After "graduating" from Ant, they flock to Web3

The two technological revolutions that are highly anticipated in the tech industry are AI and Web3. AI is expected to reshape productivity, while Web3 is anticipated to transform production relationships.

In the tech world of 2023, there is almost heavyweight news every day; it is the year of generative AI and also the year of deep bear market for Web3.

The total financing amount for Web3 in 2023 is only $3.6 billion, a decrease of 78% compared to nearly $16 billion in 2022. In contrast, the financing funds in the AI sector reached $25 billion in the first half of the year. One of the largest venture capital firms in the crypto space, Paradigm, is undergoing a paradigm shift, stating that it will no longer focus solely on cryptocurrency and the Web3 field, but will begin to expand its focus to AI.

People who once thought "Web3 is the new sexy" now feel that "Web3 is no longer sexy" and have turned to AI.

But it must also be acknowledged that this time the deep bear market of Web3 seems to be livelier than before. In the bear market, there are still people discussing compliance, ZKP( zero-knowledge proofs ), and Bitcoin ETFs. Some have also chosen to enter the market at this moment.

"When I was at Ant, I often compared AI and Web3 in discussions with my colleagues, as their development trajectories are very similar." Li Jieli ( Jerry Li ) In comparison, there have been three waves of artificial intelligence over the past sixty years, with each wave involving investments ranging from billions to tens of billions, alternating between peaks and valleys, until the emergence of OpenAI. "This new large-scale technological revolution requires going through one cycle after another to truly bring about leapfrog development."

Jerry Li once had several prominent titles: former chief architect of AntChain, former director of research and development at Apple China, and top scorer in the college entrance examination of Shanxi Province. Now, he has added another one — a newcomer to Web3.

Of course, strictly speaking, Jerry is not a newcomer to Web3. After graduating from Tsinghua University, Jerry worked in Silicon Valley for over 10 years, and then returned to Shanghai in 2015 to set up Apple's Asia-Pacific R&D center. In 2017, Jerry joined "Ant Blockchain," which had not yet upgraded to "Ant Chain," at the P10 level.

"The industry is still too early; compared to AI, it hasn't even reached the previous round of development. Currently, the total market value of the entire cryptocurrency market is less than half of that of Apple alone." Jerry compared to his former employer, the Web3 pie still seems too small.

Of course, compared to AI that is over fifty years old, Web3 seems to still be in its adolescence.

The concept of Web3 was first proposed in 2014, and its predecessors, the concepts of "cryptocurrency" and "blockchain", were only released for the first time in 2008 through Satoshi Nakamoto's "Bitcoin White Paper", which is only 15 years ago.

Rebellious and unstable, the growing pains that Web3 is experiencing have made "parents" shake their heads in disapproval. After the collapse of FTX, which had a market value of $32 billion last November, regulators around the world began to impose strict regulations on this "rebellious child."

At this juncture, at the end of 2022, Jerry left Ant Chain and officially went all in on Web3, launching the public chain project Artela. He stated that he would not consider doing anything else in the short term. When discussing the reason, Jerry quoted a famous saying from Ant: "Because we believe, we see."

The Artela team has chosen the public chain track, which is part of the Web3 infrastructure and is also referred to as the "highway" of Web3; without roads, nothing can be transported.

In the public chain arena, there are long-established Web3 genesis projects, such as Ethereum, which have already built their own moats through the "network effects" of their ecosystems, and there are also several all-star projects that come from privileged backgrounds.

Today, choosing a more crowded track, "WSJ." talks to Jerry about his views on "first-mover advantage."

"Although there is a lot of competition in the public chain market, it is still not perfect and there is still a lot of room for improvement." Recently, Jerry has been traveling around the world for meetings, which is his first step in adapting to his new identity. After a round of meetings, he gained a lot. "After communicating with many projects, our confidence has actually increased."

The biggest difference between Artela and other chains is not in the current "involution" of Scalability( performance scalability), but in Extensibility( functional scalability), and it is compatible with EVM( Ethereum Virtual Machine), allowing developers to transfer applications with one click.

This is to prepare for the future of Mass Adoption.

Mass Adoption is a term that is frequently mentioned in the context of Web3. In other contexts, it can also be described as the "iPhone moment of the industry" and the "last mile," but the core issue is very clear: how can we enable ordinary people to use Web3?

The "Ant Gang" is the creator of Mass Adoption in the internet era. In their context, Mass Adoption is closer to building another "Alipay" in Web3.

Of course, it is full of experience. Artela's CTO Qiu Honglin (, alias: CP), has supported the underlying architecture of Ant Group's digital collectibles platform Whale Explore. He stated that Whale Explore had already achieved over 100 million daily active users through its New Year activity of collecting the five blessings. "At that time, we already achieved stable on-chain transactions at the billion level, while Ethereum was only at several million. In a sense, it can be said that Ant Chain has truly reached Mass Adoption."

CP was once an OG of the Ant Chain team, having joined the initial form of Ant Chain in 2015 when it was still an interest incubation group.

"They say that if someone in Ant Group wants to talk about blockchain, by the time they ask the second person, my name will definitely come up." CP has slightly curly hair, and when he speaks, he has a hint of a Cantonese accent. He seems to be smiling, which always gives people the feeling of chatting casually, but upon closer listening, the content he expresses is very professional and detailed. Ant Chain has the highest number of patents in the world, and CP holds hundreds of blockchain patents by himself.

