Web3 CMO Stories

Breaking Blockchain Barriers: Wanchain's Quest for Interoperability – with Temujin Louie | S4 E28

• Joeri Billast & Temujin Louie • Season 4

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How can we break down the barriers between different blockchain systems?

Join us for an enlightening conversation with Temujin Louie, CEO of Wanchain, as he shares his evolution from a curious grad student discovering Bitcoin to leading the charge in blockchain interoperability.

Discover the ambitious mission of Wanchain as Temujin outlines the challenges and solutions in creating a unified network of blockchains. We explore the fractured landscape of cross-chain bridging, the complications of wrapped assets, and the critical need for industry-wide standards to elevate user experience and accelerate blockchain adoption.

In this episode, we dive into the nitty-gritty of blockchain interoperability, examining approaches like multi-sig, multi-party computation, zero-knowledge proofs, and oracles, and why establishing robust guidelines for these methods is essential.

Temujin also reveals Wanchain's strategies for advocating interoperability, including their collaborations with organizations like the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and participation in key industry events.

For those new to the blockchain world, Temujin offers practical advice and valuable resources to get started. Don’t miss this insightful discussion on the transformative potential of interoperability to revolutionize the blockchain industry.

This episode was recorded through a Podcastle call on June 25, 2024. Read the blog article and show notes here: https://webdrie.net/breaking-blockchain-barriers-wanchains-quest-for-interoperability-with-temujin-louie/

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Temujin:

I want this data to be able to move from one chain to the other in a secure way, and that's what we're building with interoperability.

Joeri:

Hello everyone and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories podcast. My name is Joeri Billast and I'm your podcast host, and today I'm happy to be joined by Temujin. Hello Temujin, how are you?

Temujin:

Hi Joeri, thanks very much for having me. You did an excellent job on the name pronunciation. I know it's not the easiest name in the world.

Joeri:

Actually, for me it's not so difficult because I'm in Belgium you will maybe hear like in my accent, so it's not so difficult, but really great to have you on the show. Temujin, I may be calling you Tem, maybe, because that's what I guess most people call you. Guys, if you don't know, Temujin, Tem Louie, he's the CEO at Wanchain and OneChain is the longest-running decentralized interoperability solution. Longest-running decentralized interoperability solution. Yes, I suggest you tell us a bit about your background, your story, and start where you want to start.

Temujin:

Sure, yeah, thanks for the opportunity, so I'll jump right into it. As you rightfully pointed out, my name is Temujin Louie and I'm the CEO of Wanchain, the longest running interoperability project in the space, and I've been in blockchain since about 2012. I first got interested in Bitcoin, like most of us, while I was a grad student, and then life came in. I was in and out of blockchain for a little bit and didn't really go full time as my career until basically 2017, when the ICO boom really started taking off, and that was my entry point, and since that time, I've been flushing full time. So I'm here I'm a true believer and I'm not going anywhere and this industry is just so incredible all the things that are being built and things that are happening in different corners. It's impossible to keep up with all of it, but it's all really great stuff.

Joeri:

Yeah, and so now you are at Wanchain. How did that happen that you are now the CEO?

Temujin:

Yeah, so after I had finished my studies, I actually ended up moving to China and I was there for about 10 years and so I was there when that ICO stuff was happening and a lot of that was taking place in Asia China in particular and so I joined a small project back in those days and I was really hooked. I think I'm not ever going to be able to do anything not blockchain related at this point, so I really need this whole industry to make it to reach mainstream adoption, or else I don't know what I'm going to do.

Joeri:

Yeah, actually we are on the good track. It never goes as fast as we think, but maybe some external event will happen and suddenly you will make a big jump in adoption, who knows? But yeah, you're now at Onechain, so maybe you can tell us a bit about the mission of fun chain and how it has evolved since the inception in 2017 sure, yeah, so one chain itself.

Temujin:

we're really an r&d focused blockchain interoperability project, and our mission, or our whatever you want to call it, is really to onboard the world, onboard a billion users, into not just one blockchain, but a unified network of blockchains, one that can operate as a singular meta network that's connected by industry wide standards. That's the long-term vision. We've been building at it, piece by piece, officially since 2017. The seed's probably planted in 2016., and so this is why we can go and say that we are the longest running one, actually our first main net bridge. This launched all the way in 2018. And since that time, we've bridged a lot of different networks I think today it's nearing 40, both EVMs and non-EVMs. And, yeah, we continue to connect as many as we can whilst at the same time, pushing for this universal, industry-wide standard.

