Sword refers to "ten thousand chain interconnection": TRON will launch the expansion cross-chain solution BTTC

 Since the birth of Bitcoin, various applications and gameplay have emerged in the encrypted world continuously, and the innovation iteration speed is several times that of the traditional Internet. But strictly speaking, these improvements are only at the application level, and the pain points of the underlying blockchain architecture have not been fundamentally resolved.

In summary, the public chain has a high degree of decentralization and cannot guarantee the efficiency of data processing. At the same time, the compatibility between them is poor, which makes it difficult for data and assets to flow efficiently across systems. These two major issues have become more acute with the explosion of applications on the chain.

It can be said that the encryption world is struggling to expand across the chain for a long time. Under this background and demand, the cross-chain expansion solution BitTorrent Chain (BTTC) launched by the TRON public chain came into being.

1. The new vision has epoch-making significance for the global financial community

On September 3, Justin Sun, the founder of TRON, issued an open letter to the community regarding the new vision of TRON and the official launch of BitTorrent Chain . Justin Sun introduced that TRON 's cross-chain expansion solution BTTC will be officially launched on October 30. In the future, the first layer (Layer1), that is, the positioning of the TRON protocol as a global clearing layer, mainly provides clearing services for financial institutions; and the second layer (Layer2), namely BTTC, will serve as a bridge across Ethereum, TRON and BSC. A cross-chain expansion solution.

It is worth mentioning that BTTC is completely decentralized, and its nodes can participate in TRON Super Representative elections and obtain pledge rewards through voting pledges.

Justin Sun published an open letter on Weibo

Justin Sun also mentioned in the letter that since its official launch on June 25, 2018, the total assets on the TRON chain have exceeded US$50 billion, and the total lock-up volume has exceeded US$10 billion. But what is even more cause for concern is that the daily settlement transaction volume processed by the TRON protocol exceeds 10 billion U.S. dollars, which is comparable to that of Ethereum. Compared with traditional financial transfer networks, TRON's single-day settlement amount has reached 5 times that of the global electronic payment giant Paypal.

The support of objective data gives the TRON agreement the confidence to redefine its vision. According to the plan, TRON aims to provide decentralized, safe, efficient, low-cost and intelligent clearing services for global financial institutions, and gradually complete the replacement of SWIFT with the wave of digital asset popularization .

According to Justin Sun's analysis, SWIFT, as the bottom layer of clearing, is the information and capital communication tool for all financial institutions in the world. However, SWIFT, which uses the traditional telecommunications model, has been born for more than 48 years. Its low communication efficiency, high use cost, insufficient information intelligence, lack of interoperability + open source and other shortcomings determine that it cannot adapt to the explosive Internet data development trend. . With the distributed processing capabilities of data, blockchain may become an alternative technical solution. This trillion-level global Internet finance underlying application market will be an opportunity for TRON and even all blockchain entrepreneurs.

TRON's technical documentation

However, from the current point of view, it may be too early to truly realize the ambitious goal of becoming the "next generation of SWIFT". Because the cycle is quite long, because it needs to span different fields such as traditional finance, Internet circles, and encrypted finance. But with the BTTC that realizes the interoperability of multi-chain assets through heterogeneous cross-chains, the TRON public chain, as Layer 1, can at least first satisfy the clearing of cross-chain assets and play the role of "decentralized SWIFT" in the crypto world. Of course, all of these are hidden under TRON's bigger dream-" Ten Thousand Chain Interconnection". This is also the solution to the biggest pain point in the encryption world mentioned earlier.

2. "Ten thousand chains interconnection" creates a trillion-level Internet value ecology

"Ten thousand chain interconnection" means that the information barriers and asset barriers on each public chain will be broken, and data and value will flow unimpeded. At the same time, "cross-chain communication" technology is adopted in the encrypted world, highly fragmented and decentralized resources will be effectively integrated, and the expanded public chains will be interconnected on this basis . In the standard unified development environment, development speed or quality applications will accelerate, which for the block chain line to change the industry, will be a deeper level of innovation. The extension to the traditional Internet world means more specific, intuitive, and imaginative business dividends.

