@EMCprotocol is not a scam. It’s a legit startup founded by a group of very experienced tech entrepreneurs from China. Members of the current IC community may or may not understand or agree with the way EMC team articulates their vision. That’s all fine and I think the EMC team is open for suggestions and discussions. As @MillionMiles of 8yeargangDAO said, we in the IC community should extend open arms to welcome new players to embrace IC, not to trash them.
While it’s reasonable to perform your own due diligence on an IC project, let me share a few notes about the particular situation in China:
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China has about 7 million developers vs 24 million in the rest of the world. China has the second most number of unicorns in the world after US and is quickly catching up (say, ByteDance). Most of those developers or tech entrepreneurs are NOT on Twitter. Though Twitter seems like the way of life for crypto folks and the only place that matters to prove someone’s presence in crypto, it is not for Chinese. Every popular social media platform, from Facebook, Youtube, Google, Instagram, Reddit, Medium, Discord and Twitter is banned in China. It’s entirely possible that a famous KOL of millions of fans in China only has a puny presence on Twitter. According to Statista, WeChat is now a top 5 social media global platform with 1.3 billion MAU and Twitter is No. 14 with 556 million MAU. I’m not trying to back up any specific number from EMC for them but merely saying that there is a much bigger parallel universe out there beyond the usual Twitter/DFINITY Dev Forum/Discord etc. ICP is uniquely positioned to attract developers from that parallel universe (which has been dominated by Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei and ByteDance) and EMC is now trying to bridge to that crowd with its integration to ICP.
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The entire crypto industry is pretty tiny compared to the traditional Web2 space. ICP, if viewed as a decentralized AWS, is the only blockchain that can speak to literally millions of developers who are used to building on AWS/Azure/GCP in kubernetes (and every self-respectable developer is now toying with chatGPT/AIGC). Right now, there is no elegant solution for the crypto industry to reach out to this much bigger cohort, for a variety of reasons that Signal’s founder Moxie laid out in his famous “My First Impression of Web3” article in Jan 2022. I’d encourage members of the IC community to be more open-minded and try to help the new kid on the block. Yes, they’re new, but isn’t that what we’re trying to do here, to bring in new blood who shares our vision and audacity? We should cheer for someone who just created an account on this forum recently, not to make that a liability for them.
With this out of way, please go back to your suggestions and feedback to the EMC team on how they can present themselves better in the IC community, engage the community, and earn that trust. Thank you.