Joeri:

So cross-chain messaging protocols are still quite complicated. What are the main challenges that we are currently facing in the cross-chain bridging space?

Temujin:

The state of interoperability today. We're obviously a lot further along than we were back in 2017 in the early days, but there's still a long ways to go. I like to describe the state today as one of fractured incompatibility. The biggest problem is just that we have all these different interoperability projects and they're all in competition and they're all building ad hoc solutions. These different solutions, even though we're all trying to solve blockchain interoperability, these different solutions themselves are not interoperable with one another. So we saw this a lot in the last cycle, especially when you had all these different, mostly EVM chains popping up and their DeFi ecosystems were taking off, and then suddenly you had three, four different bridges minting different versions of wrapped USDT, for example, different bridges minting different versions of wrapped usdt, for example, in one network, and it just refractures the entire ecosystem.

Temujin:

It makes it very difficult to onboard end users. You have people who maybe this is the first time that they're engaging with blockchain and they have to figure out okay, which usdt is this and where can I use it? For whatever reason, on chain, they're all called usdt. There's no differentiator. You have to be able to look up a contract address and okay, so now you have a contract address. How are you supposed to figure out which bridge minted this? It's just not very user-friendly. So this is really the biggest challenge in the interoperability space right now. We need the interoperability protocols themselves to prioritize interoperability.

Joeri:

Yeah, and, as you explain this, people now listening to the show. We have Web3, people that are already in there, people that are looking at Web3, they want to get their feet wet, as I always say. So things like that make it difficult, like you explained. So it's good that we are on the right way, but there's still, yeah, a way to go. So you advocate for industry-wide standards to enhance cross-chain functionality. What specific standards do you think are necessary to achieve this goal?

Temujin:

That's an excellent question Because, as I mentioned, right now you have these different interoperability protocols and people who are not 24-7 in interoperability maybe they don't think about these types of details, but when you approach the challenge of I want this blockchain's data to be usable on a different blockchain, basically there's a lot of different ways that you can approach it. I think, where we are as an industry, we've at least agreed upon the definition of what interoperability is, and we have mostly agreed on what the basic architecture of an interoperability solution should look like, meaning you have a messaging layer, you have a function call layer and then you have an application layer and you can conceptualize blockchain interoperability across these three different layers. Now it's within these layers that we need the different interoperability protocols to get on the same page. For example, messaging layer this is basically being the component that will allow one blockchain to trust the data and events that originated on a different blockchain and to be able to pass this data from one way to the other. You need in bridging parlance we call it a relayer, but it's basically a middle piece that is in charge of moving the data, or copying the data from one chain to the other.

Temujin:

Now, there's not an infinite number of ways to do this today. We can do it with multi-sig, you can do it with multi-party computation, zero-knowledge proofs, like clients oracles, but it's still a manageable set of different viable alternatives that we have. We don't necessarily want just one operator handling interoperability for the entire industry. That's not what anybody wants. We don't want to sacrifice decentralization and all the reasons that we are here, but at least because we have a set number of viable options, we understand all these options and we. But at least because we have a set number of viable options, we understand all of these options and we can at least set out guidelines and standards.

Temujin:

So if you're going to do it via zero knowledge proofs, here's the best practices. If you're going to do it with multi-party computation, here's the best practices. And that's just one component of the message layer. You might have something like the message definitions themselves, or verification interfaces or all these different kind of technical components that we need everyone to basically making different types of trade-offs based on God knows what motivations, and then you do end up with where we are today, where there's security hacks left and right, particularly in bridges, and because everyone's just doing it ad hoc, just whatever way they want. These are just a few examples of specific types of standards that we want to put into place, but there's a relatively large list of these across these messaging function, call and application layers, because interoperability in blockchain itself is relatively complicated.

Joeri:

Yeah, it's relatively complicated and I'm always wondering, and therefore it's good to come on podcasts for you to explain it and for me to learn about, because, yeah, if you would someone, you would be someone in the elevator or your neighbor and they would ask you. But you just come to explain this in two sentences, in easy words.

Temujin:

That'd be far complicated. But if you're talking to someone? It's important to understand what they want. They just want to know okay, I want this data to be able to move from one chain to the other in a secure way, and that's what we're building with interoperability Simple as that. It's similar to the internet or even some traditional financial systems, I think because we grew up in these environments. A lot of end users, people, if we want to sound more human, a lot of people.

