NEO London was excited to speak with Toya Zhang who is the CMO of QLC Chain, a decentralised Network-as-a-Service infrastructure using blockchain. Let’s get down to it!

Tell us a bit about yourself and how you first got involved with blockchain…

Toya: I have always been in the communication field. At the beginning of my career, I was working in the traditional finance industry, for clients as PE, VC, asset management. I was introduced to the crypto world in 2015 when I joined OKex, amazed by the potential of Blockchain. Back at that time, the blockchain communication was mostly about which industry can Blockchain be theoretically applied at. Meanwhile, I also did global communication for Huawei carrier business, and so I got into the telecom industry thereafter.

Mobile networks are a core focus of QLC Chain. Can you tell us a little bit about the current state of telecom operations and what QLC Chain hopes to achieve for the industry?

Toya: All these years, carriers strive to improve their technology, introducing edge computing, SDN, NFV, AI, better antennas and better base stations. The innovative solutions are all serving to reduce cost and expand coverage. We can’t deny that we have faster network, wider bandwidth, and better coverage, however, if you look at the bottom technology and business model, the improvement is not as substantial. Carriers remain to be the infrastructure service provider, they have been left collecting relatively small service fees while Google and Amazon have built lucrative online empires. Another issue is, the pan IoT era is an opportunity and challenge for them.

From a network users’ perspective, first, centralised network service is the security weakness.

Secondly, the online information are not securely encrypted. Whatsapp is, telegram is, but not the majority others. Thirdly, and without doubt, the internet businesses are exploiting personal online data, without the name listed. Finally, when people connect to a public WiFi, people just simply put yourself at danger. Simply google “public wifi compromised” and we will be astonished.

Let’s break down QLC Chain in simple concepts. What are the different components, and how is blockchain being utilised?

Toya: QLC Chain is building a public chain for network-as-a-service. We are building the infrastructure for network services, aiming to build the complementary network environment in parallel with the existing public network.

Toya Zhang, CMO QLC Chain

There are specific functions that QLC Chain will feature, to enable decentralised network operations, including

- Name translation

- Content storage

- Firewall

- Virtual routing

- Billing

At this front, Blockchain is working as a public ledger where records nodes providing different kinds of virtual network service which are registered on the blockchain and be rewarded by people using the service. Users will enjoy secure, on-demand, and carrier independent network services. On the other hand, everyone who has the extra bandwidth, network resources, storage space can contribute to the public chain and work as a micro operator.

Can you tell us about WinQ?

Toya: WinQ is one example of the decentralised private network services. WinQ created a marketplace for network resources, including VPN. VPN are registered as telecom asset on Blockchain, and people who operates the VPN will earn QLC from providing the services.

It is also the first step of constructing the QLC Chain. Each VPN asset is set up in the cloud to increase the network node, then connected to different VPN nodes with a virtual router and expanded with storage, content forwarding, and firewall function. Eventually, the VPN nodes will create a decentralised NaaS built on the QLC chain. This infrastructure will protect user’s content transfer, storage, online behaviour tracking, IP boundary, DDoS detection, visiting speed and more.

What are some of the other potential applications that we might expect on the open network?

Toya: First, from the user’s perspective, people’s ID online would not be according to carriers’ registration, but be public/private key pairs integrated in the Linux system — People will experience an open network access. Secondly, as we have the storage function, in combined with decentralised routing, meaning the content provide can register the content with corresponding data on blockchain as a telecom asset. Content consumption (video, music, pic) without data if sponsored by content provider would be possible. In this sense, the network is enabled with content awareness and get smarter.

Thirdly, for enterprises intranet, the secure network routing will allow private network access with VPN enabled secure network.

Best place in the world you’ve ever travelled to and why you liked it so much!

Toya: The best place I’ve been to would be London. My first trip to London was in 2017 at a Telecom technology fair, it was a full week business trip and I got the chance to explore the city. Similar to Hong Kong, London is a financial center just with an aged appearance. Different from Hong Kong, it also has the emerging technology and hippies culture where people are passionate about making a change from the established financial industry and the fintech/startup atmosphere is everywhere.

What role do the QLC tokens have?

Toya: QLC is a utility token, people can use it purchase access network resources and of course registering a network asset requires QLC as well.

From the “nodes” point of view, the QLC token reward the nodes when the algorithm complies with Shannon Consensus.

For all the technical folks out there! — The token reward formula in black and white

You recently rebranded from QLink to QLC Chain as well as announced your own public blockchain initiative. What was the motivation for this and can we expect this new public chain to be interoperable with the NEO blockchain?

Toya: WinQ was first introduced as the name of Qlink MVP in January this year. After a while people are confused about our project itself and the working product which is a dApp.

In the first whitepaper, we indicated that we are using NEO for network asset registration and a separate public chain for transactions and smart contract, the two chains will communication via dual-chain protocol.

Starting from late April, our public chain has started developing, to differentiate us from the dApp, and to present the whole picture of the project, we decided to conduct the rebranding.

What is the one piece of advice you would give someone starting out in the blockchain space now?

Toya: Now? There will always be opportunities, regardless of the dot.com bubble comparison. One thing to keep in mind is to keep abreast with the industry overall development. This is a technology that has the potential to overhaul how business operates, be bold, and forget what you knew before.

A very unique component of QLC Chain is combining Delegated Proof of Stake with ‘Shannon Consensus’ as a dual consensus model. How do these function together and why did you choose to take this approach?

Toya: QLC Chain uses dual consensus protocols for global agreement, including DPoS for transaction and Shannon Consensus for Storage Node (DPoS + Data Storage Node Shannon Consensus).

DPoS is designed for transactions among General Accounts without incentive to representative node. However, the introduction of Smart Contract brings in data storage nodes to contribute storage, bandwidth, search capability and more that DPoS cannot efficiently satisfy the need of communication anymore. Therefore, we design a new consensus, Shannon Consensus, to server the need of data storage in a economical and efficient way.

QLC Chain (Formally QLink) presenting at NEO Amsterdam

Shannon Consensus is the next generation computational model. We introduce a verifiable entropy in the hash solution. Each node has an approximate probability to calculate a random solution.The core of the Shannon consensus is to make the probability of an Asic chip and a CPU mining reward similar to each other. This will restore the calculation power to all users, instead of focusing on a handful of miners.

Favourite quote of all time! Go!

Toya: If You’re Not Embarrassed By The First Version Of Your Product, You’ve Launched Too Late

Finally, what has been the biggest highlight for you in the past year?

Toya: Last year, we’ve completed the public token sale. Launched the WinQ and constructed the alpha phase of the public chain structure. And this is just the beginning. I look forward to the transformation of the whole industry and the new business models being built.