participated in the research and development of the company's Ethereum browser project. About 2 weeks of development time also allowed this Web2.0 practitioner who switched from Tencent to gain a preliminary understanding of the openness of Web3.0.
Massive data can be obtained directly from open source databases. The transaction address and smart contract interaction information contain various interesting information. "Although transactions are anonymous, you can see the user's trading habits from data analysis, and even analyze their preferred trading time from it. You can also see applications that exist on the chain in the form of smart contracts. Are they welcomed by users?"
Mugi bluntly stated that Web2.0 companies can certainly analyze data in this way, but the data source is not public, and the analysis is only for internal use. "Open source and shared data are one of the most attractive places in Web3.0."
Ouke Cloud Chain's job is to pass these processed data to the outside world in a readable and visual way, and the service objects cover government departments, corporate customers and ordinary users.Its most well-known product in the industry is "Chain Tianyan Pro", which is serving domestic public security, procuratorial and judicial departments to track illegal acts committed by crypto assets, such as the telecommunications fraud cases involving digital currency that have been frequently cracked down in recent years.
There are nearly 100 blockchain data service providers like Ouke Cloud Chain around the world. Some of them, like Chainalysis, mainly fight crime for law enforcement departments such as FBI , the Drug Enforcement Bureau, some provide trading indicators for traders of crypto assets like Glassnode, and others provide data reports for financial institutions and research institutions like Arcane Research.
Ethereum is just a blockchain data source mined by data analysis service providers. If the market value of each public chain asset is calculated, almost half of the top 100 crypto assets belong to public chain assets. The public chain networks that generate these ranking assets include Cardano, Solana, Polkadot, etc. They are also called the global mainstream public chain, competing with Ethereum for the market for the underlying infrastructure of Web3.0.
And data service providers are like microscopes, recording their development with data analysis in the competition of public chains, ambushing on the eve of the big data explosion in Web3.0.
Web3.0 let "Eye of the Internet" see where it should be seen
We cannot predict the final form of Web3.0, but its builders are trying to transform the current Internet with the image of a transformer, although this power has not been taken seriously by their opponents.
In the eyes of the public, Ethereum has always been equated with ETH. Those who know it have placed it in the "hype" queue with Bitcoin. Most people don't know that hundreds of applications have been deployed on the Ethereum network, and people don't even know how to access them. This is the world's largest public chain, let alone its competitive chain.
In the world of Web2.0, things that traffic does not pay attention to are worthless, while big data captures places where traffic is interested in every moment, discovering and even creating business opportunities in this way. This model has become a weapon for commercial companies to expand in the era of mobile Internet.
Victor Erye Schönberg predicted in his book "The Age of Big Data" as early as 2013 that the information storm brought by big data is "a great change in life, work and thinking."
That year, the headquarters of Alibaba Group moved to No. 969, Wenyi West Road, Yuhang District, Hangzhou. Through a series of reorganizations, the migration from the PC Internet to the mobile Internet was completed. Alipay split out Taobao and became an important third-party payment tool. Alibaba started in 2009 and laid the foundation for the number one e-commerce company's financial business.
was also that year. Tencent WeChat launched the payment function, and the QR code was regarded as the "entry of the mobile Internet" by Xiaolong . Things that were widely questioned at that time have now become a tool that the public cannot do without. Scanning has become a daily interaction between users and servers.
What really opens people's perception of big data should be today's headlines. Every time a user clicks on news and information, it will have an impact on the next time he opens the app. Before they knew it, people discovered that "my headlines always have some news that is different from yours." By algorithm recommendation, Toutiao almost destroyed the portal website that dominated the Internet for more than 10 years.
big data is regarded as the "eye of the Internet". With the mature infrastructure of Web2.0, Web3.0's big data analysis is not difficult, and even the difficulty is reduced due to the openness of data sources. Jiang Zhaosheng, a researcher at Ouke Cloud Chain Research Institute, explained that they tagged blockchain addresses, completed behavioral portraits through on-chain big data analysis, and then provided them to the demand side, "This is the basic operation of Internet big data processing."
The Internet Eyes did bring about changes, but the people who were watched began to feel uncomfortable. When people preparing for weddings are always pushed advertisements for wedding venues on Weibo, when strangers on the other end of the phone accurately report the person's name and ID number, people find that Internet big data is easily obtaining user information, and users become the target of merchants' precise marketing, and information leakage will also cause people to fall into the trap of telecommunications fraud .But when you want to see real consumer reviews on Taobao and Pinduoduo, doubts are always accompanied by consumer experience.
Web2.0 is losing trust in traffic, but Web3.0 still needs these eyes. The difference is that "Web3.0 Eyes" will not look through everything about users. "We can analyze the behavior of addresses, but cannot determine the address's belonging. This is determined by the anonymous nature of the blockchain, unless it interacts with a platform with real-name requirements."
, which is not yet known to the public, is trying to change the disadvantages of Web2.0 - starting with Web3.0, let users' data return to themselves, including ownership and usage rights. Software programs can no longer obtain user information and data for free, and consent and authorization are no longer a tyrant clause. When users do not want to use the program, they can release the authorization at any time.
What challenges will data processing face after the emergence of Web3.0, which promotes user rights and protects user privacy?
Recently, after the US Treasury Department banned Tornado Cash, a crypto asset privacy tool, there was a voice of resistance in the crypto community, which allowed Jiang Zhaosheng to see the test faced by future blockchain data service providers. "The anonymity of blockchain determines that it is censorship-resistant, which requires data service providers to be able to effectively and accurately identify on-chain data, and to separate the evildoers who use it from ordinary users, benefiting users and cracking down on behaviors that infringe on users."
Since 2020, China has been advocating the development of blockchain, but it needs to be divested from cryptocurrency. Since then, alliance chain has become the focus of research and development for domestic Internet companies. In Jiang Zhaosheng's view, even if China does not advocate the development of public chains, it cannot ignore the data research as the Web3.0 infrastructure, namely public chains. "Because risks will not be far away from it because of the ban from a certain country. At the moment when our country advocates the digital economy and builds data security, we need to deal with it in advance."
Mugi depicts a future: Web3.0 based on blockchain, data must be transparent, open, and real, and users can check and verify at any time, while data processors stand on the same starting line, because the efficiency of data source acquisition has been solved, and the real moat is who can quickly give data and analyze, who can deeply understand the on-chain ecology, and output speed and understanding to the demand side in the form of products.
If talents in the 21st century are the most expensive, then in the era of Web3.0, data will no longer be cheap. Its value is not only about insight into Web3.0, but also about the security of the next generation of Internet. Chainalysis is already creating "weapons" for the United States to combat cryptocurrency crimes, and the domestic Oko Cloud Chain is also providing assistance to law enforcement agencies that protect the property safety of Chinese people. Big data has brought about the prosperity of Web2.0 and also brought about the risk of improper data use. The lessons learned from the past may provide strategic forward-looking for the data era of Web3.0.
(Daniel, Leo, and Mugi are all pseudonyms)
