Xiao Feng: How I Met Vitalik and Chose to Fund the Ethereum Foundation?
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Xiao Feng: How I Met Vitalik and Chose to Fund the Ethereum Foundation?
"The Merge" is not only a significant moment in Ethereum's development history, but also destined to be a landmark event in the evolution of blockchain technology!
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsOn September 15, 2022, Ethereum will mark another historic milestone following the publication of its original white paper at the end of 2013 and the launch of its mainnet in July 2015: "The Merge." Ethereum's consensus mechanism will transition from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS).
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"The Merge" will reduce Ethereum’s energy consumption by 99%, cut ETH issuance by 90%, and—after integration with sharding and Layer 2 (L2) protocols—drive gas fees close to zero. All this will be achieved without compromising network security or health.
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"The Merge" is expected to enable Ethereum to scale up to 100,000 transactions per second over the next three years, and 10 million per second over the next decade, achieving high performance and extreme flexibility in scalability. This will further cement Ethereum’s position as the foundational infrastructure for the metaverse.
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"The Merge" is not only a pivotal moment in Ethereum’s development, but also destined to be a landmark event in the history of blockchain technology! After "The Merge," Ethereum will still require another upgrade six months later to restore normal transfer functionality. This subsequent upgrade has been named "Shanghai" by the Ethereum community.
September 2016, after hosting the first two global developer conferences in Berlin and London, the third Ethereum Developer Conference (DEVCON2) was held at the Rainbow Hotel in Shanghai’s North Bund. Of the nearly one thousand attendees (today’s Ethereum DevCon now draws tens of thousands), 90% had traveled from overseas. Hearing directly from global blockchain thought leaders greatly accelerated the popularization of blockchain technology in China. One Chinese tech journalist wrote on Weibo: “Walking into the venue and seeing that 90% of the attendees were foreigners made me think I was at a conference in Europe or America.”
Five years ago, this Ethereum Global Developer Conference in Shanghai—which gave participants a sense of temporal dislocation—was fully sponsored and brought to China by Wanxiang Blockchain Labs. According to the long-planned process for Ethereum’s transition from PoW to PoS, each key milestone is named after the city where a DevCon was held. Thus originated Ethereum’s "Shanghai Upgrade."
December 2014, at the “Sanya International Financial Forum” hosted by Caijing Magazine, I organized a “Digital Currency Panel.” Speakers included former financial regulators, bankers, and digital currency practitioners. My presentation focused on Ethereum, which had just celebrated its first anniversary since the white paper release, while the keynote centered on Bitcoin. This was likely the first time that digital currencies—then considered marginal—represented by Bitcoin and Ether, were discussed at a high-level forum hosted by a prominent Chinese financial media outlet. Naturally, it drew attention from China’s blockchain and cryptocurrency community.
During lunch right after the panel, I received a WeChat friend request. He said he had read about my speech online and was then sitting with Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin at a café in Incheon International Airport, South Korea, waiting for their flight. That’s how I finally connected with Vitalik—but Shen Bo was the one who introduced us.
Vitalik arrived in Shanghai in April 2015, carrying a cloth bag printed with a cat. It wasn’t his first trip to China. At our first meeting, I was surprised he could send WeChat messages in Chinese and even hold basic conversations, albeit not fluently—an impressive feat for someone who hadn’t formally studied the language. His Chinese proficiency differed from most foreigners; his written skills were stronger than his spoken ones. He once shared his secret method: reading Chinese-translated materials on blockchain and cryptocurrencies—including the Bitcoin and Ethereum white papers—and cross-referencing them with the original English versions. Once, when the three of us shared a taxi in New York, he would occasionally pull out his phone during our Chinese conversation to check a Chinese-English dictionary, confirming whether his understanding matched what we were saying. In 2016, at the Wanxiang Blockchain Week in Shanghai, Vitalik prepared his presentation slides entirely in Chinese himself.
