Can you please introduce yourself and your background? Why and how did you build Titan? How did you join Elastos?

I am Dong Xu, CEO of Titan.



I have created various startups and have been senior executive for several state-owned enterprises. I have also worked as an angel investor focused on the blockchain field. The Titan project was a blockchain project I invested in, and I joined Titan as full-time CEO later.

Trends show that, in the future, most data will be put on the cloud, most content will be videos, 5G will be widely adopted, etc. My core belief is actually very simple: with all these trends, the traffic of the internet will grow rapidly and the traditional CDN (content distribution network) will no longer be the best choice of cost and technology.

There was a time that P2P technology was considered “low cost with poor experience” and was a complement to CDN. However, with Titan’s breakthrough in core algorithms and the increase of peripheral devices in the 5G era, Titan repositioned P2P technology to “excellent experience with low cost”. This can potentially subvert the traditional CDN or let the traditional CDN be a complement to P2P.

I joined Elastos because of Rong Chen. Rong is a senior fellow at Tsinghua and I have much respect for him. Rong very much recognizes Titan’s philosophy and technology, and that is also why Titan Network earned the opportunity to have the angel investment from Elastos.

The first time I met with Rong was through the introduction of a Tsinghua alumnus at Zhongguancun, Beijing. I was showing Rong the movie Avatar in 4K with the use of Titan. There were nearly 400 TV boxes in Hangzhou to support 4K video playback in Beijing smoothly, which let Rong see the technical capabilities and commercial value of Titan.

The reason why Titan chose to cooperate with Elastos was quite simple. One is that Rong has a great reputation in the technical field and the other is that Elastos is really doing something concrete in the blockchain public space. We are looking for partners who know technology and work on concrete things.

How many people are there in your development team? Could you introduce some of them and their background?

At present, there are more than ten people in the Titan team, most of them from China’s first-line Internet companies such as Alibaba and Baidu.

The community is very interested in the work and progress of Titan. How will Titan’s development integrate/contribute to the Elastos infrastructure?

Titan does not utilize blockchain at the moment in order to achieve the ultrafast experience. Currently we can transmit 15-second 4K/8K short videos with over 90% by P2P sharing, deliver higher reliability through integration of traditional CDN and Titan peripheral devices to implement TCP/UDP mutual backups for different network conditions, and an ultra-low price (as we can utilize storage of less than 100M of storage with mass of devices).

The cooperation with Elastos starts with resource sharing, followed by data cooperation, and then technology integration:

Resource sharing means that we use the equipment resources of Elastos ecosystem. For example, Shijiu TV, an Elastos partner, currently has 200,000 devices active every day to provide traffic to Titan.

Data cooperation refers to the traffic of Titan’s device nodes that will be put on-chain and stored on Elastos.

Technology integration means Titan will have its own chain in the future and perform in-depth technology integration with Elastos. Titan could become a sidechain of Elastos.

Currently, we are in the stage of resource cooperation and planning for data cooperation.

Because Titan does not have a blockchain right now, there is no whitepaper for the time being.

Can you tell us about recent development? What is the road map for the coming quarter?

Titan’s current development focus is on increasing customer base and polishing our products.

Titan’s P2P network is currently capable of providing high-performance distributed CDN services, but the efficiency of the entire network needs to be further improved. We are now introducing AI-based network-wide data scheduling to cope with the dynamic changes of cold and hot data. For example, when a video gets popular, Titan needs to recognize the change and adjust the distribution of the video’s information fragments across the network to meet the increased demand.

Our goal this quarter is technically to make Titan a live system where data distribution can flow on-demand like blood stream. In terms of the number of customers, there is an increase of 200% from the previous quarter. These customers are business customers who use Titan’s distributed CDN. At this time they mainly use Titan for audio- and video-on-demand, and file downloads.

How does Titan communicate with the Elastos team on the development progress? Do you have any communication or even cooperation with other Elastos ecosystem projects?

Titan and Elastos’ China team have good interaction and communication. We are now currently cooperating with Shijiu and StorSwift which are enterprises in the Elastos ecosystem. Titan should have 5G bandwidth service capability in 2019 and complete the next round financing soon.

The cooperation with StorSwift is currently in the early stage. Because we are both projects within the Elastos ecology, and StorSwift focuses on storage while Titan focuses on traffic, the cooperation of the two is natural. At present, we are exploring the possibility to work together in the aspects of equipment resources and technology.

How does Titan raise the funds needed? Are you planning to use the CR proposal or IEO?

Titan is still mainly engaged in traditional equity financing. At least for 2019, it will not use the IEO to finance.

How can the community get the latest news from Titan? Do you have any channels for publishing information, such as websites, social media, etc?

Titan currently works low-profile and has not done any PR. The company’s basic information can be accessed at www.titannetwork.io.

Finally, what are your hobbies and what do you do when in your leisure time?

I usually spend time with my daughter, reading, and going to the gym.