Temujin:

There's an assumption that a lot of this work is already done when you're using the internet. You don't have to think about okay, how is one data packet being transferred from here to there? You don't have to worry about. Is this website handling it differently than this other website? You don't have to worry about. Is this website handling it differently than this other website?

Temujin:

If you're banking, you just assume that these different banks are doing cross-border transactions or even domestic transactions, according to some sort of compliant rule set, and then you can make your decision on which bank to use, for example, on more product level decisions. So I like, it's cheaper for the end user, there's various benefits, etc. Etc. You're not choosing a bank in this example based on the background infrastructure that they're using you start. You go from a starting point where this background infrastructure is safe, vetted and shared. And that's precisely what we're trying to get to in blockchain interoperability, because today, people are making decisions the same way. They're looking at this bridge oh, this one's faster or this one's cheaper and I'm making a decision that way, but unbeknownst to the, to this particular person they might have just picked a bridge who. The reason why they're faster or cheaper is because they've made some awful shortcuts in the background which have really put this user's assets at risk, and we see that playing out all the time yeah, it's, I'm not wondering.

Joeri:

I hear you talking about all of that and a lot of obstacles are still there. We want to work on the adoption. How much time do we need to implement standards? How much time do you estimate it will take to have widespread adoption?

Temujin:

So my personal bias, of course, is that we can't really have true mainstream adoption until this interoperability problem is solved. If this interoperability issue doesn't get solved, I'm still bullish optimistic on blockchain adoption, but it's going to more than likely just be present in specific use cases, isolated for specific tasks for which it is suited. Use cases isolated for specific tasks for which it is suited. But our vision is and I think probably the vision of most people listening to this podcast is more we it's view blockchain as, and web3 is more of a revolution, and we want the world, so to speak, to run on blockchain now. For that and for this type of interoperability to be solved, we are still a ways away, unfortunately, and it's also hard to imagine that it's going to happen in a vacuum and only at the public blockchain level. Companies or projects that focus on interoperability the bulk of our efforts are on the public level, but there's the government and enterprise level of things that are paying attention. They're seeing the mistakes as well as the successes that we're achieving in interoperability here, and they're learning from that to do their own experiments Now in a kind of backwards way.

Temujin:

I think this mainstream adoption of blockchain technology as a whole is going to need a catalyst, and that catalyst is going to come from this enterprise government level.

Temujin:

It might come from something that's even a little controversial like CBDCs, which would have a similar need for interoperability across systems and across countries, and it's arguably that interoperability here is even more complicated than the problems that we're facing in the public realm, and we talked a little bit about some of the challenges in getting this type of interoperability in place at the public level.

Temujin:

A lot of that is because there might be mistrust between different interoperability projects. There might be just lack of aligned incentives for different public blockchains to make the changes at the kind of protocol level to become interoperable, but for the most part, there are a few exceptions, of course, but for the most part, a lot of these blockchain ecosystems are looking for mainstream adoption, and when something like a blockchain network or a CBDC at the enterprise or government level is properly put into place, it itself will have instituted certain interoperability standards that it must abide by, and that may just turn out to be the catalyst that the public blockchains will then have a viable target to move towards as well to become interoperable not only with other public blockchains but also the private enterprise level as well. A nice road ahead.

Joeri:

But I will always like to ask to my podcast guest what are you excited about right now, on this moment, what is happening in your life, in in one chain's life? If you can't talk it like that, I can say it like that.

Temujin:

There's just so much exciting stuff happening in blockchain and I feel very lucky to be in this industry, and especially for being in this industry as long as I've been able to be. I might have verbalized it once or twice in my life, but it really is special to feel like, when you go to work every day, that you're looking at things that are on the cutting edge, and I do feel that most days, almost every day the only days I don't feel that is when there's a big hack or something like that that has occurred, and it's like the same mistake that has occurred 20 times before happening again. With that exception, I really feel blessed in that way to be in an ecosystem or an industry where there's so many big thinkers, there's so many really cool experiments happening and where, even though we sometimes disagree on the path to get to the end point, everyone has a shared vision in mind.

Joeri:

Yeah, that's a positive message. What I'm also interested in is you're now on the show here talking about your company and your vision. What else are you doing to get the word out about OneChain, about interoperability? Are you going to events or are you taking other actions on the marketing front?

Temujin:

Yeah, so we're definitely always going to events. We have our event calendar brings us to basically all the big events that you expect from in the blockchain space token 2049, consensus, things like that and we also whether you want to call it marketing or BD or something else we don't work in a vacuum. We don't try to build these things alone. We're here preaching that we need collaboration and universal standards. We're not just building this alone and then telling people they need to adopt what we've built. We think this is not the right way to go about it.

