Disclaimer: This article is intended to convey more market information and does not constitute any investment advice. The article only represents the author's views and does not represent the official position of MarsBit.
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Source: Chain Catcher
Original title: Dialogue Wang Feng : Optimistic about the functional NFT direction. The only gap between Element and OpenSea is the time
In mid-August, the NFT aggregation trading platform Element 2.0 version was officially launched. Wang Feng's speech record at the Twitter Space press conference "I Want to Let the Whole Team Hear My Excited Heartbeat" quickly caused widespread dissemination. This is also the rare screen-sinking articles that Wang Feng has followed the "Ten Questions of Wang Feng" series of articles in previous years.
once again stood in front of the public and spoke out, perhaps it was a major turn and charge for Wang Feng to enter the Web3 field. In 2017, Wang Feng resigned as CEO of Blueport Interactive and handed over the game company that had accompanied him for ten years to his former entrepreneurial partner to manage it. He then founded the Mars Finance and Consensus Laboratory, which once attracted much attention from the market. Although he launched businesses such as cocoa finance, Mars trading masters and Mars Cloud Mine, most of them were forced to shut down or transform due to domestic policies and other factors. What is less well known about
is that Wang Feng’s Twitter ID is called “Little Hidden in the Chain”, which is quite a hidden and dormant meaning. Looking at Wang Feng's growth process, he became famous in the workplace in Kingsoft Software . From starting a business from scratch to listing in Blueport Games, Wang Feng has always been a star in the workplace and entrepreneurial community, and was once the target of media coverage. Since entering the blockchain industry, although Wang Feng is well-known in the circle for "Wang Feng's Ten Questions", he has almost never accepted interviews with him by the media.
In April 2021, Wang Feng announced the establishment of Element and completed a US$11.5 million financing led by Sequoia, SIG, Dragonfly Capital and other capital within one month. Over the past year or so, almost all his thoughts and energy have been devoted to this NFT trading platform.
Since the beginning of the NFT summer last year, OpenSea has been in an absolute dominant position in the NFT market. Even cryptocurrency exchange giants like Coinbase and FTX have made a high-profile entry, most of them have returned in a miserable way. In the fiercely competitive NFT market, although Element has remained low-key for a long time, it has become more and more courageous with the opportunity of the new version being launched recently. The transaction volume and number of users have long ranked first in BNB Chain, and the data on Ethereum has surpassed SudoSwap in the past 7 days.
At this important node, the chain catcher invited Wang Feng to conduct an exclusive interview, and talked in detail about Wang Feng’s experience and experience in entering the NFT industry, as well as the development of Element. Wang Feng said that the biggest mistake he has made in the past year was that he thought he would succeed soon, and regretfully missed the opportunity in the Solana NFT market.
But Wang Feng believes that although Element lags behind OpenSea in multiple data dimensions, the gap between the two is mainly about the beginning sooner or later, and plans to catch up with OpenSea with ease of use at the tool level, while seeking to seize new opportunities in the changes. For example, he believes that domain name assets such as ENS, SpaceID, and .bit are being hotly speculated, which is actually an opportunity for functional NFTs. The next wave of GameFi products will sooner or later. By looking for new asset customization tools to cater to user experience, the market will always give hard-working people the opportunity to overtake.
The following is the original text of the conversation:
1. Chain Catcher: When NFT was initially popular, you were not optimistic. When did you start to change your opinion? What is the specific process of changing ideas and actions?
Wang Feng: I personally entered the industry from software product design and game production, so what I feel most about is to do applications and user experience. I don't really believe in abstract things in the sky. Before 2021, I will pay more attention to a series of applications on DeFi. In fact, I only started trading digital currency during the DeFi period.
I bought my first BTC at $3,000 and then stocked it up. The same is true for buying ETH. So I would miss EOS, and I didn’t buy BNB and FTX, but our consensus lab is an early investor in FTX and the returns are good.
