Xinshu Dong is a software developer and co-founder of Zilliqa, a high-transaction throughput blockchain. He is also the co-founder of RockX, a Staking-as-a-Service platform. ^[1]

Education

Xinshu received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the National University of Singapore. ^[1]

Career

Dong started his blockchain career as a researcher at the National University of Singapore. During this time, Xinshu contributed to a blockchain project with the Singapore Stock Exchange as the technical lead. While developing use cases for the private blockchain network, Xinshu realized the significance of transitioning to the public blockchain sphere in mid-2017. ^[1][2]

“I was working on building use cases for the private blockchain network and in the middle of 2017, I recognised the importance of scaling up into the public blockchain space. That’s when I made the switch.”

Dong joined Prateek Saxena and Max Kantelia at Anquan Capital, where he assumed the role of head of engineering. However, the team at Anquan realized they needed a scalable blockchain platform. In June 2017, Dong, Saxena, Kantelia, Amrit Kumar, and Juzar Motiwalla founded Zilliqa. ^[2]

Interviews

Building Zilliqa

In June 2018, Tech In Asia interviewed Dong about how the team at Zilliqa got started. The interview was right after Zilliqa reached the $1 billion market cap. Dong commented: ^[3]

“Hitting the billion-dollar mark is nice, but it has never been our priority. I see it as a natural consequence of what we have been working on at Zilliqa, and that number is just a way to represent the confidence people have in us.”

He then discussed what it was like to turn Saxena’s research paper on sharding into a real project: ^[3]

“A research paper in computer science is about 10 to 15 pages, written about the researcher’s immediate scope of work. It can be a starting point, but it’s not meant to be a solution that can be readily applied in the real world…In a public blockchain, we have very adversarial circumstances where any node can be malicious, with up to one-third of the nodes being arbitrarily malicious. Existing building blocks are not necessarily designed for these hostile environments. As such, there are many things you need to strengthen and change when you want to borrow and apply those ideas.”

When asked about what contributed to Zilliqa’s success, Dong shared three main factors, starting with the team: ^[3]

“The areas of expertise at its foundation are networking, distributed systems, cybersecurity, and cryptography. In our team, we have almost 100 percent coverage on all these areas to build a good blockchain protocol. We’re really fortunate to have been able to assemble such a team…I believe it’s more about having analytical skills. We can sit down and look at the protocols, propose different ideas and critique each other until we reach a point where we can show very rigorously that we have a solution that is fast, scalable, and secure.”

The second factor was the strong support from the community: ^[3]

“We had a website, wrote some articles, and that was it. We also had some early backers who might have spread the word to their friends and communities.”

The third factor was not bandwagoning or using airdrops: ^[3]

“We don’t jump on bandwagons. Since our early days, we have been open to ideas on how to do things, but we always had our independent assessment before making decisions. We think about solutions very carefully and go with the one that we believe is most feasible. This applies not just for technical development, but in all other aspects, like community building, business development, and marketing…We’re willing to make that sacrifice, because we don’t want to jump or rush into things before we know how to do it well.”

At the end of the interview, Dong shared advice for future blockchain startups: ^[3]

“All blockchain startups should start with a clear mission. It doesn’t have to be a completely new idea, but it has to be of value to the ecosystem. Otherwise, others will think you are just trying to ride out the hype, and this can quickly be destructive to your credibility and reputation.”

Later, in March 2019, Praying Mantis, a decentralized AI platform, interviewed Dong about Zilliqa’s vision and focus on scalability. Dong started with what he wanted Zilliqa to be: ^[2]

“My vision is to make Zilliqa a de-facto platform of choice, for people wanting to build high-throughput, high-scalability applications. The vision is also to develop Zilliqa into a general platform serving cross-industry purposes and needs. To begin with, we are focused on specific sectors, to demonstrate that concrete use cases can be built on Zilliqa.”

He then discussed how Zilliqa uses sharding as its scalability solution and also explained the latency issues: ^[2]

“Sharding does not make latency a bigger problem, nor sharding is a solution to latency. It maintains the status quo. To understand latency, we need to look at the fundamentals. Blockchain networks are slower than centralised solutions. This is a feature of the blockchain networks. Blockchain uses redundancy to achieve better resilience, security and decentralisation. The cost of having redundancy is higher latency. However, keeping the experience of the application users, there are options to improve on the latency. For example, user confirmations can be given much faster compared to the actual latency of the blocks.”

He also shared advice to people looking to join the blockchain community: ^[2]

“Now is the best time for everyone to be humbled to learn. This applies not only to people on-the-fence, but also blockchain advocates. The hype is high, and this is a future technology. The people on-the-fence are also going to be very useful, because they provide the criticism and going to ask critical questions for people like us to address, before they are going to be convinced. My advice for them is to engage with us and have dialogue with us. Let us know your exact concerns and issues in adopting blockchain technology. This will help us improve the technology to help with their use cases.”