Coinpost Interview with Dr. Jin, Trias Academic Advisor on Trias and Triathon
TL; DR
Recently, Coinpost, the most influential crypto media in Japan, interviewed Professor Jin of the Institute of mathematics of Oxford University, an academic consultant of Trias. In the interview, Professor Jin gave a detailed interpretation of the technology and application scenarios of Trias and Triathon, and shared what academic support from Oxford Octa laboratory which his research team and Trias built together will provide to Trias in the future. Professor Jin said in the interview that Trias is a full-stack distributed trust cloud infrastructure, and Triathon is expected to become a new cornerstone in the field of crypto assets.
Click to read the interview: 英オックスフォード大が支援するブロックチェーンプロジェクト「Trias」インタビュー
The following is the English Translation:
1) Thank you for your time today Professor Jin. Please begin by telling us what is your role at Oxford University? What are you teaching at the moment?
I’m an associate professor in the mathematics institute in Oxford University. I’m working in the field of mathematics and finance. I’m based in the research group and mathematical computation of science. My research focuses on optimal investments, dynamic decision making, and a little bit on pricing, risk management, and also I do research on behavioral finance and economics. Recently, I’ve been interested in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and token economics.
Recently, last October we established a new lab called Oxford Octa Laboratory in Decentralized Finance and Digital Economics, by a generous donation from Octa Innovation. Now I’m the director of the Lab.
As for teaching, I’ve taught quite a lot of courses, two courses for this year. One is Optimization which is for master’s degree students, and another one is Information Theory which is for senior undergrad students. Previously, I’ve also taught courses on Statistics Calculus, Statistics Control, Financial Intuitive Pricing, Optimal Investments, etc.
2) Do you have similar projects going on in Oxford related to DeFi and digital economics?
Related to Digital Economics, there are three main ongoing projects in our lab. The first one is on comparison and optimization of consensus protocols in the blockchain. This is joint work with one of our research fellows in the lab, and another two from the blockchain industry. So we compare the different consensus protocols on their efficiency, security, and capacity. We also try to find optimal parameters to make the protocols work better.
3) What does Oxford Octa laboratory mainly work on? What is the main project?
The main research theme in the Lab is qualitative and quantitative analysis in Digital Economics. Because we’re based in the Mathematics Institute, most members in our lab are the research group in computational and mathematic finance. We will try to use ideas of modeling and analysis and computational techniques in Mathematics Finance to study questions in Digital economics and Digital Finance like those techniques in probability, statistic analysis, numerical methods, machine learning, and modeling techniques in pricing theory, design of financial intuitions, to help the research in digital economics, token economics and other areas of digital finance.
4) Can you tell us the details about your system regarding deep learning, credit scoring of the P2P network?
Sure. These are two ongoing projects in our lab and joint work with Octa Innovation. So the problem we started is how to score the credibility of each machine in the community to know who has higher credibility, so we use the checking scheme among them to report the result of each other and we will score each of those machines systemically by the overall performance of the checking. So this is something like data processing with a huge amount of data and our result is something like a factor for each of those machines. And we use some probability to estimate the best of scoring to fit those checking results which will be millions of results in one day or one hour.
5) Do you estimate this credit scoring to be mostly based on financial activities, or are there any other factors involving it?
In the financial market, the credit rating is very important for companies. There are some similarities but they’re not the same. However, the credit rating problem is based on the performance of each company. It depends on whether the company has default behavior or not during some time period, and this kind of event will be quite rare so data size will be quite small and scarce. But in our P2P credit scoring, we will have a huge amount of checking to each other, so the size of our data will be much bigger and more frequent so all calculations can be very accurate.
6) Will you consider implementing Decentralized ID (DID) as one of the options?
In my research, I left the application part to Octa Innovation. What I know is that we have the idea to apply to the scoring system to “big society”, something like credit alliance where we have a lot of pliers including those companies and intermediaries which we build credibility among society. This society can be any society of any size and members inside but not too small like we’re expecting more than 100’s of members.
I’m not sure whether DAO needs this kind of credibility because to me DAO is currently more working on trustability among those members by blockchain technology. So our work is more fundamental. It’s below the level of application so we won’t provide the estimation of the credibility of the machines because our scoring is not only on the moral level of different individuals but also on the accuracy of those computer chips which may not be controlled by human beings but machines.
The Oxford-Octa Laboratory will focus on the field of mathematical questions from digital finance and economics, including applying machine learning and blockchain technologies.
7) Could you please describe what is Trias in a few simple sentences in the condition that most people still don’t have a grasp of blockchain technology?
Trias is a full-stack decentralized trusted cloud infrastructure and an enterprise-oriented blockchain. It provides a platform to run DApps. It has integrated TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) technology, cyber security, and graph computing algorithms as a combined blockchain solution to ensure the correct execution of software.
Compared with other blockchains, the main feature of this Trias technology is the security of the application run on this platform.
Trias is building a highly scalable public chain that also provides “layer -1” infrastructure to support other public chains including Ethereum and Hyperledger. As I said in our research, we are also working on sucurity issue.
The TriasForce, which is a DApp run on Trias, has already been deployed in financial institutions and manufacturing industries.
8) What is the biggest difference between dApps running on Ethereum and dApps running on the Trias Network (Trias Force)? What is the benefit of one method over another?
