Scaling for crypto mass adoption may seem far away but Zhang has set his sights on doing just that

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When I mentioned to a friend in crypto that I was interviewing Dr. Xiao-guang (Ben) Zhang, he was impressed because it is not often that you get to meet someone who has built a blockchain from the ground up. They are a rare species. 

A computer scientist-turned consultant-turned entrepreneur, Zhang is now on a mission to build his startup NodeReal into a one-stop blockchain infrastructure platform that he hopes will be the web3 of cloud - much like dominant players Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and AliCloud are to the web2 space.

It is a lofty vision, but Zhang has pedigree. He holds a PhD in computer science and is a pioneer of the blockchain infrastructure sector. One of the founding builders of the BNB Chain ecosystem, in only two years he coordinated its growth from zero to position BNB Chain as one of the largest blockchains in the world.

The base layer of blockchain infrastructure is referred to as Layer 1, which handles  smart contract transactions and logs them on the blockchain. All transactions logged are viewable because blockchain is a giant database of records - a decentralized ledger. Layer 1s are also referred to as chains, of which Bitcoin and Ethereum are also examples. Several of the world’s Layer 1 chains are public, open-source environments, giving developers freedom to build their own applications and business ventures on top of Layer 1 chains, and these are referred to as Layer 2.

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Binance and its token BNB (Binance Coin) was initially launched on the Ethereum blockchain as a token, which is used to pay for various fees on the Binance platform, including trading and listing fees. Founded in China by Changpeng Zhao, Binance has grown to become the world’s largest centralized cryptocurrency exchange, a position further consolidated following the collapse of rival FTX in late 2022. 

I caught up with Xiao-guang Zhang before Chinese New Year (CNY). In this part of the world, it is normal to work through the Christmas period and take your annual break around CNY. For all of us in the crypto space, 2022 was such an intense and emotional year. At the time Zhang and I connected, we were yet to take a break. So when his video popped up with his Zoom background set to the tropical island with the swaying palm trees (you know the one), I just had to laugh. It broke the ice immediately. It was the perfect background.

I was keen to get Zhang’s reflections on 2022.

“It was unexpected to be honest,” he told me. “If you had asked me this question at the beginning of 2022, we were still in a very optimistic environment. NodeReal secured its investment of $16 million (Series A, led by Sky9 Capital) at the beginning of 2022. That’s not small. We were lucky.” 

NodeReal’s data over the past three months shows an overall industry resilience, Zhang said. “Although it's a very deep bear market right now, our utility is still very high,” he said. “Every week, we have more than 1,000 users using our service right now. And our partners still want to keep building. Even for those that may slow down a little bit, they are absolutely planning and building for the longer term.”

The bear market has also forced NodeReal to adjust their strategy. “In this current situation, we may go deeper,” he said. “That's why we chose our company name NodeReal - to “know the real” requirements of our customers. Our number one is to go to the blockchain core because we are still the BNB Chain core contributor. We put a lot of effort into the BNB Chain for scalability, storage and ecosystem building.”

NodeReal is the culmination of a series of events that began with his PhD thesis, which Zhang said was pivotal to giving him a global outlook.

“My thesis supervisor was a Stanford University graduate with a very open mind and it dramatically changed my approach to identifying the problem and finding the solution,” he said. “He showed me that for some of the challenges or problems that you cannot solve, you have to be more systematic and think deeper. My parents taught me that I need to study and work harder. Here I learned how to work smarter. It opened my eyes and I wanted to become more global.”

At the end of his studies in 2004, Zhang joined the enterprise database software company Sybase as an engineer. The company was acquired by SAP in 2010. That same year, he joined Morgan Stanley, a career that spanned nearly a decade and exposed him to startup culture through Morgan Stanley’s famous CTO Summits in Silicon Valley. 

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For Zhang, exposure to startups often felt at odds with the limitations of working within a large corporation.

“I worked in web2 and FinTech for quite a long time, within a corporate culture,” he said. “You need to follow the procedures. Yes, you can propose your idea. But you have a lot of restrictions to make these ideas happen.”

When a friend introduced blockchain to him it was a defining moment - he saw it as a gateway to entrepreneurial freedom. He left Morgan Stanley and joined the effort to build at Binance. Coming from the comfort of a corporation to starting a project from scratch brought home the reality of being a startup founder.

“I still remember when I really kicked it off and almost one month went by and there was one block and zero transactions there,” he said. “I could not get any applications in the blockchain. So I had to go out, find the partners. Within 12 months we had hundreds of applications in the BNB chain.”

From there, the platform experienced explosive growth.

“For the BNB Chain in 2021 it felt like we went through several cycles,” he said. “During that time, I really did experience super high pressure for the infrastructure side. At the highest time we had 700,000 queries per second, which is something like Amazon Black Friday or Alibaba Singles Day. At the same time, we also saw Ethereum dramatically improved. Their user base improved. Polygon [was] coming up. And Solana. We really needed to dramatically improve our service to satisfy the requirements of the user base. 

The BNB Chain Lunar New Year meetup in Singapore

The numbers tell the story. In December 2021, BNB Chain released its staggering annual figures revealing “2.14 billion transactions in total, with an ATH (all time high) of 16.26 million daily transactions recorded on 25th Nov,” propelling the blockchain to become one of the biggest in a rapidly short time span.

This is when the idea for NodeReal was born. For Zhang the problem to solve was clear --  scalability in the face of mass adoption.

“I want to build something even bigger, and especially for this high-performance ecosystem,” he said. “Something like AWS, Google Cloud for the Internet. At the beginning, you do not need this kind of cloud service. But later, after you have really scaled your business so much, you need this kind of scale infrastructure. Which is something that AWS did at the beginning by only serving Amazon, and later they secured Netflix. Netflix really helped them to reform the host services.” 

Zhang concedes that the bear market hasn’t provided the ideal conditions to offer up the quantity of clients with the type of scaling challenges for which he has the solution. “We know this is a big opportunity, so we jumped in and built this infrastructure. But because of the bear market, the utility for this kind of high-performance service is currently not in high demand,” he said. The company has since tweaked its business strategy to meet the market conditions. “Our vision of becoming a web3 cloud service provider has not changed. So we are still focusing.”

With the company of 100 headquartered in Singapore, I wanted to find out what impressions Zhang had formed of the South East Asian market following his recent move here. While praising the skills of the local talent, he remarked, “if you look at the original, innovative projects, either from the layer 1, layer 2, web3 applications, they are still in the US or Europe right now. So, absolutely, I want to help in this region and see how we can really build more innovative ideas, but I think we need to connect with the top innovators where they are. At the same time, we hope we can bridge them with the Asian region. That is why we are here - to support mass adoption, growth and long-term success of the web3 ecosystem.”