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CoinFi attended Token2049 and had the chance to interview the founder of Wanchain, Jack Lu. Check out the video below if you’re interested to hear more about what Wanchain are excited about in 2018!

We’re here with Jack Lu, the founder of WanChain at Token 2049.

Can you talk us a little bit about how you actually come up with the name WanChain?

In 2016 I started a company in China, it’s called Wanglu. The first 3 characters are WAN and it stands for Wide Area Network. In Chinese, WAN stands for ten thousand, so for 1 coin, there are 10.000 coins. I’m sure everybody liked it! We looked around and we really loved that name. Wanglu was used to create the ecosystem, to glue all these WAN applications together.

Can you talk a little bit about WanChain and what it is?

As I mentioned, WAN stands for Wide Area Network, we’re trying to link all these different siloed blockains into one connected internet of blockchains. Even though that bitcoin is more like a global network, but when you look at it, it’s really like a siloed closed network. It’s really like the internet in the old days. As all we know, to really release the power, you need to look at all of them connected. WanChain tried to use a very straightforward mechanism to integrate all these different blockchains and the assets can be moved around from one chain to another, and in the same time, we will use privacy and also some smart contracts. You can create private smart contracts with a combination of all the assets from different chains, so really you can create very complicated financial applications in this new digital economy. This would become an infrastructure to allow third parties to develop applications on top of that and create a totally new economy, token economy.

You talk about the interconnectability of chains, I’m aware you have an alliance with Aion and ICON. Are you developing some type of interoperability protocols similar to say TCP IP for the internet?

I think that’s the goal, we were trying to create a TCP IP for the blockchain wall, but that would take a while. Several companies Aion, ICON, and WanChain, started this alliance, the goal for us is to get together because we are trying to solve the very same problem. It’s very challenging, but we are trying to work together. Once we create our own little network, we can interconnect or connect our networks first, and then we can start to work on the standards for the cross-chain technology.

Do you feel like the goal would be to come up with the protocol that’s agreed across all three chains and then how to envision that getting widespread adoption by everyone because there need to be some standards for the interoperability? Is that correct?

Yes, we are working with the Chinese government and other government entities and other associations. At the moment we need to see proposals, right now is a little bit too early to talk about the standards, but we will make our little network work first, and then we need to integrate all these different networks.

You also mention that a unique aspect of WanChain is this concept of a privacy smart contract. Can you talk a little bit about that? And then I believe you can also do a privacy token on WanChain so if you could explain how that works to our audience that would be great.

Actually the technology itself it’s well developed. What we did is we took a neuro style brain signatures on one time accounts in combination with Etherum smart contracts. With the combinations, users or anybody can create a private smart contract on top of WanChain. You can also use some standards, you can use our templates to create privacy tokens. So with these smart contracts, users will have the option to send the transaction in private. It’s more like a warehouse, I like to use this as an example. If I want to send a private transaction or tokens to you, at first I would deposit my tokens into a big warehouse, because a lot of people deposit tokens into a warehouse and people won’t tell which one is from which. And then we will do transactions in the warehouse, and when you will need it, you will withdraw. Basically, we will wide the transactions from where to where.

When do you anticipate that the first privacy token will launch on WanChain and what would that look like? What kind of privacy token would that be in your vision?

By default, I think all the cross-chain tokens will be in privacy tokens so we will create these templates. Actually, the templates are already there and from the 1.0 release, anybody can use the template now to create privacy tokens. I think different parties will come up with different use cases, there are many use cases. For example, for a company to send out the salaries or bonuses a lot of times you use Ether, you don’t want your colleagues to know how much you will be sending out. I think it’s an awkward situation, I think this would be the perfect use case for that. The second one would be privacy token ICO. Some of the investors might prefer private transactions.

Do you envision possibly in the future on WanChain there could be someone launching an ICO and the amount of money raised, the size of each investment and who invested it’s completely abstracted away?

I think it’s up to the users and up to the projects and what they want to do. In some cases, some investors might want privacy, but I think you still want your project or ICO as transparent as possible so your investors could see what’s going on. In the smart contracts, you can define what can be private and what not.

One thing I found very interesting about WanChain is going forward there’s gonna be a lot of things like security cryptocurrencies loads and other applications possible on the WanChain blockchain. With financial applications like that and obviously were in an environment where we see a lot more regulatory actions. How do you see that impacting WanChain’s roadmap going forward?

I think we are entering into a regulatory and more restricted stage in 2018, but our roadmap is very clear. WanChain is trying to build the infrastructure, we are trying to build the new wall-street, sometimes they call it Alibaba. We are only providing the “electricity”, the groundwork, and we let third-parties to do the applications on top of that. If they have a license, they have done all the compliance work, and then they can build all these 10 stories high banks or insurance companies were can they offer some kind of services, security or crypto exchange, that kind of services. For WanChain, we don’t want to get into that kind of applications level of business, so we are trying to avoid any regulatory risks there.

We are in the third quarter of 2018, what are you the most excited about this year 2018 for WanChain and also for cryptocurrencies space in general?

I’m very excited that WanChain is already live. In January 2018, the majority of work in WanChain was already done, in the second half of the year, we want to get the cross-chain worked out. Hopefully, we will get the breakthrough in the next couple of months and by mid-year or later this year we’ll get the cross-chain released into production. Hopefully, by the end of the year, we’ll get the cross-chain with Ethereum and Bitcoin the major crypto economies and we are gonna bring them together. Then we will allow third parties to create many applications like a decentralized exchange or multi-asset crowdfunding and many other applications. I think that’s very exciting for our project this year. For the blockchain community, a lot of times the price goes up and down but we’re focusing on long-term, we are not very worried about this. I’ve been true this kind of thing in 2013, usually the long-term focus projects will be successful in the long run. You don’t want to look at the price fluctuation and do a short-term trading.

Thank you so much, Jack! We really appreciate your time to share your thoughts on WanChain for this year.