We ask the buidlers in the blockchain and cryptocurrency sector for their thoughts on the industry… and throw in a few random zingers to keep them on their toes!
This week, our 6 Questions go to Chen Li, the co-founder and CEO of Youbi Capital, a venture capital firm investing in blockchain technologies and disruptive decentralized applications.
Chen Li is the co-founder and CEO of Youbi Capital. He has a Ph.D. in chemistry and worked as a scientist for Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, where he won two awards for his contributions to developing groundbreaking antibody drugs. In 2015, he was introduced to Bitcoin mining by his roommate in college, then jointly founded Youbi Capital in 2017. Chen built the foundation of Youbi’s thesis in blockchain infrastructure and led investments in Algorand, Avalanche, Polkadot, Flow, Kadena, Chainlink, Debank and others. He was also an advisor to JP Morgan’s blockchain team.
1 — What is the main hurdle to mass adoption of blockchain technology?
The main hurdle to mass adoption of blockchain technology now is still its infrastructure, specifically, scalability and security of layer 1s. We all saw that the watershed moment for Axie Infinity was not the play-to-earn movement that started in early 2020 but the migration of the game from Ethereum to Ronin in mid 2021, which led to an explosion of players and revenue growth right away.
But Axie was just one application, and can therefore be easily accommodated on a dedicated chain, while for the DeFi protocols — which are highly composable and already interconnected — we still don’t have a layer 1 for the entire set of DeFi protocols to migrate over without starting to jam its traffic. Solana might be the closest to achieving this goal, but it is not horizontally scalable for mass adoption.
There is still a lot to do to lay a solid foundation for the blockchain application.
2 — What will happen to Bitcoin and Ethereum over the next 10 years?
Bitcoin has successfully extended the consensus on its asset as a…
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