In the summer of 2019, CZ called me, Binance invested 1 million US dollars in Mars Finance, and the one who gave our team was BNB, which was only a few dollars at that time. I said I only want US dollars, and CZ said you can get BNB and exchange it yourself, so we exchanged it for US dollars with almost no thoughts. At first I only believed in BTC and ETH. After DeFi became popular, I became really interested in cryptocurrencies and transactions. I began to believe that blockchain technology will definitely go a long way, and a large number of developers will participate in promoting the application.
can be said that without DeFi, I might not be able to persist in waiting for the NFT opportunity. I started to form a team to do decentralized applications after I became obsessed with DeFi. I made a lot of encouragement in the internal team to encourage everyone to participate in DeFi and NFT. How could I feel if I didn’t play?
As for the focus on the ERC721 protocol, the source is actually in Blueport Interactive, a game development company I founded by myself and was listed in Hong Kong at the end of 2014. At that time, we had already produced more than 15 online games. One day in the fourth quarter of 2017, I saw a blockchain game called Crypto Cat. I quickly transferred seven people and quickly imitated and designed a similar product. My technical partner started to participate in blockchain with me at that time, but I didn't expect to continue until now. Our project runs on a public chain designed by a domestic team, and a version was provided in less than ten days. So, I am the first group of people to touch on NFT.
But at that time I didn't expect that the ERC721 protocol would have today's full wings. What people fear most is that you give up after doing it. If someone mentions it later, you won’t care so much. It was precisely when we got in touch that we gave up and felt that the time to make games on blockchain was far from ripe. And it was almost a time when Animoca Brand, who had a gaming background like us, got involved. They not only invested in crypto cats, but also OpenSea, which sold crypto cats and later SandBox.
During the DeFi period, we considered entering the lending market, such as Compound and AAVE and other major lending agreements. My technical partners have studied them in-depth for a while, and I have also learned from some entrepreneurial teams around me many times, and I have indeed had some confidence in my heart. With a technically prepared team, you are not too scared of starting an NFT trading protocol and the market. In fact, our development team quickly wrote out its own first-generation transaction agreement.
2. Chain Catcher: In the early vision, what are your positioning and goals for Element? What is the biggest difficulty in this process?
Wang Feng: needs to answer this question in four aspects, and you must change your mind.
First of all, let’s talk about the product research and development level. Starting an NFT trading platform based on its own protocol, encapsulating a protocol into a market, and then operating the transaction data is the initial plan. However, developing a mature NFT trading platform is still very difficult to implement. It not only requires solving Web3 technology stacks such as transaction protocols and on-chain data cleaning, but also has a lot of work on practical Web2 functions. This process requires continuous polishing of the product R&D team, and it takes time to produce high-quality products.
Second, most of our team members come from making applications and games. When benchmarking products like OpenSea, the first reaction is how to have a better experience. Three months after the product was launched, we understand that the basic value of the trading platform is not just traffic, but also liquidity.
Third, in the early stage of entering the market, I did consider making an OpenSea that is completely targeted in the Chinese market, but we soon discovered that Web3 is likely to have no so-called national market or regional market, and it cannot be compared with the Web2 era of Taobao in China to the United States Ebay. Blockchain is the new Mediterranean civilization. You can regard each public chain as a Greek city-state. Today's Ethereum may already be the encrypted version of Roman Republic .
OpenSea can succeed in Ethereum, Magic Eden can succeed in Solana, and of course I can find a way out on BNB Chain. So, we quickly launched a version that supports BNB Chain, and then deduced to more EVM systems.In the fourth quarter of last year, the only ecosystem that many GameFi looked at at that time was BNB Chain. With the active cooperation of some GameFi projects, our data on BNB Chain has stabilized. With a little confidence, we began to free up time to solve the Ethereum market, which led to the product strategy that we finally decided to go to multi-chain and aggregation.
is fourth, because each ecosystem has different supporters and its operating strategies are also different, so we once thought about whether to use different brands of strategies. In the end, we insisted on using Element brand to build a market for all chain integration. We hope that users and investors can trust our sincerity. Therefore, our homepage has login portals for different public chain markets.
3. Chain Catcher: From mid-last year to now, what major changes or new trends do you think have occurred in the NFT industry? For this reason, what strategic adjustments have Element made?
Wang Feng: In fact, at the beginning of last year, many people made a mistake in the judgment. Many of the first people who came in mainly looked at opportunities on pure art assets. I was half-believing and half-doubted about this matter at that time. I have been focusing on online games for ten years. Of course, I understand the value of art design to products, but I do not have the ability to identify pure art markets. I understand the mass market more. At that time, Opensea was not the only one who dominated the market. Many art platforms were more concerned, and Beeple was hyped up very much. At the same time, the public chains of Axie Games and Flow Games are in full swing, and not many people are interested in PFP avatar NFTs.