During his more than one month stay in Shanghai, Vitalik lived at Shen Bo’s home. He had no special demands regarding lifestyle—almost no desires beyond basic sustenance. His only possible hobby might have been cats. While on a business trip to Hong Kong, I found a heavy photography book on cats by a renowned photographer in a bookstore and brought it back to Shanghai as a gift for Vitalik. Given his nomadic lifestyle, he probably couldn’t carry such a bulky book around despite appreciating it. In 2015, Vitalik stayed in Shanghai multiple times, totaling over three months. Perhaps this photo book brought him some comfort during his time there.
We met frequently to discuss blockchain and Ethereum, with a central focus on how Wanxiang could collaborate with Ethereum to advance blockchain R&D and applications in China. One morning in April 2015, Vitalik came to Wanxiang Tower looking visibly tired—he clearly hadn’t slept well the night before. Shen Bo pulled me aside and told me the Ethereum community had held an all-night meeting, sparked by concerns over the cash reserves in the Ethereum Foundation’s account and doubts about whether sufficient funds existed to support operations until the mainnet launch.
At just 20 years old, Vitalik was clearly under pressure from community developers. Such foundational technologies with world-changing potential deserve strong support from all sides. Intuitively, I sensed this might be a rare opportunity granted by fate—to Wanxiang, and to me. If we stepped in with active funding at this critical juncture, we could not only become contributors to this landmark project but also use it as a strategic lever to execute Wanxiang’s broader blockchain strategy.
Thus, I proposed that Wanxiang Blockchain Labs donate $500,000 to the Ethereum Foundation. I added that if needed, we could continue supporting them the following year, helping alleviate developers’ concerns so they could focus fully on work, ensuring the timely launch of the Ethereum mainnet with whatever assistance we could provide.
Since the Ethereum Foundation is a non-profit legal entity registered in Switzerland, both parties’ lawyers helped draft a donation agreement. The Foundation agreed that upon mainnet launch, it would return a pre-agreed amount of ETH from unlocked tokens to the donor. As "Wanxiang Blockchain Labs" was still in the process of registration and to comply with foreign exchange regulations, the funds were transferred via an overseas subsidiary within the Wanxiang group. However, the blockchain collaboration was officially assigned to the soon-to-be-established "Wanxiang Blockchain Labs" for execution.
After everything was settled, Vitalik announced in an open letter to the community that the Ethereum Foundation had received a donation from a China-based organization, along with its commitment to ongoing support. This calmed the developers’ concerns about the Foundation’s near-term cash flow. In hindsight, these worries were unnecessary. But at the time, facing such a globally ambitious project—the so-called "world computer"—led by a young technical prodigy in his early twenties, questions like “how long can this last?” were quite natural.
This event also marked the official start of Wanxiang’s strategic deployment in blockchain. In the second half of 2015, Wanxiang Blockchain Labs was established; the first Wanxiang Blockchain Global Summit was held; Distributed Capital—the first Asian venture fund dedicated solely to blockchain investments—was launched (with Wanxiang as the sole limited partner); Wanxiang Blockchain Labs launched its global "Blockchain Startup Grant Program"; published a series of blockchain books; co-hosted training workshops for Chinese blockchain experts, and more.
Mid-October 2015, the first Wanxiang Blockchain Global Summit was held in Shanghai, marking the beginning of blockchain technology promotion in China. Wanxiang fully leveraged resources from the Ethereum community to curate cutting-edge global topics, invite top international blockchain figures, and mobilize domestic industry players to participate. Responding to Vitalik’s call and invitations, many of the world’s leading blockchain experts attended, representing the highest level of global blockchain expertise at the time. The summit lasted two days: the first day was an open forum, the second a private, invitation-only discussion. The event received strong support and widespread acclaim from the domestic industry. One pioneering domestic company sent eight colleagues, but due to space limitations, not all were invited to the closed sessions. They approached me directly, insisting on attending all six private discussion sessions. Their enthusiasm deeply moved me.
