Privacy and Scalability in the Blockchain Age: A Conversation with Victor Ji, Co-Founder of Manta Network

Victor Ji, blockchain pioneer and the Co-founder of Manta Network, recently provided invaluable insights on the future of blockchain technology in a discussion with BitpushNews at the BitBlock Summit in New York.

The focus of this year's Summit was on the ever-evolving landscape of blockchain technology, with a particular emphasis on how it may revolutionize privacy and scalability in the digital age. At the forefront of these conversations was the question of how blockchain could potentially enhance digital privacy and handle large-scale operations while maintaining its core principles. Further discussions delved into the legal terrain for blockchain startups in the US and a more detailed understanding of the real-world applications of privacy-focused blockchain solutions.

As the Co-Founder of Manta Network, Victor navigated through his experiences, outlining the inception and evolution of the Manta Network. Stemming from a profound passion for societal impact and financial freedom that he honed at Harvard Kennedy School, Victor's insights paint a promising picture of blockchain technology's future, especially regarding privacy and scalability. Moreover, his perspective serves as a beacon of guidance for aspiring entrepreneurs in the crypto space.

Bitpush: How did your studies at the Kennedy School and Guanghua Management school of Peking shape your perspective on the blockchain industry and your decision to co-found Manta Network? Can you share any particular insights or experiences from your time there that influenced your current path?

Victor Ji: I started researching crypto in 2016. When was like doing my first startup and I was trying to find some new technology and I found blockchain to be a good one. And at that time, you know, like I started about cryptocurrency and then before I joined the Kennedy School, I was already working on crypto. I started my own fund also working on other VCs before and other projects before.

So I understood how the crypto industry works. Back in 2018, I got a chance to study at the Harvard Kennedy School. Before I was in crypto, actually in the tradfi, but I was not working in the states, I was actually working in Israel during the tradfi. So, it's a pretty unique experience, but I find in Israel, everyone has their own startup. I actually learn a lot about how to do startup. I talk to a lot of founders and, I really want to be an entrepreneur since that time. And then when I get into crypto, I started working from the VC side.

I studied economics at the Kennedy School, but we were also thinking about how to create an impact on society. And the way I'm thinking impact is, you know, is to enable more people with unbanked people and how to serve them and enable them to have some ways to achieve freedom in finance in their daily lives. And I think crypto is the best way to achieve that goal. But at the same time, if you want to fully realize freedom and help protect human rights in the web website, there's no way right now because everything is transparent, but you definitely need privacy. It's a basic human right. So our goal is to try to figure out a solution in privacy.

I was actually in Gary Gensler's class, at MIT, when I studied at Harvard, I can cross-register some class at MIT. I learned a lot from compliance side in Gary's class, so I don't think privacy is in conflict with compliance, but they need a good technology. And then back in 2019, I started research on ZK. I think that's the best way to achieve decentralized and privacy. I think like that's best technology to solve the issue. So back in the defi summer, I was heavily involved in that project in 2020. And then I found my co-founder at that time, he was a research scientist and there's another co-founder was my classmate at MIT. 

That's how we started Manta Network. We use DK technology and we know what we want to do which is to achieve human freedom and protect human rights while keeping compliance for the whole web. 

Bitpush: How do you foresee the future of blockchain technology with respect to privacy and scalability? Where does Manta Network fit in that future landscape?

Victor Ji: I think there's lot of privacy projects. Some are like fully decentralized. It's like a tornado cast, but they're really non-compliance. They don't care about regulations. Also, there's some like super sophisticated privacy projects like Mina, Aztec, they're doing really sophisticated things like privacy preserving programming language. So it's not compatible, but what we are thinking is how can we get a compliance and compatible privacy solution that what we are we want to do. Basically, we try to enable developers to build on top of us without knowing anything about Zk, and without learning any new languages. But at the same time, you know we have lot of like features like zkKYC you know, like lot of other ways to, to enhance our network to be a compliance network.

But at the same time, like the basic technology, what we are doing is we have a public address, and we have a private address. This private address is for shooting it, you can do sending, receive and transfer all these actions in the private network, but no one can see it on the blockchain. But we use ZK to hide all this information and this information still verified on the chain. So, we are on chain privacy, but at the same time, it's not against the regulation.

Bitpush: What were some of the most significant challenges you faced in the early stages of Manta Network?

Victor Ji: At the beginning we have lot of like issues and there was a lot of challenges. At the beginning we took a lot of time doing research and engineering work. It's really hard. It's much harder than we expect to build the infrastructure for Manta network. There was no one we can copy and there's a lot of hype in the market, but it's super hard to build these things. But we actually made it. It definitely took longer than we expected. But this year we are starting to have more engineers and we have more applications. We improve our engineering capability a lot and there's lot of great engineers on our team. We are doing some great infrastructure and also we have more than 220k zkSBT minted. We have seven ZSBT right now there are great partners like farm Linea. Cyberconnect and Galxe. So, it is growing really fast.

And we launch our wallet within a month, and we already have 150k downloads. As time goes on, I think we are also like going to face more challenges. We need to grow our ecosystem. I think our long-term goal is to be more compatible, to have more privacy features to enable users easier to use our technology. So we need our network to be faster, cheaper, and at the same time, easy to build. 

Bitpush: Having studied at the Kennedy School and now leading a major player in the crypto space, what advice would you give to entrepreneurs who are looking to disrupt traditional industries with blockchain technology?

Victor Ji: For the entrepreneurs, the first thing is to really commit what you are doing. If you don't commit yourself, it will be really hard for other people to commit, and to believe what you are doing. So, commitment is key. I think that would be a really important thing. And I think knowing how to raise fund is really important and finding a good start is important. A good start, you can take as long as you need to find a good start, because if you find a good direction, it can make things much easier. But if you find a terrible direction no matter how you did, it would be useless.

In other words, the narrative you are building and the project you are building, its direction is really important. Finding a great founder is important. If I say 90% of the project can success or not, it depends on which founder you find. You need to find a good cofounder. That is the most important thing. But if you want to do yourself, it's certainly possible. But it's just much harder.

Bitpush: How do you see the regulatory environment affecting the drive towards more private and scalable blockchain solutions, and how is Manta Network preparing for potential regulatory challenges?

Victor Ji: I think from the beginning we try to be complex as much as possible even though it's really hard. But we have great legal counsel, we have done a lot of things and we never raised from any US semester. We have fully decentralized foundation, and we have a development company is only focused on development of the network. So that's something we really focus on. And also, we have lot of PR compliance feature like zkKYC on the network, basically on like leverage finance, leverage galaxy. So we have tried with KYC users without touching any of their privacy information.

Yeah, I think that's kind of the idea, but I think your company regulation is not that clear in us. especially right now. So, it, it is actually killing the developer. It's killing the real builder. It's killing the industry. So that's not good. We still need to find better ways to try to work with regulation, but at the same time, the regulation needs to be much, much clearer and have to fit the the dynamic of the equip the Web3 world rather than only about following the security. You know, that's really simple, but not accurate way to define this kind of thing. 

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