Temujin:

So we work very closely with several industry organizations. The first one that comes to mind is the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and a lot of the R&D and the publishing that we do around these types of universal standards we funnel through the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance because then it gets vetted by a lot of different partner projects and just really smart people that happen to work at other places besides wine chain and get their feedback on everything as well. Actually, on that note, just recently, the, the enterprise ethereum alliance, just opened the public draft of a new interoperability standard. This was authored by wine chain, so if anyone's interested in seeing the nuts and bolts of what I'm talking about here. You can easily google that and it's still fresh. We mentioned the industry changes a lot, so this document's a living document. It's going to continue to change based on feedback, but you'll get a really good sense of the type of standards that we are talking about. So, yeah, we do a lot of stuff with a lot of different projects to try to push the industry forward.

Joeri:

Yeah, collaboration community, all of that is key. Web3. By the way, yeah, I was also in Austin at Consensus Bison Blockchain Week. I will be at ECC because that's in Belgium this time, very close for you. Yeah, it is. I'm moving to Portugal in August, so it's just at the right moment Now. If you have any advice for people now listening and they want to learn about blockchain, they want to understand, they want to grasp all these meanings like what is interoperability and all of that. What would you advise them?

Temujin:

I have two bits of conflicting advice here. On the one hand, safety first. We're at the cutting edge and, as you can all see, sometimes there are missteps and it's real people that are getting hurt. So, safety first, always. Now, on the flip side of that, my advice is just start. If blockchain changes too fast, you're not going to be able to enter the space as an expert. No matter how much reading you do, you'll never be quote unquote fully prepared. Everything is just changing too quickly, and so the only, really the only real way to keep up is to be a part of it. So if you're interested in the space, you're an entrepreneur, you're a marketing professional you just have to start at some point.

Joeri:

So my suggestion would be to start right now exactly, and even if you are already in the space, it it's evolving so quickly. You need to keep up with everything. Yeah, just like in Web 2 or in real life, just be careful and just don't believe everything that you see and just be careful. But yeah, you should also make your feet wet. Try it out and understand this.

Temujin:

Yes, and once you're in the space, you'll also start to get a little more sense of what's reasonable and what's possible. Maybe this is how the two pieces of advice combine, because, as you mentioned, there's a lot of messages out there, there's a lot of big claims, and once you're really familiar with the state of affairs and blockchain, it's much easier to immediately know which claims are complete BS. 90% of the projects in the corner of the space relatively at the same level doing the same sorts of things, and then suddenly there's a new project that pops up and says we have solved all of the problems that all of these established projects have continued to struggle with, and that's a pretty big red flag Exactly.

Joeri:

It never comes like that out of the blue, so you have to study a bit, do your own research. That's something that that it's always a good advice and what I do. Time I invite people on my podcast and like that I learn and like also for my listeners. They learn. And if they want to learn even more about you and everything that you're doing with OneChain Tam, where would you like to send them?

Temujin:

Sure. The best place to go is our Twitter account. So for the project it's at OneChain underscore org and for myself it's at Tamajin Louie. Relatively simple, as long as you can see how my name is spelled on this, that's T-E-M-U-J-I-N-L-O-U-I-E, and that's probably the best two places. If you want to use the products that OneChain has already built, you can go to bridgeonechainorg, and then you can also join our. We have a Telegram community. There's always lots of people there who are more than happy to just talk about interoperability in general even if not just one chain specifically Amazing.

Joeri:

Like my listeners know, there is always a blog article there. I always show notes, so everything you mentioned them will be found in there. Thanks so much for being guests on my show. I really love to hear all your insights.

Temujin:

Thanks so much for having me. I had a blast on my show. I really love to hear all your insights. Thanks so much for having me. I had a blast talking to you and to the listeners. I hope you get interested. Look at blockchain, definitely. Look at interoperability. We're on the verge, so to speak, of changing the world, so it's very, very exciting.

Joeri:

Thanks, dan. That was a really motivating, exciting message at the end of this podcast. So, guys, if this message resonates with you and if you think other people around you should hear them's message, be sure to share the podcast episode with them. If you're not yet following our show yet, this is a really good moment to do this. If you haven't given me a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or somewhere else, that would really make me happy if you can give me a review, because then I would even reach more people and, of course, I would like to see you back next time. Take care, bye-bye.

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Joeri Billast

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