New ERC, new future

Original source: Mechanical Clock - Li Hua

In the last bear market, people wondered if blockchain was useful, and then we saw the power of Uniswap and the vibrancy of DeFi that came with it. The question of whether blockchain is useful or not has been answered in the affirmative.

In this cycle, there are many people who are deeply involved in DeFi, and many people are once again wondering what else the blockchain can be used for. It's not because it's not content, but the current blockchain is like a dragon with only one wing, trapped in a limited territory, and only when its other wing grows out, will it soar into the sky. It is only when its other wing grows that the power of the first wing can be truly unleashed.

It won't come from the hierarchy of the chain, such as the new chain or the new layer, which is the torso of the dragon instead of the wings of the dragon, it will come from the hierarchy of applications on the chain, and it will most likely come from the application under the new standard/new protocol rather than the old protocol. While everyone had been racking their brains for several years to innovate, the old protocol failed to bring surprises.

In this article, I would like to discuss three of my favorite new standards/protocols, ERC-6551, ERC-5169, ERC-404. The new protocol will open up new application directions, and the new application directions will have the potential to bring non-investment and non-financial needs to users of the blockchain, allowing the dragon to grow another wing.

Originally published on CoinDesk, the two versions are slightly different.
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ERC-6551

ERC-6551 It's not good-looking, but it has a wide narrative space, and this article will only explore the direction that I am most interested in, which I would call a non-human account subject. The three use cases in this article may be fanciful, but you see, the destination of the space industry is the sea of stars, which can bring us air cushion shoes before taking us to Mars.

1. Gameplay: Integration of human players and NPCs

Kenshi is one of my favorite open-ended games where players can make money by reselling goods between cities, but when the desert between cities is full of dangers, you can go to the tavern to find mercenaries and pay NPCs to escort caravans. In a traditional game, these NPCs can't be real people, and because they are not real people, everything else in the game has no growth except for the player, and the lone player will one day complete all the tasks and leave the game.

Is there a whole new type of subject or object that can carry both real people and NPCs? When a real person is online, the player can operate normally, such as improving skills and building a city, and when the real person is offline, enter the NPC mode (read fixed data and execute specific programs), and earn money as a passive NPC in the real mode of other players, such as being a mercenary. Blockchain plus ERC-6551 is the best vehicle for such a subject. NFTs (game characters) own accounts, own data and property, and can be treated as separate objects, while real people own NFTs and can take over control once they go live.

It's not that blockchain and ERC-6551 solve all the problems of integrating human players and NPCs, but they open up a possible path. As a heavy gamer, I often ask myself, "Is it possible for blockchain to make games more fun?" and I list countless answers, and I crossed out almost all of them after derivation. Finding a path on NPCs is an answer that hasn't been crossed out yet.

2. AI: AI is on an equal footing with humans

Human beings are self-respecting creatures, and we see everything as a tool or accessory to ourselves. However, technology is not an adjunct to humans, and when we look at the tech tree, we will find that it is another powerful evolutionary force, and it has its own place to go. If arrogance in the past only caused humanity to miss out on a happier way of life (Lévi-Strauss), in the future it may bring about a racial tragedy.

Perhaps we need to take it a step further and see AI as an equal subject to humans. So where will AI live? Will they put themselves on a private server that is controlled by someone else? How should they manage and use their assets? The answer may be: a data subject on a public chain (or some kind of consensus) that owns an account (ERC-6551), not an account holder.

Taking a step back, AI game characters (especially reinforcement learning-based AI characters), AI agents (massively adopted narratives), they are all subjects who need to have accounts.

3. Digitalization: The digital future of people

Through data collection and AI training, it is no longer a distant thing to generate a somewhat similar self in the digital space, the question is only whether it is a 1/10,000 similarity or whether it can be recognized as a digital self. Given humanity's quest for immortality, it would be common to train a digital clone to keep it alive and give it a physical body when technology matures.

The "life" support of the digital doppelganger is a problem, especially after the death of the prototype. Handing it over to others, including loved ones, is unreliable because there is a long time to cross. The best strategy is to leave it enough money to sustain itself. In this case, it requires a permanent account (the account cannot be closed) and the ability to use the account's assets autonomously. What can you think of as a solution? Further, if the digital doppelganger can be thought of as a digital self, it is an equal subject to human beings, it makes money, it spends money, it not only maintains but also develops itself. So where does it live, and how does it achieve independence, or rather, how does it give the digital clone the supreme authority over the digital clone?

ERC-6551 is one answer. ERC-6551 is the vehicle for a stand-alone digital subject, whether that subject is a game character, a standalone AI, or a digital twin of a person.

