Beijing, China, Aug. 03, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Two extremes as ice and fire
Besides the sweltering heat of this summer, there is another “hot” topic in our minds: blockchain. This topic keeps many people awake in the middle of the night, as they get carried away by their enthusiasm while talking about their dreams of technology and wealth. Among this group of people, Barton Chao - the founder of InterValue - is an exception. The first impression he makes is that of a calm, gentle, refined and cultivated man who doesn’t talk much except when it comes to technology.
Those who walk into Barton Chao’s slightly cramped office in Changsha can see a small plaque hanging in the most conspicuous place with the words “Mutual trust is everything”. This is the motto of the company.
A large sofa occupies most of the space and both the warm bedding that lies on it and AC’s low-temperature contrast with Changsha’s sweltering heat.
This is a bit similar to the world’s attitude towards the “ice” and “fire” of blockchain. It also illustrates the local “mattress culture” that pushes hard working employees to sometimes sleep at the office.
Countless nights, Barton Chao has also been unable to fall asleep because of his obsession for blockchain, but he does not belong to the group of tycoons who are ruling this space. He is the kind of man who knows every single line of code and every single node like the back of his hands.
Skimming through Barton Chao’s resume might seem a bit monotonous. From 2002 to 2013, he attended China’s National University of Defence Technology, starting as an undergraduate and ending up with a PhD in computer science and technology. After graduating, he remained there as a lecturer but quickly got bored of this environment that could not contain his entrepreneurial spirit.
In 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin ushered in a massive wave among the tech world. Barton Chao immediately joined the crowds of blockchain enthusiasts with his particular sensitivity. “My first impression was that Bitcoin was more likely to succeed than any traditional centralized digital currency projects that had been carried out so far.” Barton Chao looks at things in a different way. He firmly believes that there will be no crisis of trust between people in a great and innovative world. His appeal for technology has gotten out of control and he has conducted in-depth research on network security, penetration, attack and defense, and he has become a senior expert in P2P networks, cryptography, network security, and blockchain.
Lead a group of PhDs to accelerate the switch to blockchain 4.0 era
In 2015, Barton Chao started to work on the establishment of a company. The process of talent selection and recruitment required an intensive brainstorming and some tough decisions, but many of his fellow students and doctors responded positively to his approaches. “Don’t let people stagnate, do something meaningful with their time”.
Barton Chao has brought together all kinds of computer industry elites in the company. The company is led by industry specialists and counts nearly 100 employees, among which 50 developers (of whom 25 doctors) as well as experienced project consultants and strategic partners.
One of Barton Chao’s former classmates ironically laughs at the situation “My company went public recently and among the 300 employees, we haven’t been able to hire a single PhDs. Yet, Barton has gathered so many of them here, they must have been victims of his charm”
In fact, Barton Chao does not need any help but only his own talent to turn lead into gold. And despite being such a thoughtful, well-organized and motivated leader, he remains very low-key. He is an adept of the “t-shirt & slippers” outfit and is humble and polite to everyone.
“From the beginning, our concept of cooperation is a long-term commitment and it aims to establish a venture incubator that relies on the alumni system for the future.” This way of sharing resources is similar to what public chains aim to achieve, and this is probably the reason why Barton Chao can gather so many people.
Barton Chao set up the head office in Changsha for the simple reason that most of the team's technical talents are living there, but the company's development ambitions and technical assets are global. They have therefore established independent accounting branches in Beijing, Chengdu, and Shenzhen so that talents from everywhere can be better integrated and the business can develop more smoothly. “No matter which branch you go to, everyone is spontaneously working overtime. This kind of atmosphere is really emulating. This is the company where I have seen the most camp beds.”
Barton Chao and his team previously worked on several blockchain related projects and have a deep understanding of the technical principles, underlying technology, middle layer protocols, application scenarios and development trends of blockchain, backed up by a solid operational experience.
“To be profitable, a blockchain company cannot only rely on the token economy”. Since its establishment, the company has secured revenue, mainly for undertaking the development of some technical projects or working on security issues. These activities have not only served as training for company’s talents, but they have also helped this group of PhDs better understand market demand. Doing business first, raising funds later. This is one of the major differences between Barton Chao’s team and the others.
“No token-investment, no speculation” is the minimal constraint that Barton Chao imposes to himself. He often tells his colleagues that he “walks along the river, but must remain cautious not to fall down into the water”
After the launch of the fundraising, Barton Chao talked to 7 institutions who expressed their strong interest in investing in less than 2 days. In the end, Barton Chao received the support of ROOTSCAP, BENRUI CAPITAL, EYU CAPITAL, GENESIS CAPITAL, HUAYING CAPITAL, STARWIN CAPITAL, HELLO CAPITAL, BIGCOIN CAPITAL, SKYLINE CAPITAL, SKYWALK CAPITAL, REFLEXION CAPITAL, CLOUDCHAIN CAPITAL, GAMA CAPITAL, KYLIN CAPITAL, AREA NINE TECHNOLOGY, CRYPTO LABORATORY, OBSIPIAN CAPITAL, OK CRYPTO, etc.