I believe that the biggest market in the future is Ethereum. Take the NFT market just as an example. If OpenSea has always maintained its dominance, there will always be opportunities for us to break. This bone is hard to chew and we can't get around. In order to compete with OpenSea, we must first cooperate with it. Therefore, in this process, we realized that the very wonderful competitive cooperation relationship in the crypto market actually comes from composability. We started thinking about making aggregate orders at the end of 2021. There was a detour in between, and the formed product planning began after March 2022. During this period, I was very inspired by LooksRare and GEM based on transaction mining. How to do the transaction depth in an NFT market, you have to find a way to do it yourself. No external force can help you.
I don’t think that as long as you look for good assets to do LaunchPad, you can create a good trading platform. If the transaction depth is not solved from the product design, any assets will eventually flow into the OpenSea market. Many trading platforms enter the market, but in fact they only do things like quasi-issuers. Even if you look for SugiShang Youya or Ronaldo, they will eventually be transferred into OpenSea's secondary market ocean. It’s not that it’s not good to publish, but in fact, the most profitable team last year was the NFT distribution team. But we do the NFT trading market, not asset issuance. If you really want to be an issuer, you don’t need to write a useful trading market so hard, just build an NFT brand, find IP projects, write robot scripts and play the community.
4. Chain Catcher: Nowadays, Element has become one of the representative Chinese projects and an important competitor to the NFT trading platform. How many points do you give Element's current results? Can you share some of the most impressive scenes during this process?
Wang Feng: I haven’t started a business once, and I’m not afraid of being afraid that I can’t do it well. So, I always dislike myself. I have higher requirements for myself than others. My friend in Silicon Valley told me that this is a mental illness. I don't know how to score. Don’t recommend what you don’t want others to do. So, if the product is not done well, I will have no face to speak.
Objectively speaking, the Element 2.0 product version is already an NFT trading platform with high availability. I personally don’t need OpenSea anymore, and so are many people around me. This state gradually began three months ago, so we started recruiting soldiers among community volunteers. In the past month, people have always said that they can't go back to OpenSea after using Element. This is the most gratifying sentence I heard.
purely from the product and technical perspective, the advantages of Element are mainly reflected in four dimensions: completeness of full-chain assets, deep aggregate orders, ease of use of tools, and real-time data tracking. Because it is rooted in decentralized infrastructure, NFT trading platforms and DeFi have many similarities, such as being driven by a basic protocol. But at the same time, the NFT market is becoming more and more similar to CEX, which is currently in the mainstream market. This is increasingly strong from the feedback from our community and product operation team. For this reason, a lot of our technical team's workload is also on Offchain. People who do not personally operate an NFT trading platform will think of these factors simply.
5. Chain Catcher: As a Chinese project, one of the biggest challenges is how to expand the overseas user market. What obstacles have you encountered in this regard? How international is the current team? What special strategies have been adopted to expand overseas markets?
Wang Feng: First of all, we look for people from overseas, and we have four people in the US market. Find people you trust and divide the market into multiple chains, multiple languages and regions to operate in a refined manner. In every region, you must find local people to cover the market, especially senior people who have experience and understanding of NFT. For the North American market, OpenSea's fourth employee came to help us expand the North American market. They are familiar with the ecological resource links, such as Coinbase Wallet, Metamask and other market collaboration.
is followed by creator relationship. Our creator community directors are creators themselves, and the creator circle is very important. At present, we have gradually started collaboration with Outland and NYCh selected artists.
In fact, many of our volunteers are from multilingual regions such as Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Canada, France and Australia. They are already NFT Traders and have a higher understanding of business than ordinary users. Our relationship with them will be steadily based on a cooperation system based on invitation and rebate. Elment took the lead in supporting the invitation and rebate mechanism.
6, Chain Catcher: From the data website, Element is still a certain distance from the transaction volume, user volume and other data of leading NFT markets such as OpenSea. What do you think is the main cause of the gap?