It wasn’t untilearly January 2016 that the first Blockchain Hackathon was held in Shanghai, marking the perfect conclusion of Wanxiang’s initial phase of blockchain initiatives. Co-organized by Wanxiang and Deloitte, the hackathon welcomed three technical experts sent by the Ethereum Foundation as mentors and judges, with Vitalik attending in person. Over 120 participants from around the world formed teams on-site and created projects spontaneously. One member of the winning team was a high school student who had self-funded his trip from Italy to compete. After the intense 48-hour competition, he asked if he could join Wanxiang Blockchain Labs full-time. After much persuasion, we managed to get him on a return flight. A year later, we began to regret it slightly—he eventually co-founded a blockchain startup in Europe and became the core technical figure behind the now-popular project. Youthful ambition knows no bounds! Reflecting on how Vitalik himself was only in his early twenties when starting out, one can’t help but marvel: in the blockchain industry, the younger generation is truly formidable!
May 2016, a nine-member delegation departed from Pudong Airport, first heading to the San Francisco Bay Area, then New York for the “Consensus Conference,” detouring through London before returning to Shanghai. This was a Europe-U.S. blockchain research tour planned together with Vitalik, who joined us in San Francisco. Along the way, we met many leading figures, absorbed new ideas, and discovered promising projects. Another goal of this trip was to identify several mystery speakers for the second Wanxiang Blockchain Summit. At a restaurant in Mountain View, Silicon Valley, we had lunch with Nick Szabo, the “father of smart contracts,” and invited him to speak at that year’s blockchain summit in Shanghai. Extremely cautious, arranging a meeting with him had taken considerable effort. After multiple invitations over two years, he finally attended the Third Wanxiang Blockchain Global Summit in 2017.
Late September 2016, the Second Wanxiang Blockchain Global Summit took place as scheduled. This time, however, the event had expanded into the “Blockchain Week.” The first three days hosted the Second Ethereum Global Developer Conference (following software development convention, the first was named DevCon0; this being DevCon2, it was technically the third). Day four featured a blockchain project demo day, followed by the global summit on days five and six. It was precisely Wanxiang’s 2015 funding commitment to the Ethereum community that enabled the expansion from a single summit to a full international week. Beyond the initial $500,000 donation, Wanxiang had also pledged continued support for Ethereum’s development in 2016 as needed. However, after the successful mainnet launch, the Ethereum Foundation no longer faced urgent funding needs. Still, Wanxiang couldn’t let its promise go unfulfilled. So we proposed that if the Ethereum Global Developer Conference moved to China, Wanxiang Blockchain Labs would cover all expenses, while any ticket sales or sponsorship revenues would go directly to the Ethereum Foundation. Thus, the “Shanghai Blockchain Week” was born.
September 15, 2022, Ethereum’s “The Merge” is imminent. I envision a future where a comprehensive blockchain protocol stack converges around Ethereum. In the 1980s, the internet featured numerous incompatible protocols until market forces unified them into the TCP/IP stack. The deeper the layer, the more standardized the protocols became—such as IP, TCP, and HTTP. Only at the application layer did diversity flourish, with potentially hundreds of different protocols.
Today’s multi-chain phenomenon in blockchain resembles the era before internet protocols were unified. Market demand for seamless interoperability will inevitably drive the convergence of blockchain protocol stacks. Currently, only Ethereum appears—intentionally or unintentionally—to be architecting a full blockchain protocol stack, spanning from L0 (distributed communication, storage, computing) to L1, L2, and even L3. Moreover, post-"Merge," Ethereum’s performance and scalability improvements will support mass adoption.According to the Ethereum Foundation, within ten years, Ethereum aims to achieve transaction throughput of 10 million TPS.
Based on my observations and drawing parallels with the evolution of internet protocols, I believe that in the coming years, market forces will gradually consolidate blockchain protocols into a unified stack. Other public blockchains outside Ethereum may evolve into sub-chains, sidechains, shards, or zones of Ethereum, ultimately realizing a seamlessly interconnected blockchain ecosystem.
Now, at this pivotal moment in Ethereum and blockchain development, the Chinese publication of *The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-hackers Is Building the Next Internet* (translated as *Everything Connected: Ethereum and the Future of Digital Finance*) by China Translation & Publishing House is profoundly significant!
Let these personal memories of Ethereum’s "Shanghai moment" serve as supplementary context for this important book.
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