Just like the giants such as Ali and Tencent , once the data and the development ecosystem are completely opened up, and a large number of innovation and entrepreneurship opportunities are released, the Internet industry in the future may be in another pattern.

TRON official website page

Driven by the extremely tempting ecological picture, TRON has already pointed out the "interconnection of ten thousand chains" and has made full preparations for this. Looking back, TRON has secretly laid out for this when it gradually entered the top-tier rankings of the public chain track under the bull market and DeFi boom that started at the end of last year. At the end of February this year, Odaily Planet Daily analyzed in the article " Another TRON Under the Noise " that since the outbreak of DeFi, the external public chain that has undertaken the most value overflow of the Ethereum network is precisely TRON.

There are two main reasons behind it: Polkadot and other new era public chains were not fully prepared at that time, which left a rare window of time for the "husband chain" TRON. Public chains that have matured in 2018 or earlier are available in DeFi. The foundation has been consolidated before the outbreak; more importantly, the TRON Virtual Machine (TVM) is similar to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) environment. Developers on the existing Ethereum chain do not need to learn a new programming language to be on the TRON chain. Quickly develop, debug and compile smart contracts, which also makes the end user experience closer.

It can be seen that compatibility with the Ethereum virtual machine is a key strategy for TRON to achieve cross-chain interoperability. With this advantage and its own technological iteration, in the next few months, as the DeFi boom and NFT carnival take turns, the core data of the TRON public chain performs better. According to Tronscan data, the total number of transactions on the TRON network exceeds 2.4 billion and the total number of accounts exceeds 52 million. Compared with the data at the end of February, the increase was 59% and 140%, respectively.

Data displayed on the TRON browser page

Justin Sun, who has tasted the dividends in grabbing the share of the Ethereum ecosystem and is getting more and more courageous, intends to further expand the results. He stated in the open letter that BTTC, as a heterogeneous chain cross-chain interoperability expansion protocol, will be compatible with TRON , Ethereum and BSC at the same time. That is, through BTTC, the unlimited transfer of assets between mainstream public chains can be realized. In addition, BTTC will also be fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine EVM, allowing all EVM developers to quickly migrate applications to TRON, providing a new high-speed, low-cost environment for applications on Ethereum.

At the same time, Justin Sun, who has always been generous, announced in the letter that he will invest 1 billion US dollars to encourage the migration of the Ethereum project to BTTC. This series of actions collectively point to a vision-BTTC will realize "the interconnection of ten thousand chains" by being compatible with more public chains in the future.

Some core data are listed on the homepage of TRON's official website

Corresponding to the grand narrative, it is actually founder Justin Sun who has consistently adhered to the public chain track since the official launch of TRON in June 2018. Although he himself, because of too much ink on the marketing level, he is quite criticized. TRON also encountered some doubts at the beginning of its launch, but judging from its current performance, it has become the first echelon of the public chain circuit.

Constantly increasing technology research and development is another aspect that Justin Sun and his team are not well-known to outsiders. Justin Sun revealed in an interview with Odaily Planet Daily at the beginning of this year that in the past four years, TRON has continuously invested 1 billion yuan in research and development costs each year. On the other hand, many "domestic public chain" projects were launched at the same time as TRON or even earlier, and they were given high hopes because of their various auras, but in the end they fell silent.

Sun Yuchen led the wave field in the "domestic public chain" collective fall of the lost game in the tight encirclement, which lasted three years, getting better, block chain raw state grid Bureau will start or expansion of cross-chain solutions BTTC a chance after the wave field Was rewritten.

3. The paradigm of "communication technology + financial innovation" linkage implies the changing trend of the world in the future

In summary, TRON's Layer 1 and Layer 2 complement each other in positioning. The former provides security and consensus support for the latter, and the latter is one of the most important application scenarios for the former in the future. The essence of the synergy between the two is the dividends derived from the iterative technology upgrade and the efficient flow of value. This kind of benign interaction will prosper the public chain ecology in the encrypted world through cross-chain and capacity expansion, and promote the mutual transfer of value.