Wang Feng: In fact, the only gap is time. We used to be 1% of others, but our current goal is to achieve 10%. OpenSea's previous round was already a giant with a valuation of 13 billion US dollars. It was five years before we entered the market, so we need some time.
If emerging assets cannot arise, just everyone is competing for the existing PFP market together, investors should not invest in new trading markets? The answer is certainly not the case. Before the next emerging product category breaks out, let’s polish a useful Web3 product. In terms of R&D, we have invested more than 20 people from less than ten people at the earliest. If we get more investment, we must invest manpower in the agreement, tools and data services, so that everyone can be convinced and have to use it. In today's bear market, there is a product team that is not short of money. You can calm down and make good products and listen to the opinions of community users. What's wrong with it?
is not as good as we do things that are neither broken nor established. Because OpenSea is in an absolute dominant position in the Ethereum market, we made the decision to aggregate OpenSea and existing leading trading platforms in the Ethereum market at the beginning of the year. At present, the aggregation protocol released by Element 2.0 has been recognized by many users. In terms of trading experience, we also plan to catch up with OpenSea in terms of tool-level ease of use, and then seek new opportunities in the changes. I think domain name asset opportunities such as ENS, SpaceID, and .bit are actually opportunities for functional NFTs. In particular, SpaceID, which has been very active recently, is an ENS in the BNB Chain ecosystem. Because we provide customized based on the characteristics of domain name NFTs, such as enumeration classification and effective sorting based on the combination styles of numbers and letters. In addition, our products have advantages in batch processing tools in transactions, Element has gained about 75% of the secondary market. I have seen the results of more than 8,000 transactions on that day.
Starbucks combines consumption points and NFT, which is also a landmark event.I estimate that more offline institutions and Web2 will enter the market to issue Pass cards, and equity assets may have a chance to rise. Whether it is practical value or ability to break the circle, Pass card may not be a flash in the pan, not a MEME. The next wave of GameFi products will sooner or later, and we are focusing on finding new asset customization tools to cater to user experience. The market will always give hard-working people the opportunity to overtake.
Element ranked fourth when it was the highest
7. Chain Catcher: You once said that OpenSea is moving too slowly in products. Why do you think that starting from the perspective of tools can compete with OpenSea?
Wang Feng: From the perspective of product iteration speed, we are definitely faster than OpenSea. But latecomers cannot simply copy and cannot rely on one road to catch up. There are only two ways, one is product differentiation, such as building a market that focuses on aggregation and toolization, which requires some effort and market users will verify it. The second is to find solutions in operational innovation. We first chose the first path. The reason we look at it this way is also inspired by the DEX market from the Uniswap AMM model to the 1Inch aggregation trading model. We believe that products that adopt aggregation trading are the space left by the market and are more suitable for our technology and product design team. If the product problems are solved, there will be room for bold play in operations.
8. Chain Catcher: Nowadays, multi-chain expansion is the strategic direction of most projects. Element also supports multiple networks such as Polygon and BNB Chain. The official website shows that it will support Solana, but it has not yet been launched. After OpenSea was launched in May this year, it has become one of Solana's main NFT markets. What are the reasons?
Wang Feng: We have put a lot of energy into BNB Chain. Although there are few PFP products on BNB Chain today, we believe that the NFT market that relies solely on PFP will turn around, and BNB Chain's potential in the NFT market is still underestimated. We hope to maintain the position at the top of the BNB Chain market and be better off at the absolute first place. This may take a little time.
In addition, we still plan to enter the Solana market through aggregation transactions. In fact, there are always opportunities, such as Aptos, the new leading public chain of the Move series, and we are also in contact. Let's see it in a while.
9. Chain Catcher: Looking back now, have you made some mistakes in the entrepreneurship process this year?
Wang Feng: If can be reproduced, we should go straight to the Solana public chain market.
I bought 4 Crypto Punks in September last year, so I missed less than 10 Ethereum Bored Apes. The former fell and rose and rose, while the latter rose 15 times in the same period. If I had studied social emotions and DC groups more deeply at that time, I might have had more rational judgments.
