Dr. Yaoqi Jia is the founder of Alt Research and AltLayer Network. He is an experienced developer who specializes in web and blockchain security. ^[1]

Education

Dr. Jia graduated from the National University of Singapore with a Ph.D. in the School of Computing in 2017. ^[1][2]

Career

Dr. Jia began his career as a research fellow at the National University of Singapore in 2017, focusing on blockchain security, web security and privacy, and network security. In the same year, he co-founded Zilliqa, a high-throughput blockchain platform, where he was CTO for one year and an advisor for the following year. ^[1][2]

In 2019, he became the director/GM of Parity Asia, a company that provides blockchain infrastructure. There, he helped grow the developer community and helped build Substrate and Polkadot, Parity’s main technologies. Three years later, he moved to an advisor position at the company. ^[1][2]

In December 2021, Dr. Jia founded Alt Research and AltLayer Network. ^[1][2]

Interviews

About AltLayer

In September 2022, Crypto Coin Show interviewed Dr. Jia about AltLayer and its solutions to Web3 scaling. When asked for a quick overview, Dr. Jia discussed how the ideas of AltLayer came about: ^[3]

“When we have a lot of popular applications like NFTs and games over the past one and a half years, it typically introduces a lot of traffic and sometimes congests the network or even causes the network to stall. In that case, we really need some elastic scaling solutions, basically to offload this traffic and pressure from the Layer 1s to a dedicated execution environment. That's how AltLayer jumps into the picture. So AltLayer, we are providing a new service called flash learning technique. Basically, what we can provide is a tool for developers so they generally need to click a bunch of buttons, and then the protocol can quickly initiate a dedicated rollup solution.”

When asked about how AltLayer could help with multi-chain applications, he said: ^[3]

“It's also referred to as this multi-chain feature. So, for example, for an NFT project, once they launch something on AltLayer, later they can choose which Layer 1 they want to have their NFTs settled on. So, if they are interested in having multiple NFTs on different blockchain networks like Ethereum, Polygon, and BNB, then we can help them. Once the NFT minting is done, we roll out all the NFTs, and some of the NFTs are on Ethereum, some of them are on Polygon, and some of them are on BNB. So, you can enjoy the liquidity and volume of all different chains.”

He later provided his thoughts on the future of NFTs: ^[3]

“It's basically some new use cases of activities and probably as you mentioned right more and more games probably they want their items to be like tokenized as artists and for us like we believe that in the near future right definitely is a huge market and because we have a lot of uh sort of resources can…some are like software tokenized as NFTs apart from the games we also have like different content right like blog posts and even some of the video audio and all the resources actually can be treated as assets on-chain.”

And how AltLayer was working with various game companies to help achieve this: ^[3]

“Right now, in our pipeline, we're actually working with a bunch of games. Apart from having the items as NFTs on different Layer 1s, we're also collaborating with them to explore the potential game logic that can be hosted on Layer 2. Previously, due to the high congestion and network issues on various platforms, many games couldn't fully utilize on-chain game logic. However, with our approach, besides NFTs for items and game access, we can incorporate more functionalities and features on-chain. One lesson we've learned from DeFi and other applications is that once you have a significant amount of resources, data, and assets on-chain, users can combine them in various ways, similar to building with Lego bricks. I believe we'll see a similar trend with Layer 2 solutions.”