In other words, TRON’s “Ten Thousand Chain Interconnection” will focus on promoting the implementation and application of the “next generation of decentralized SWIFT”, that is, a unified decentralized underlying protocol standard that opens up various public chains. Data and value, and complete data clearing intensively, acting as a hub for value conversion in the world on the chain; and "the next generation of decentralized SWIFT" will rely on the attributes of "technology + finance" to be the bottom layer at the application level. "Ten Thousand Chain Interconnection" attracts a steady flow of capital, information and users, and prospering the ecology of "Ten Thousand Chain Interconnection".

But as mentioned above, with the acceleration of the digitalization process, many unforeseen changes will take place in human society, just as the public could not imagine the sense of science and technology and the degree of convenience in today's society 10 years ago . The resonance effect achieved by TRON through "Layer1+Layer2" may have an impact far beyond the encrypted world, because it is a paradigm of "communication technology + financial innovation" linkage, which has become more mature in technology and more ecological. In an open environment, it may penetrate the network industry and even the lives of the general public, making it possible to realize the commercial value that previously existed only in imagination and was unattainable.

For example, the free circulation of super-sovereign digital assets can leverage the resource endowments of extremely underdeveloped countries into the mechanism. Even war-torn countries such as Afghanistan or extremely poor African countries can indirectly enjoy the innovative power of TRON. The dividend of multinational capital stimulates the value of every humble corner. In addition, the popularization of this paradigm will also be a baptism for the public's consumption and entrepreneurial concepts. In a more open and inclusive atmosphere, human trial and error have gradually ignited new genes, and it has become a round of innovation that has spread to all industries. The dual evolution of environment and mind will quickly rewrite the underlying logic of business history.

A cool picture of the meta-universe world

What is worth noting is that the pattern of “ten-thousand-chain interconnection” that TRON intends to achieve is highly compatible with the current “meta-universe” concept. It is also the commercial blue ocean created by the iterative upgrade of technology. Both "Chain Link" and "Meta Universe" are committed to breaking the gap between virtual and reality and restoring the imagination of users to real time and space. Relying on the decentralized governance structure, and under the framework of the sharing economy, both will amplify the dividends derived from technological innovation and mechanism innovation and feed them back to the participants in this process. According to Bloomberg Intelligence (Bloomberg Intelligence), the scale of the meta-universe market will reach 800 billion US dollars in 2024, approaching one trillion US dollars.

At that time, through the “ten thousand chain interconnection” and its commonality with the meta-universe, TRON can successfully stir the nearly trillion meta-universe market space in the historical trend of the overall transition of human social behavior to the data space and the large-scale digitalization of assets. It takes time to test. But in order to succeed or not, at this moment, TRON, which aims to realize the "interconnection of all chains", is conducting a meaningful experiment in technology and finance.

Engineers who don't play games can't do autopilot well

 Human beings are likely to "hand over" their lives to autonomous driving in the future, but few people know that many companies are entrusting the task of realizing this "life-threatening" technology to a bunch of "game-playing" engineers. 

This is not a joke. 

"There are even people in the industry using the GTA 5 game engine to do research and development related to autonomous driving." A person engaged in research and development of autonomous driving technology said to Pinwan . GTA 5 is a very popular open world adventure video game. The content involves violence, gangsters, gun battles, etc. Of course, it also includes grabbing a walking car and then rampaging in the virtual world. 

For the first time, you can hardly imagine the relationship between such a "crude" game and "safety first" autonomous driving. 

In fact, what engineers are after is the role of GTA 5 as a ready-made "simulation platform". 

The so-called simulation platform test is simply to test the autonomous driving in a virtual world that simulates the real road, so as to improve the code of automatic driving faster and more cost-effectively. 

To achieve a broad sense of automatic driving, the difficulty is no less than the realization of strong artificial intelligence. Although the field of autonomous driving still seems to be very hot, today, companies are still a long way from reaching the L4 level of commercial landing and making profits. Among them, safety reasons are one of the most important influencing factors. 