But the biggest mistake we made last year was mistakenly thinking that we would succeed soon. What is more fatal than mistakes is to endure the pain of making mistakes. Specifically, it is the pain of choice. Without choice, there is no pain in the true sense. The biggest difficulty of an entrepreneurial team is not that others specify the direction for you or whether you can achieve it when you are ahead, but whether you have chosen a path you can go on. Especially you know that differentiation is key and do as few things as possible, but it is really difficult to find things that are truly valuable in the long term. The timing, ability and funds are matched. Sometimes we can only whistle to the sky and see luck. When we are studying, we often feel confident when doing multiple-choice questions and choose ABCD without thinking. When we encounter application questions, we bite the pen and feel that we can’t start. But in reality, doing multiple-choice questions is more difficult than doing applied questions.
10. Chain Catcher: The horizontal and vertical integration and mergers and acquisitions in the overseas NFT market are very obvious. Is this putting pressure on you? If OpenSea integrates GEM in the future and Uniswap also integrates Genie in the front-end, what impact do you think this will have on the NFT market?
Wang Feng: In fact, I am very happy to see these two mergers and acquisitions, which is a positive signal we have seen in the market.
's current aggregation trading platform is only for sale, and we also support multi-chain, and GEM only runs on Ethereum.
11. Chain Catcher: At present, several independent NFT trading aggregators have relatively low trading share in the entire market. Why is it still difficult for trading aggregators to win the favor of most users when they have the best liquidity? What do you think are the main factors and problems users pay attention to when purchasing NFTs?
Wang Feng: I think that aggregation trading will have an increasing share in the market.
Our users are traders. There is a word in the art market called collectors, but today's market is more typical traders, and they don't have to get up early without profit. However, different types of traders pay attention to different aspects, type preferences and investment time preferences all have an impact on the trader's decisions.
12. Chain Catcher: In terms of improving liquidity, X2Y2 and LooksRare adopt transaction mining. Although the signs of brushing volume are obvious, it has helped greatly improve transaction volume and influence. How do you view the sustainability and actual role of this model?
Wang Feng: LooksRare and X2Y2 entered the market in the form of trading rewards at the beginning of this year, quickly gaining the right to speak in the market. We rely on products, so the actions we take on the market are much clumsy than they do. At that time, we were preparing to move towards the model of providing aggregation protocols. And I was very unpopular with them at one time, but I noticed that both of them were constantly iterating their operational strategies, including the rotational changes in invitation rewards and transaction rewards. I admire their operational capabilities very much.
But in essence, I have never thought that trading platforms should regard trading mining as the core strategy for product operations. Although this is a very effective cold start solution, a user's interest in selecting multiple assets from the value of the value of the asset to choose from the inequality formed by any asset between the direct transaction cost and mining income. Therefore, their main appeal to this platform is to fuck the hair. It's a bit like sprinting or swimmers taking stimulants and not taking too much. Have you ever seen anyone taking stimulants for marathons?
We will not use transaction mining as part of our core product. However, we are not opposed to doing some time-limiting operational reward activities. But I don't think it's a clever move for a trading platform to write transaction mining into economic model . I don’t know if I have a long-term wish to continue with such a team. You worked hard to develop a trading platform. The Token assets were not distributed to real trading users, nor were they allocated to investors who supported you, but were occupied by more than a dozen mines, so that as a trading platform, you had to dig your own mine by yourself. This is drinking poison to quench your thirst.
solves the liquidity of a trading market for a long time, which should be the professional service capabilities of the product in trading, such as improving transaction efficiency, aggregation and price comparison systems, etc., and should also be asset cooperation capabilities, brand and reputation. The same goes, marathon athletes do not take stimulants.
13. Chain Catcher: In the medium and long term, what are your market goals for Element? What specific plans can you share with next?
Wang Feng: Element has two directions. One is to become a very mature NFT trading market, and the other is to move towards full communityization and start ELE DAO to run more businesses.
From the perspective of operational efficiency, these two items conflict. Therefore, we are still in the process of product-centered development, and we are rapidly iterating R&D, and pay attention to community feedback.
14. Chain Catcher: Element will also issue tokens and establish DAOs in the future. What role does ELE token play in improving platform liquidity and attracting new products? At present, many DAOs are actually pseudo-decentralized. What level of decentralization do you hope to achieve?
Wang Feng: If we officially release ELE tokens, we hope to provide incentive tokens to users and the market. But we will not use token financing. Our investors are all equity capital. Last year, we took US$11.5 million from Sequoia, SIG and DrangonFly. In the future, our token will be for users, shareholders and teams.