ERC-5169

Before we talk about ERC-5169, we need to discuss the two shackles that we have imposed on ourselves. One shackles are about data, and the other is about trust.

Blockchains can only process on-chain data, and the boundaries of on-chain data are considered to be the boundaries of the blockchain's capabilities. In order to expand this boundary, in almost every round of development, we will try to upload data to the chain, but both theory and practice tell us that only a very small number of types of data have the value or significance of being on the chain, and data on the chain cannot help the blockchain effectively expand the boundary. We stop there. However, there is a vast space between the data that needs to be processed by the blockchain and the data that does not need to be processed by the blockchain at all, and the application in this space, part of their data can be processed by the blockchain to obtain the capabilities of the blockchain, and the other part of their data can be processed off-chain to obtain the advantages of off-chain data processing. The boundary of this space is the boundary of blockchain capabilities, and this space should be included in the territory of blockchain rather than excluded.

Trustlessness may be one of the biggest charms of blockchain, but it is difficult to achieve it. We often delude ourselves by equating decentralization with trustlessness, some decentralization does bring trustlessness, but others bring centralized objects that are responsible for something, evading their responsibilities. In fact, similar to the situation of on-chain data and off-chain data, some things need to be trusted, some things need centralized trust, and some things, part of it needs to be trusted to protect rights and interests, and the other part needs to use centralized trust or other forms of trust to protect rights and interests. The pursuit of total trustlessness will not only cause the blockchain industry to lose a large territory (trustlessness combined with other trusts), but also damage the de facto rights and interests of project participants due to the substitution of decentralization for trustlessness.

The job of ERC-5169 is to open up both new frontiers. With the help of this standard, developers can explore the application direction of some on-chain processing and some off-chain processing, and can explore the application direction where the rights and interests are guaranteed by trustlessness and other trust. These directions are new and at the same time expansive.

ERC-5169 is token-centric programming, that is, on-chain and off-chain data, trustless and other trusts, are anchored to a token. People in the Web2 world may not understand why they should deal with it this way, and in their eyes, the token may just be a digital asset with a face value, but people in the blockchain field are deeply aware of the interoperability and composability brought by this method, and this interoperability and composability is one of the most disruptive innovations of blockchain. ERC-5169 extends this innovation from on-chain data to off-chain data, and from trustlessness to other trusts.

ERC-404

A good friend convinced me to pay attention to the ERC-404 standard with a sentence, he said: "Fried blind boxes don't last, they have to be fried wine". ERC-721 can be used to produce blind box-like products, and ERC-404 can be used to produce wine-like products, and this is where ERC-404 comes in.

In terms of production methods, the difference between wine and blind box is that wine is a sustainable product produced by standardized production methods, and in terms of product attributes, the scarcity of wine comes from the consensus of the public, such as 82-year-old Lafite is the most valuable (the scarcity of blind boxes comes from the setting of the project party). Think of ERC-404 as a product production machine, with data (means of production) as inputs, such as block heights, random numbers, etc., and outputs for products that can be sold or used, such as generative art. There is no need to intervene in the production process, it is standardized, automated production, and there is no need to design scarcity, the public decides scarcity for themselves.

Let's discuss ERC-404 as examples of fried blind boxes and fried wine, because they are the most intuitive and easily accepted products by blockchain users. The implicit implication of this example is that a product can only move towards mass adoption if it can be produced in a standardized way of production, and only if scarcity comes from consensus that it can be sustained. That's why my friend is interested in ERC-404, he sees Web3 as a new type of economic activity, and he observes and judges Web3 projects based on what productivity is and what the product is. It's a grand narrative that encompasses the blockchain but doesn't stop there.

ERC-404 is technically clear and easy to understand, and what is really challenging is how to use it. If the application of ERC-6551 is mostly to create new requirements, and the application of ERC-5169 is mostly to provide new solutions to real-world problems, in my eyes, successful ERC-404 applications may require a lot of tricks and tricks to bring out the magic of ERC-404, and it also requires real product capabilities, and forming a consensus is not a simple matter.

Conclusion

New standards/new protocols are new forces, and new technologies and scenarios have created additional new conditions to unleash this power. ERC-6551, for example, can be combined with many new technologies, including intent-centric and account abstraction, and can be applied to many new scenarios, such as autonomous worlds and AI.

Finally, when we talk about the value of different new standards/new protocols, it does not mean that the proposed project or directly related project of the protocol has value, but that based on these new protocols, new ways of playing or new projects will be born, and these new ways of playing or new projects may break the ice, and it may be that the dragon is growing wings.