Regarding Extensibility, CP gives an example: "In games, besides player input on the front end, there is also the back end, such as map refreshes, time and weather, or when a big boss dies, the little monsters next door will also be eliminated together. Blockchain has no background tasks because all execution on the blockchain must be interacted with by the user."

In the future, running Fully On-Chain Games on Artela ( may become "the Earth continues to turn without you," meaning players design the rules, and the system runs automatically.

For blockchain, which currently finds it somewhat difficult to play board games, achieving smooth interactions places higher demands on the computing layer. "We aim to achieve a hundred times that of EVM." Thanks to the experience accumulated in AntChain, CP added, "In fact, current test data shows that we are already able to approach two orders of magnitude in terms of computing."

But they do not want to replace Ethereum; projects on the Ethereum chain can be transferred to Artela with one click. CP's "abstraction" summarizes Artela's features: "Simply put, if we compare EVM to the CPU of the blockchain, we are adding a GPU to the blockchain." In simpler terms, large games can be played on the blockchain in the future.

"The lending services like Jiebei and Huabei in the era of Internet finance are innovations from 0 to 1. We, as a group, have experienced the process of transforming a vague concept into a concrete commercial product and understand the complexity behind it." CP believes that taking the same path again in the era of public chains presents many challenges, but fortunately, there are references from past experiences.

Most of the team members at Artela come from Ant Group. "A tacit team of a dozen people is about the same as the progress of a team of twenty." Established just a few months ago, Artela secured $6 million in seed funding, led by Shima Capital, with participation from A&T Capital, Big Brain Holdings, SevenX Ventures, Dispersion Capital, Amino Capital, and others.

Artela's testnet launched in September, using a targeted invitation system for its current ecosystem partners. Defi and Fully On-chain Games may both be potential focal points for the future. CP mentioned that Artela does not intend to engage in typical public chain activities such as airdrops and conventional combinations, but rather wants to explore innovation with ecosystem applications. They will be focused on development in the coming months, aiming for a formal public test around December.

It can stably run hundreds of millions of daily active users. Undoubtedly, Ant Chain has already reached the ceiling in certain areas of Web3. However, their activity is somewhat subtly separated from Web3.

As the decentralized nature of Web3 brings about "open source" rather than "patent," compared to the mainstream direction of public chains in foreign countries, there is also a certain "incompatibility" with non-token blockchains, also known as consortium chains, which are more suitable for the domestic context. Ant Chain aims to pave a different path for Web3 in China, focusing on open consortium chains and industrial Web3.

As early as 2017, Ant believed in the future of blockchain. At that time, the industry had not yet matured, but Ant had already regarded blockchain as a core strategic focus. "At that time, Ant said it would focus its investments, but actually not many people understood it, and we were a very small team. After looking at a lot of foreign literature and reports, I felt that this technology still had great potential, especially in the context of globalization, being able to have financial applications, I think is particularly valuable."

Jerry, who serves as the Chief Architect, has been studying the white papers of Bitcoin and Ethereum. As his research deepens, he increasingly believes that blockchain is the next stage of "using technology to serve finance."

In the same year, "Big Brother" Jiang Guofei of Ant Blockchain joined Ant Financial as Vice President and President of the Financial Technology Business Line, overseeing Ant Blockchain. The strategic positioning of Ant Blockchain within the group continues to rise. Ant Blockchain is gaining momentum, with cross-border remittances, supply chain finance, electronic invoices, judicial storage of evidence... for a time, applications based on the industrial end are fully blooming.

In 2018, Alipay Hong Kong launched a blockchain-based cross-border remittance feature, allowing over 180,000 Filipino workers to send their wages home without having to wait several days or pay relatively high cross-border fees. Inclusive finance, Ant Group had already successfully solved cases early on.

CP also became a popular engineer for the company. Jack Ma mentioned CP during the second World Intelligent Conference, along with his widely circulated matchmaking anecdotes.

"We at Ant Financial have an engineer who wrote 'Engineer' on his dating profile, indicating he was a coder. As a result, no one clicked on his profile, and the girls weren't interested in him. Later, he changed his profile to 'Blockchain Engineer' and received over two hundred love letters."

In 2020, Ant Blockchain announced its brand upgrade to Ant Chain, and the company's executives stated that this decision "is no less than the decision to establish Alipay."

However, three years have passed, and Ant Chain, which is deeply engaged in the Web3 industry, has not welcomed a truly "Alipay" level application.

Taking cross-border remittances as an example, an Ant Group official told the WSJ that there are no technical barriers to cross-border remittances, but the policy and regulatory support for this technology varies by country, making such projects closer to customization. "At that time, our collaboration with Standard Chartered Bank was because they were already our long-term partners."

Even during the Spring Festival, the Whale Explorer, with over 100 million daily active users, faces issues such as stagnant sales of collectibles and difficulty in breaking into new circles. Previously, most of the digital collectibles launched by Whale Explorer were cultural and artistic pieces, making it hard for young people to find them trendy. "However, my dad really likes it; this is the only product I've ever made that he continues to use." The work content of CP is of great interest to family members, and Whale Explorer might be the easiest product for them to understand.

"Although Ant Group is very advanced in financial technology, the domestic regulatory framework is still mainly alliance chains. This actually removes the essence of blockchain, which is to represent value with digital assets. I believe that in the future, we still need to pursue the path of public chains, but currently, there is no soil for public chains in the country." Jerry is more optimistic about the future of public chains.

The consortium chain that separates the concept of digital assets has no basis for rights and incentives. "The consortium chain only takes on the data layer aspects; to truly reconstruct production relations, I think we are still far from it."