As for the complete ELE DAO plan, we still need some time to prepare for soliciting opinions from investors and the community, and we are opening a community forum.
15. Chain Catcher: Opensea was previously revealed to have planned to go public. It is currently very centralized in management, which has caused a lot of criticism that violates the spirit of encryption. How do you view this controversy? As a very centralized project, it has become the largest NFT market. So how important is decentralization to the long-term development of the project?
Wang Feng: The market position of a platform is given by users. Whether users like it or can tolerate it is all decided by them. We won't attract attention by criticizing OpenSea, and there is no reason to criticize OpenSea. I have never seen Binance publicly criticize Coinbase.
On the other hand, I am increasingly convinced that the NFT trading market will coexist with semi-centralized and decentralized market operations, which is largely similar to the current digital currency trading market ecosystem. After we go out to do NFT trading ourselves, we can better understand Binance's strength. When doing transactions, many things are connected.
16. Chain Catcher: Coinbase NFT market has been criticized for its low trading volume since it was launched, which is inconsistent with the market's expectations. Why do you think this product has been coldly accepted by the market? What are the problems with Coinbase’s NFT development strategy?
Wang Feng: The problems encountered by Coinbase in the NFT market are almost the same as those encountered by most digital currency exchanges entering the NFT market, that is, over-believing that traffic and capital advantages can become key competitive capabilities. In fact, the core competitiveness of any market is focus, differentiated choices and cost leadership. These are Michael Porter's three-element perspectives on competition. I didn't see Coinbase doing the right thing. In terms of products, the only difference between them and OpenSea may be the more elegant interface. In terms of technical solutions, they only integrate the V4 version of the 0x protocol released in March this year. I feel that the NFT team they formed did not do much.
In addition, centralized trading market and decentralized trading market are two generations of markets in the crypto world. It's a bit like Yahoo saw Google coming out, thinking that writing a search box on the content portal can reduce the dimensionality. Little do we know that the real dimensionality reduction strike is the technical path and operational concept, rather than the traffic advantages, capital and existing brands.
17. Chain Catcher: At present, speculation in the NFT field is very serious. Vitalik also believes that the current financialization of the crypto industry is too serious. What do you think is the main non-financialization scenario of NFT? How do you view the recent hot Soul Binded Tokens (SBTs)?
Wang Feng: I understand V God’s worries very much. Blockchain was born out of a currency hypothesis experiment, which subsequently triggered more revolutions in financial scenarios. But blockchain is more than just finance. This question has been repeatedly said. Once, someone fell into the anti-counterfeiting pit of blockchain. I think that starting from Bitcoin’s block production and accounting, blockchain is based on the decentralized mechanism. The most inherent advantage is that it can calculate and write, read, but it cannot be modified. SBT is such a product.
In fact, our current Web3 identity is confined to the Web2 historical scene it is committed to breaking, so it is often ridiculed as Web2.5/Web2.8. For example, most NFT artists rely on centralized platforms such as OpenSea and Twitter to promise the initial source of their identity. There was no original identity beacon in the crypto universe. All kinds of proof qualifications depend on the big brother's eyes of the big brother in the Web2 market. If we relive digital survival today, it would be ridiculous to find that global users are still living in the 1984 and animal farms of George Orwell metaphor, but the big brother has been replaced by the global social giant. Even the DAOs we token vote today often rely on Web2 infrastructure, such as having to adopt social media accounts to resist witch attacks.
I think what is more worthy of attention than SBT is the underlying DID, the so-called native encrypted identity flag. The latter is a decentralized passport, the former is a stamped visa after a passport book, and there are many visas on a passport.What I am more interested in is DID, the cornerstone of the application of the new digital society in the future.
18. Chain Catcher: Public data shows that the current NFT market trading volume is less than one-tenth of its peak period. Many people think that the NFT market has entered a bear market. Where do you think the next stimulus or incremental market in the NFT market may come from?
Wang Feng: Pass cards, functional NFTs and GameFi that combine with traditional economy may have a new round of opportunities.
After the bear market, it will be a bull market. If we can increase users by 10 times in a bear market, we will not worry about when the bull market will return.
Editor: Alex