Trias targets the trustworthiness of a lower layer: to ensure the correct executions of a general-purpose application, which includes other chains as they are fundamentally still software systems.
So basically, Ethereum itself is regarded as a dApp on Trias (We named it DSaaS). Everyone who needs to build a dApp on Ethereum can easily firstly initiate a dedicated Ethereum chain on Trias, with tweaked features, such as performance, latency, and security, and these will be improved.
9) Could you please tell us about Trias token’s utility in each layer?
Trias has 3 layers in its design, and Trias token has utility values in all these 3 layers. The first layer is the Execution layer where nodes have a chance to execute third-party codes, and nodes providing inspection services to the executing node will get $TRIAS tokens as rewards or incentives.
In the 2nd layer called the Development Layer, participants having contributions to coding, testing, security analyzing, building, hosting, distributing software components will get $TRIAS as rewards or incentives.
In the 3rd layer called the Application Layer, companies implementing Trias smart contracts to build Decentralized Software-as-a-Service (DSaaS) will earn $TRIAS from their users; meanwhile, these companies will pay $TRIAS to the services providers from the Execution Layer and Development Layer for hosting or supporting their DSaaS.
10) For now, we have a fairly good understanding of Trias. Then, what is Triathon?
Triathon is our recent project launched by Trias. This is a decentralized, community-driven framework for testing and auditing blockchains and decentralized applications (dApps).
Triathon aims to provide project builders and token holders with the ability to drive the testing and auditing process of crypto projects during their full lifecycles, regardless of whether the individual has a background in technology or not, so the general public can participate in this testing and auditing for blockchains and dApps.
11) So how does Triathon work?
The main idea of Triathon is to make the testing and auditing like a game so the general public can participate in some decentralized way and this process will be visible and observable by everybody.
So by this kind of operation, testing can be as easy as playing a game. It turns the obscure technical language into game-like testing scenarios. Triathon believes Metaverse is the future for this kind of task as it bridges reality and the virtual world. In Metaverse, atoms and bytes, human beings and software, physical assets and digital tokens/NFTs can coexist. Therefore, Triathon creates a GameFi, which provides an immersive experience for non-tech users to test blockchain projects in a real-time environment. Users can utilize and even create testing tools by themselves to initiate attacks and assignments to the testnets, observe the performance, and vote for their preferred projects. Meanwhile, users can earn income while enjoying playing games. This is called “play-and-earn”.
As a community built by public blockchains, applications (i.e. testnet), and participators, Triathon carries out real-time verification rigorously and transparently. There are six aspects to this kind of testing, including security, scalability, decentralization degree, storage efficiency, processing capacity, and adaptability being verified through different testing tasks and users worldwide can come to witness the whole process. By participating in this gaming or testing, they can also earn rewards and/or income. This is how Triathon does its testing and auditing– involving the global community and undertaking verification based on the community’s interests and real needs. Instead of seeking endorsement from authoritative third parties, Triathon collects credibility from users and observers across the space from the real world and virtual world. This kind of idea is exactly the decentralization in the blockchain.
12) How can you imagine Triathon later?
Triathon aims to be a new foundation stone for the crypto industry. It redefines the launching process of valid crypto projects.
It also gives all investors tools to verify every aspect of a new project by themselves. I believe these tools will be a standard choice for all investors in the near future.
Furthermore, with the “layer -1” capability of the Trias infrastructure, Triathon further has a chance to become the new foundation stone for the entire Internet. In the Internet world, test-driven launching and investing facilities can help us to identify the genuine properties of Internet services. I hope Triathon can shed the light on this kind of purpose.
13) So how will you measure the success of the Triathon?
This is a good question, but not easy to answer. Measuring the performance or success of a project is always hard especially if you want to measure it accurately because for different individuals, criteria may be different.
To me, Triathon is designed to be a decentralized, community-driven infrastructure for testing and auditing. It is primarily used for testing Trias’ own infrastructure. After launching the Triathon mainnet, Triathon can also support other subprojects’ launching in Trias. And the whole community can check the process in Triathon. If users can take Triathon’s testing results as a reference for making investment decisions, we can say that Triathon has achieved its goal — that is to be a purifier in the industry of blockchain and dApps.
14) Do you have any message for the Japanese audience?
Frankly, I’m not familiar with investors’ priorities in Japan, but I know that the Japanese are very into the crypto market and the government is more tolerant of cryptocurrencies. My view for this market is that this market is much better for financial investment but it’s still quite volatile compared with stocks or financial industries.
Potentially, the crypto market is more valuable at least to me because the idea of decentralization is critical and it will be more efficient, fair, and secure than the classical investment market.
I think we should pay more attention to the crypto market, but when we play in this market, we need to be careful and cautious since it’s still very volatile currently.
15) What kind of industry should be joining Trias in Japan? Can any ordinary person or blockchain enthusiast join Trias?
I think the most prominent feature of Trias is the security and scalability of the blockchain. If your project needs some higher requirements in terms of quality in this aspect, I strongly recommend Trias and it will be a very good choice for the Japanese industry.
Official website: https://www.trias.one
Whitepaper: https://www.trias.one/whitepaper
Telegram: https://t.me/triaslab
Twitter: https://twitter.com/triaslab
Discord: https://discord.gg/uSHpezwKWZ
Trade on Pancake: https://triaslab.medium.com/how-to-buy-trias-on-pancakeswap-d9bd1628e69f
