Most suffered badly in 2020 and they name it their worst year ever. For me, on the contrast, 2020 is my best year of lifetime. COVID-19 is no doubt the most blamed factor that drove the economy down. That’s not the case for me.

Personally I stay in my apartment at most time without social activities as my lifestyle for years, and am less travelled. So COVID-19 makes no harms on my daily life and surprisingly makes it even better, e.g. less crowed supermarkets. Though the constantly healthy code checking or temperature measuring actually annoys me, but wearing masks as a new norm has made my privacy protected in a country under strictest surveillance with cameras in every corner.

On the side of working, we are a small team, an Internet native team. Before 2020, we already communicated and collaborated mostly online, with Slack and GitHub, and we rarely made face-to-face communications or meetings. At the end of 2019, we also made the decision to close our only office in Beijing and went fully remote, that was before COVID-19 was reported and aware by people. Not only our internal communication, but also all our external cooperations are online. So COVID-19 has almost zero impacts on our business. Another crucial advantage that protects our business from pandemic is that we are still in an early stage without pressure on revenue.

Without negative impacts from pandemic, 2020 is just a normal year for me. Every year, I feel dramatically improved, the same in 2020. Most significant achievements are:

• Better understanding in cryptographic theory and technology. I have read lots of papers on elliptic curves, BLS digital signature, group theory, and reviewed many mathematical knowledge from my college.
• Lots of work in distributed system. Most of my engineering works are making something distributed. The Mixin Kernel is a distributed ledger, the D3M-PIN system is a distributed authentication system for human, and the Mixin Domain assures its assets security by distributed threshold signature.
• Further learning on WebRTC technology. My previous startup is an video streaming service, and I have had good experiences with many streaming technologies including WebRTC, which was not mature enough 5 years ago. This year we added E2EE group voice call in Mixin Messenger, and I choose WebRTC as the foundation, and made our own SFU, Kraken.
• More fluent English skills. By reading more papers and news, I have improved a lot in understanding English. I have also restarted my writing and created about 100 posts. As a skill, English and programming are the only that I feel improved after leaving college. Yesterday I read some IELTS articles and just felt much easier than my daily readings.
• Significant growth of our startup. After three years development, Mixin has gained lots of users and is managing hundreds of millions of assets in the distributed ledger. During the pandemic year, we make the core metrics tripled than 2019. Thus result has built a solid starting point for our next 10 years.
• Leap understanding on investments and finance. I rarely do financial investments and resist doing pure financial things. After working on the public distributed ledger for years, the technology side of a financial system, I have changed my minds a lot on finance. Regular investing is actually the same methodology I insist on everything, and making money with money is not a shame. We also jointly started some MTG projects by providing money for liquidity, including an AMM and a stablecoin.
• More thorough and softer thoughts on human. I am a sharp one on things, and I judge critically, not for benefiting from that, but for improving others. And I do really bad on distinguishing one from the other on their capabilities, I believe people are equal, this is also the root cause of my critical attitudes towards people. Both of them have been somewhat overcome.

There are still more to list, but the most significant achievement I made in 2020 is staying the same me as the one of my high school. I think about myself a lot, during breaks, before sleeping, and when impressed by something, and I always have a conclusion that I have never changed since high school. During an event on Dec 20, someone pointed out that it was not high school, it was only that I realized myself in high school, people was born like. I make no further thinking on this topic, but I know I’m the same high school boy, defined by my motive, my belief in slow is fast, in consistence.

Just as my previous post, almost all my posts lead to the same summary that consistence makes great difference, the consistent me has make every year better than the past years for me. Thus I can forecast 2021 would surpass 2020 to be my best year of lifetime.