In March 2018, Uber's self-driving car crashed with a pedestrian, which directly caused its road test permit to be revoked, which further caused regulatory agencies in various countries to treat the test vehicle on the road more strictly. But on the other hand, a large amount of real vehicle scene data is one of the important conditions for the continuous "evolution" of autonomous driving. In 2016, the RAND Think Tank pointed out that an autonomous driving system needs to test 11 billion miles to meet the conditions for mass production applications. This means that even a self-driving fleet with 100 test vehicles will take about 500 years to test at an average speed of 25 miles (40 kilometers) per hour for 7×24 hours. So a paradox appears: the regulator believes that the car must be safe enough to get on the road, but in terms of technical realization, autonomous driving must rely on more on the road to collect more real data and become safer. 

Therefore, practitioners have set their sights on the simulation platform one after another. 

Similar to the actual road test, the simulation test of autonomous driving also needs to absorb a large amount of scene data to accelerate the iteration of the algorithm. Judging from the published test data , Waymo, which was the first to be involved in autonomous driving technology research, has been formally established in 2009. As of January 2020, it has measured 20 million miles of roads and 10 billion miles of virtual simulation tests. These are completely two. Magnitude. 

The simulation test of autonomous driving also reduces the R&D and operating costs of enterprises. 20 million miles and 11 billion miles are still not a small distance. If you want to use real-vehicle testing, almost no company can afford the time cost and capital cost. Waymo burned at a rate of US$1 billion a year when working on its Robotaxi (self-driving taxi) project, and the installation cost of lidar alone reached US$75,000. Studies have shown that the large-scale intelligent simulation system greatly reduces the test cost of the actual vehicle, and its cost is only 1% of the cost of the road test, and it can also expand the mileage of thousands of times the actual road test. 

Since the occurrence of the Uber incident, countries have become vigilant about the conduct of autonomous driving road tests by various companies, and the management of actual vehicle tests on public roads has become more and more stringent. Test sites and designated roads issue test licenses to applicants. Due to the limited volume of road sites, companies often queue up. Therefore, various objective restrictions have slowed down the accumulation of data in real-vehicle testing methods. 

At the same time, the fixed places and designated roads also make the scenes in the actual vehicle test relatively limited, which cannot meet the test requirements of various special road conditions, in other words, the needs of the long tail scene. People usually understand the long-tail scene as all sudden, low-probability, and unpredictable scenes, such as intersections with faulty traffic lights, drunk vehicles, extreme weather, and so on. On the simulation platform, in order to exhaust the various scenarios that the autonomous driving system may encounter and ensure the safety and reliability of the system, practitioners need to do more simulations and tests on the long tail scenario. 

Through the above description, the industry has a lot of demand for simulation testing of autonomous driving. So what exactly is simulation testing of autonomous driving? 

The team of Professor Henry Liu from the Intelligent and Connected Transportation Research Center of the University of Michigan once told Pinwan: “In simple terms, the simulation test is like building a game based on the real world, allowing an autonomous car in this virtual world. Keep running.” You can even think that the data of players driving in GTA 5 can be used for testing and utilization to some extent. 

The actual situation is also true, and it has become the choice of many companies to use game engines Unity, Unreal, and UE4 as an autonomous driving virtual simulation platform. Autonomous driving simulation platforms developed based on UE4 include open source AirSim, Carla and Tencent 's TAD Sim. TAD Sim, a simulation platform developed by Tencent, uses its own technology accumulation in the game field, and uses in-game scene restoration, 3D reconstruction, physics engine, MMO synchronization, Agent AI and other technologies to improve the reproducibility and efficiency of automated driving simulation platform testing. . Baidu 's Apollo platform chose to cooperate with Unity to build its full-stack open source autonomous driving software platform. 

Autopilot manufacturers choose to use game engines as the simulation platform. The main reason is that it can produce a full-stack closed-loop simulation, especially in the simulation of the perception module. It can reconstruct a three-dimensional environment and simulate the camera in the three-dimensional environment. Various input signals such as lidar. 