The team could have started to build its blockchain for a long time as its members possess all the required technical expertise, but two questions remained for Barton Chao: Which design should we choose? How to build the underlying ecosystem? This is why Barton went stealth-mode until the first half of 2018, where InterValue officially got off the ground
“Do the right things, at the right time. Don’t be impetuous, don’t be impatient.”. After successfully leading the fundraising and the design of the blockchain layout, Barton Chao is no longer a purely technical mind. He has become a true founder. InterValue was born.
Trust is what maintains the values and the stability among society and each individual aspire to trust others' words, promises, and statements. Barton Chao has always been convinced that there is no better gift in the world than trust.
InterValue is designed to be part of the blockchain 4.0 era and focuses on both the infrastructure and the core technology at platform-level. It can take the form of public, private and hybrid chains and has different application scenarios. It also aims to build an ecosystem based on the blockchain technology.
If one looks at the history of InterValue and what has been accomplished so far, one can immediately realize that the team has not been wasting any time: In August 2017, Barton Chao envisioned the positioning, vision, and functions of InterValue. In November 2017, the InterValue core R&D team was officially formed to complete the writing of the whitepaper and initiate the development plan. The InterValue Chinese and English whitepaper were iterated 3 times between February and March 2018, from 1.0 to 4.0. In April 2018, InterValue v1.0 TestNet was completed and implemented; in June 2018, InterValue v2.0 TestNet featuring HashNet consensus mechanism was successfully implemented and tested. The transaction speed within one single subnet (shard) exceeded 280,000 TPS and 4 million TPS at network scale.
2017 is generally considered to be the year of the advent of blockchain technology and its applications, the first step towards adoption. Competition is getting more and more intense in 2018.InterValue is the first project of the blockchain 4.0 era to support the large-scale deployment of blockchain applications. InterValue’s community on Telegram exceeds 88k members.
The InterValue v2.0 TestNet features a new and independently designed HashNet consensus mechanism. The HashNet Consensus forms a divide-and-conquer distributed system through the "intra-shard autonomy, inter-shard collaboration" approach. Layering and sharding are implemented based on the Hashgraph consensus algorithm. The hierarchical Gossip network topology and the newly designed sharding mechanism that supports both nodes-sharding and state-sharding allows to process transactions within different shards and different nodes and to achieve asymptotic linear TPS increments, equipping the whole system with high concurrency and fast confirmation. The implementation of the HashNet consensus mechanism has increased the capacity and transaction confirmation speed of InterValue platform to 1,000,000 TPS+, far above other projects in the blockchain space.
As Barton Chao highlights, current blockchains mainly suffer 3 major problems:
- Performance issues - the existing mainstream blockchain solutions have very low transaction throughputs and cannot scale
- Usability issues – most blockchains cannot be practically used due to lack of features and interoperability with other blockchains
- Security issues - the current blockchain landscape faces many security risks such as smart contract vulnerabilities, transaction loopholes, code loopholes, etc.
Although many blockchain applications and projects are currently being developed, the shortcomings of the current underlying technology make their success impossible.
As a technology provider, the InterValue team has partnered with several companies that use blockchain technology to optimize and enhance existing business processes and has used the InterValue infrastructure in multiple real-world applications and scenarios. In addition, it is actively building a community of developers and initiatives to evangelize blockchain technology, and it will launch a dApp development incentive plan to ensure that more resources, teams and technical talents participate in the optimization of the InterValue infrastructure. The foundation will promote InterValue’s technology and strive to make InterValue platform used in as many industries as possible.
The goal of InterValue is to build a public blockchain with various application scenarios that can be applied to multiple contexts. The challenge of the construction of InterValue’s ecosystem is getting more and more clear for Barton Chao. "We have built the architecture and welcome other teams and groups to build the ecosystem with us. This is also in line with the original intention of Nakamoto when he first designed the blockchain. No one is the absolute center, but together we can build a safer, more transparent, simple and trusted world."
I wish these "geeks" who have dreams to successfully establish the world's first practical infrastructure of the blockchain 4.0 era to support large-scale applications and improve the blockchain-based ecosystem.
Please visit our websites and the official community for more details:
Website: https://www.inve.one
English telegram: https://t.me/InterValueProject
Chinese telegram: https://t.me/InterValue
Telegram official announcement channel: https://t.me/InterValueofficial
Twitter: https://twitter.com/intervaluepro
Medium blog: https://medium.com/@intervalueproject
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InterValueofficial
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/intervalue
Quora: https://intervalue.quora.com
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