An Interview with Trinity Founder Mr. David Li

Trinity is a lightning network (LN) version on NEO Platform, hope to achieve real time payments, low transaction fees, privacy protection on NEO mainnet assets using state channels technology.

And bringing this great technology to us is, Mr. David Li is the founder of Trinity.

David Li contacted me on 11th Jan 2018 and apologized for plagiarizing a pictogram from the Raiden Network website in their quick tech intro to private donors, which I published as an article earlier on my blog (https://medium.com/@DeepLearningBitcoin/trinity-neo-ico-copied-raiden-network-b0147975eeda ).

After few back and forth conversations with David Li, I decided to conduct an interview with him, learn more about the Trinity Technology and hear out his side of the story.

Below is the Q&A session with Mr. David Li, conducted on 17th Jan 2018.

ZebraCrossing: Do you think current crypto market boom is a bubble? Similar to the dot.com bubble?

David Li: I do agree this is a bubble similar to dot.com one in that any company tries to attach the name “blockchain” to its good old biz gets a boom no matter in traditional financial market or crypto market. this is becoz our generation are totally ignorant to what crypto really is and our core industry is yet to deliver a good answer. This bubble will end very differently though.

ZebraCrossing: Could you comment on the future development of blockchain in general, and what problems will the blockchain community will be facing over the upcoming years?

David Li: Despite the possible crazy ride this yr, we can see blockchain industry is iterating rapidly. I think scaling towards better performance is an issue that takes a few yrs of engineering to tackle, but not the longterm issue. The core is about educating a whole generation about proper cryptoeconomy, about a whole new mindset like incentivizing and punishing thru tokens, and tokenizing individual values. With that achieved, we will be in a brave new world with all this reg-anonymity-speculation drama solving itself.

ZebraCrossing: What are the possible solutions for the scaling issues you have mentioned earlier?

David Li: I consider state channel and sharding the best two solutions for offchain and onchain scaling respectively. Decentralizing decentralized consensus nodes is over-engineering. And simply increasing block size on a PoW chain is……laughable.

ZebraCrossing: I came across a project called Zilliqa and after researching about it, I learned they are using a process called sharding to achieve very high throughput, they do it on their main chain. With such high throughput already in their mainchain, do you think Zilliqa will ever need a side chain like Trinity? Can you comment on that?

David Li: I met Xinshu in his office and did a video interview with him. I also spoke to a lot of devs from different project teams. Zilliqa is considered, by far, the best sharding-based high performance pub chain, explained the tech with greatest clarity to say the least (that already implies actually solving it). They are being very practical on their future roadmap, which could put them at 6 digits of tps, even millions in the future. But you should know offchain scaling is about putting another millions of tps on top of that. We only focus on Neo at the moment, but we will be in close contact with Zilliqa side.

ZebraCrossing: What set Trinity differentiates it from Raiden and Lightning Networks?

David Li: LN is a totally different story since bitcoin is….let’s be honest, a very simple blockchain. But they have their own problems to solve with this entire PoW system. Raiden and Trinity are 2 projects share similar designing concepts but implemented completely different as the underlying chains are so different. To give you an example Neo blockchain requires 500 GAS which is A LOT of money (about 20k usd) to deploy a smart contract , while raiden can deploy a contract for every channel generated on Ethereum.

ZebraCrossing: Do you think Raiden Network and/or Lightning Networks is a strong competitor to Trinity?

David Li: So following the last answer, no, they are not. Let’s presume there is such a competition, you win with many factors combined. I’d rather save this for a later time and let the community and market decide. But our key words are, devotion, user experience, and sustainbale business model.

ZebraCrossing: Is there other development or research now that is more advanced than state channel technology?

David Li: will be very hard to define “more advanced”. can we say zkp is more advanced than ring-sig? the latter is just as complicated and can be improved a great deal. Sharding, State Channels and cross-chain (polkadot, aelf, ontology) models are all without running mainnet to compare. Maybe the future ultimate is about combining this tech together, maybe not. But at the moment the most pressing thing is to cut the BS and deliver the promise.

ZebraCrossing: What made you create the Trinity Project? Why do you think Trinity is needed where Neo itself could handle 1000 TX/s

David Li: Have you ever paid mining pools “acceleration fees” to accelerate your bitcoin tx confirmation? that service still exists and many chinese mining pools do that. If this isn’t sick enough (not to blame the miners), ppl should realize the better we are prepared to truly build a crypto-economy, less ppl get hurt when bubble burst. And to achieve the blockchain throughput capacity that is needed to support this cryptoeconomy, performance enhancement is not just urgent, it’s life-saving. Neo cannot handle 1000 tps atm, 200 is more realistic, we proved this during our donation. But even if Neo reaches 1,000,000 tps, trinity is still needed. Obviously ppl have to come to a basic consensus: not all tx should be or can be on mainnet.

ZebraCrossing: What is the application of Trinity? Could you give some real life examples where Trinity will be used in daily life?

David Li: Phase 1 will be supporting instant & private simple token tx between individuals, then high frequency trading. The next phase will be supporting DApp operations and IoT payments. Phase 3……confidential at the moment, but I think devs can naturally deduct. Daily life…meaning, excluding crypto speculation as a job? I think Chinese ppl understand this the deepest. Trinity will very soon reach wechatpay/alipay level tps and yield a similar user experience if you find accepting merchants. Credit cards are disqualified in this comparison.

ZebraCrossing: Would you like to further explain about the plagiarism of the pictogram from Raiden homepage?

David Li: I think all needs to be explained are in that blog post. Besides, I spoke to Phillip from Raiden last Sat on an event in Shanghai. He surprisingly told me he didn't care as this is an “open-source world”. For the record we are sorry as open-source means we can copy their codes (would be meaningless neo/eth too different) but not the diagram even it was only intended as quick tech intro to private donors. But we laughed. Community seeing a lot of new blood who ate too much “proprietary” and “patented” poison. If we could copy raiden codes, we won't hesitate a second. we’d give them a big thumbs-up and accelerate the whole development. But from here we take our separate paths, I know as a fact we will do much better :-).

I would like to thank Mr. David Li for spending time with us for this interview and wish great success to the Trinity Team.

ZebraCrossing

18th Jan 2018