The following is a transcript of the speech by Xiao Feng, Chairman of WANXiang Blockchain and Chairman and CEO of HashKey Group, at the EAG Ethereum Application Alliance event:

Xiao Feng: Friends, good morning everyone!

Welcome to the EAG Ethereum Application Alliance event. The Ethereum Application Alliance, EAG, originated in 2014. In 2014, I made a judgment that I later shared publicly with many friends. Blockchain technology entered what we call the "1995 moment" of the internet, meaning that blockchain technology has developed to a point that it can support large-scale commercial applications. We know that most of the well-known internet platforms we are familiar with today were actually born between 1995 and 2005. Other than Amazon, which was founded in 1994, they can essentially be categorized under the "1995 moment," hence the large-scale application of the internet truly began in 1995.

The explosion of internet applications in 1995 had several prerequisites:

First, if the computer operating system was still DOS and interaction with computers was via command line, I believe there wouldn't have been a massive explosion of internet applications. It later progressed from DOS, browsers, and dialog boxes to graphical operating systems like Windows, allowing more people to interact with computers in a more convenient way. With technology evolving to such a condition, internet applications began to appear. Of course, there were other conditions as well, including bandwidth and the construction of communication infrastructures.

I say that from 2004, blockchain also entered a period of application explosion because at that time, many technologies, application tools, and certain mechanisms of infrastructure construction regarding blockchain became suitable for commercial applications. That was the judgment I made. Besides that judgment, I continuously discussed with people in the entire ecosystem and those with application scenarios about how to establish their commercial applications on blockchain.

In the second half of last year, we initiated the Ethereum Application Alliance (EAG) in Singapore. The abbreviation EAG came about during a discussion with Ethereum founder Vitalik on what would be a good abbreviation, and the invention of this name should actually be credited to Vitalik, who, of course, was very supportive of our initiative to start a global application alliance.

Another background to the establishment of EAG is that starting from 2024, there will be an Ethereum community event called "Shan Hai Wu" in 2024 and 2025. In 2025, in Singapore, dozens of developers from around the world will gather for a month to discuss various application ideas on Ethereum. Last year at the "Shan Hai Wu" event in Singapore, over 18 developers from Africa came, most of whom were visiting Asia for the first time and even stepping out of Africa for the first time.

In addition to last year's event in Singapore, there will also be a month-long "Shan Hai Wu" event in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in 2024, gathering nearly a hundred developers from the Ethereum ecosystem, particularly application developers. Everyone will come together for a month to inspire and discuss each other, which is also the foundation of the Ethereum Application Alliance.

The "Shan Hai Wu" has been held three times in a row; the first session in 2023 took place in a cooler summer spot in Northeast China and lasted about a month, with roughly 300 people attending over the course of the event. Some people might stay for one or two weeks, while others stayed longer.

Based on these two foundations, one is that we believe blockchain technology has reached a point to support large-scale commercial applications; the other is the specific activities carried out in the form of "Shan Hai Wu" in 2023, 2024, and 2025. By the time of the third session, the influence of "Shan Hai Wu" even surpassed Asia, having produced a significant impact in Africa.

Next, EAG is planning to potentially hold a "Shan Hai Wu" event in Africa, truly mobilizing the developers there. This is the origin of EAG and some preparatory work we've done before.

This afternoon at 4:30, Vitalik and I will have a fireside chat lasting about an hour and a half, where we intend to discuss Ethereum applications from both our perspectives, exploring future trends, scenarios, and infrastructure construction related to Ethereum applications.

Yesterday, I also presented on the potential disruptive innovations that may arise from the combination of intelligent economy, blockchain, zero-knowledge proofs, and homomorphic encryption. We know that topics like zero-knowledge proofs and formal verification have actually been discussed within the Ethereum community since 2016. I remember very clearly that the Ethereum Global Developers Conference (Devcon) in October 2016 was held in Shanghai, where several technical experts discussed how tools like formal verification and zero-knowledge proofs or privacy-protecting technologies could integrate with blockchain technology over two days of conference.

In ten years, we have seen that technologies like zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption have gradually moved closer to or entered a stage where they can support large-scale commercial applications. They require algorithm optimization, hardware acceleration, and wider bandwidth. After ten years, these privacy computing technologies have started to support large-scale applications based on blockchain, integrated with AI.

In yesterday's talk, I specifically provided an example of how the combination of these three technologies might disrupt existing commerce. The example I gave was about hospitals; the medical data produced by hospitals is undoubtedly high-value data, but hospitals cannot turn data into tokens without AI, making it difficult for others to utilize it. However, if there is only AI to turn it into tokens, the problem is that hospitals have extremely high privacy requirements for their data, necessitating the addition of privacy protection and computational techniques such as zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption, as medical data absolutely cannot be leaked.

If we rely solely on privacy computing techniques like zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption, it is still not enough. That would certainly be a step forward, but combining AI with privacy computing techniques raises another issue. If we need to use a certain hospital's data token, we would have to negotiate offline with the relevant department of the hospital, sign contracts, and make payments. This clearly is not advantageous for the hospital unless it establishes a large commercial operation system to sell its data. This limitation clearly restricts the hospital's capacity to expand its commercial activities in the "Token factory." However, if we can integrate blockchain technology, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, into a trustless, permissionless trade environment, then all medical data tokens from a hospital could potentially be utilized through smart contracts without the need for trust or permission, accessible to global developers and users. This would obviously lead to a newer business model that can reach a larger range of users. We continue to explore how to integrate other technological enhancements on Ethereum to create new business models.

As of today, at this moment, the event of EAG in 2026 has further solidified our confidence. The "1995 moment" of blockchain is not a question of whether it has come or not, it has already arrived and is accelerating, which is how I am opening today’s EAG event.

Thank you, everyone!

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