Simulation is equivalent to the construction of the real world. In the training of the perception algorithm, the simulation system comes with the true value of the scene elements, and automatically generates various weather and road conditions without labeling to ensure coverage. The truth value is the objective attribute and objective value of all items. Usually, what the human eye or the autopilot sensor sees is the observation value, and the truth value is the absolute objective attribute of an object that is not transferred by any observer's observation result. All elements are generated by the simulation system itself, so it has the objective value of all the elements in the scene, without the observer's observation, and the self-labeling required by the perception system is directly carried out through the truth value of the simulation system. 

Generally, the perception training of traditional algorithms requires manual labeling. For example, a little girl will draw a frame to label when riding a bicycle. The labor cost of third-party labeling needs 1 billion US dollars each year. Waymo uses a large number of virtual tests to complete algorithm development and regression. test. 

When the engineer adjusts the algorithm, it may only take a few minutes to test on the simulation test platform, but if it is a road test, it may take half a day or a day to make an appointment for the adjustment of the autonomous driving fleet, and choose to test on the simulation platform. As long as the computing power permits, high-concurrency tests such as 1000 vehicles and 2000 vehicles can be carried out at the same time. 

In summary, the core capabilities of automated driving simulation testing include geometric restoration of scenes, 3D scene simulation + sensor simulation; restoration of scene logic, decision planning simulation; physical restoration of scenes, control + vehicle dynamics simulation; high concurrency , Cloud simulation and other advantages. 

Therefore, new and old autopilot companies are recruiting compound talents with virtual engine backgrounds such as Unity and Unreal. An industry person said to Pinwan: “One is that the simulation environment needs to be rendered more and more realistic, and the other is that these talents can make some optimizations based on the virtual engine to reduce the cost of the entire simulation test.” 

Recruitment requirements for simulation engineers of an autonomous driving company 

Autonomous driving companies are also looking for ways to improve the efficiency of simulation tests. Improving the fidelity of virtual scenes is usually considered a reasonable way, but it is not that easy. 

Professor Henry Liu said: "Because this environment is constructed based on a mathematical model, if we want the calculation results to be closer to the real world, then the construction of this model will be more complicated and the calculation speed will be slower." Create a highly realistic virtual The difficulty of the world may not be less than the realization of autonomous driving. Simulation testing is not complete United States , and the results have certain limitations, it does not help companies solve all the problems autopilot. Although Waymo's 20 million miles of autonomous driving in 2020 and more than 15 billion miles of autonomous driving simulation mileage in 2020 can kill most of the latecomers in the autonomous driving industry, 20 million miles are a drop in the price of achieving autonomous driving, and data is not omnipotent, and there is no evidence. It shows that autonomous driving simulation can fully simulate the complex situation of the real world. 

At present, all data-driven methods will always fail scenarios . First, the uncertainty of the data itself. For example, for many occluded objects, even human labels will have a lot of uncertainty; secondly, due to the high complexity of the model, it is difficult to identify all models in the virtual engine, especially in Europe and the United States. Scene. 

Different from the human eye, it is much more difficult for the algorithm to recognize the image. Once a few key elements in the image undergo subtle changes, the algorithm’s output recognition results may have huge differences, not to mention the human eyes. When misjudged. Therefore, massive data is not a sufficient condition to realize L4 or even L5 autonomous driving. It cannot be expected to prove the absolute safety of offline roads through hundreds of millions of kilometers of "safe driving" on the virtual simulation platform. 

A professional said to Pinwan: “Although the use of game engines for simulation testing has solved some of the problems of autonomous driving to a certain extent, in the final analysis, its focus is still on testing. Its main purpose is to prevent the possibility of autonomous driving algorithms. Make mistakes on some mistakes that have already been made, or test them in advance in scenarios that engineers can think of. It is more to ensure the correctness of the logic of the entire system." 

This article is from the WeChat public account "Pinwancool" (ID: pinwancool) , author: Hong Yuhan , 36氪 published with authorization.

The opinions of this article represent only the author himself, and the 36氪 platform only provides information storage space services.