Notary Application

PLEASE NOTE ANY APPLICATION SUBMITTED BEFORE THE FINALIZATION OF THE GOVERNING FIP OR THIS REPO WILL BE DISCARDED

To apply as a notary, please fill out the following form.

Core Information

Name: Bruce Xie
(Optional) Affiliated Organization: Wankejia
Website / Social Media: https://www.wkj.link/
On-chain Address(es) to be Notarized: f1mvmwf7mo3i5qxunvivb64kf6td6ak5zrcdhisby
Region of Operation: Greater China
Use case(s) to be supported: General
DataCap Requested: 50PB

Please respond to the questions below in pargraph form, replacing the text saying "Please answer here". Include as much detail as you can in your answer!

Long Term Network Alignment

Time Commitment

Describe the nature and duration of your affiliation with the Filecoin project. Please include relevant Github handles, miner ids, significant projects or contributions (with links).

Wankejia: The largest storage mining crypto exchange in China. 85% volume of China-made storage mining cryptocurrencies are traded at Wankejia platform. Incubated or participated development and launching more than 10 China-made storage mining cryptoes including:
链克LTK: by Xunlei (NASDAQ:XNET), Nasdaq listed company https://www.xunlei.com/
数字黄金DGC: by Lenovo (00992.HK), Fortune 500 company https://www.lenovo.com/
积分星STC: by 2345 (02345.HK), HK listed company https://www.2345.com/
云砖YZ: by 360 (NASDAQ: QFIN), Nasdaq listed company https://www.360.cn/
As a storage mining crypto lover, I started to affiliate with IPFS/Filecoin since 2014 when the white paper just came out. Firstly introduced IPFS/Filecoin into several Blockchain club in China, and there wasn’t many at the time. People was fascinated by BTC at the time, even ETH did not drag too much attentions from crypto communities. In late 2015, I co-founded the Blockchain club of Peking University (the top university in China), and introduced IPFS/Filecoin into the club. IPFS/Filecoin started to heat up in 2016 due to several active club members. Other than myself, we have Mr. Dong, who published several book regarding IPFS/Filecoin and well-recognized in China as the IPFS evangelist; Mr. Cai, my crypto exchange investor, who invested multiple Filecoin ecosystem companies which became significant contributors nowadays; Mr. Lu, a global Filecoin evangelist, who later in 2019-2020 supported over 20 miners across 6 continents to participant in Filecoin testnet and mainnet by providing logistics and data center solutions.
Selected projects and contributions:
2015 Co-founded Peking University Blockchain Club; 2017 Founded IPFS/Filecoin Group
2017 Participated Filecoin ICO on behalf of Peking University Blockchain Club
2017 Incubated and technical supported one of the top Filecoin minging company
2017 Convinced Madison Group Holdings, a HK listed company, to invest and participate Filecoin and to lead the Hong Kong Filecoin Investment communities.
2018 Brought Abu Dhabi royal family crypto fund to participate Filecoin
2017-2020 Monthly Filecoin discussions and Q&A online/offline at Wankejia.
2017-2020 Converted more than 300,000 Wankejia community members to early Filecoin investors, and many of them became China regional leaders in Province/City level KOL and community organizers.

Stake Exposure

Please cite total token at stake (currently available, locked as collateral, vesting over time) and any substantiating evidence.

I prefer not to disclose the exact amount; while a significant portion of Filecoin held by Chinese individual investors are kept in Wankejia.

Industry Reputation

In-protocol Reputation

Please describe (in detail) your activity and tenure as a member of the Filecoin community. Please note (with links where possible) any contributions made to implementations of Filecoin, the spec, documentation, or to substantially help the Filecoin ecosystem grow.

As a storage mining crypto lover, I started to affiliate with IPFS/Filecoin since 2014 when the white paper just came out. Firstly introduced IPFS/Filecoin into several Blockchain club in China, and there wasn’t many at the time. People was fascinated by BTC at the time, even ETH did not drag too much attentions from crypto communities. In late 2015, I co-founded the Blockchain club of Peking University (the top university in China), and introduced IPFS/Filecoin into the club. IPFS/Filecoin started to heat up in 2016 due to several active club members. Other than myself, we have Mr. Dong, who published several book regarding IPFS/Filecoin and well-recognized in China as the IPFS evangelist; Mr. Cai, my crypto exchange investor, who invested multiple Filecoin ecosystem companies which became significant contributors nowadays; Mr. Lu, a global Filecoin evangelist, who later in 2019-2020 supported over 20 miners across 6 continents to participant in Filecoin testnet and mainnet by providing logistics and data center solutions.
Selected projects and contributions:
2015 Co-founded Peking University Blockchain Club; 2017 Founded IPFS/Filecoin Group
2017 Participated Filecoin ICO on behalf of Peking University Blockchain Club
2017 Incubated and technical supported one of the top Filecoin minging company
2017 Convinced Madison Group Holdings, a HK listed company, to invest and participate Filecoin and to lead the Hong Kong Filecoin Investment communities.
2018 Brought Abu Dhabi royal family crypto fund to participate Filecoin
2017-2020 Monthly Filecoin discussions and Q&A online/offline at Wankejia.
2017-2020 Converted more than 300,000 Wankejia community members to early Filecoin investors, and many of them became China regional leaders in Province/City level KOL and community organizers.
2020 https://www.wkj.link/exchange/btd_bitcny BTD, the largest distributed storage mining crypto in China with 6 million users and 260 local offices/agencies, 95% transaction volume in on Wankejia platform. We converted more than 5% of BTD users to Filecoin investors, and more than 10 local offices/agencies became Filecoin KOLs.    
2020 https://www.wkj.link/exchange/ltk_bitcny LTK, a well-known distributed storage mining crypto in China a couple of years ago founded by Xunlei (NASDAQ:XNET). It was shut down due to government regulation, with 150,000+ miners in the marketing self-trading on Wankejia platform. Now most of the 150,000+ miners became Filecoin investors.

In-protocol Security

Please describe your contributions to the security of Filecoin and the duration over which you've made contributions. Please also include any links or references who might be able to substantiate your contributions (e.g. if you've filed several bugs, please cite who you've communicated with on the Filecoin side).

We did have quite some technical support in 2017 and early 2018 to some of the Filecoin mining companies or groups, and later on some became top miners in the network. We didn’t get the chance to speak with Filecoin side.

External Reputation

Please describe the nature of your organization, including the country of registration, size of the organization, and time since inception.

Country of registration: Started in China, and re-registered in UK in 2017 due to local regulation
Size of the organization: 51
Time since inception: 6 years
Wankejia: The largest storage mining crypto exchange in China. 85% volume of China-made storage mining cryptocurrencies are traded at Wankejia platform. Incubated or participated development and launching more than 10 China-made storage mining cryptoes including:
链克LTK: by Xunlei (NASDAQ:XNET), Nasdaq listed company https://www.xunlei.com/
数字黄金DGC: by Lenovo (00992.HK), Fortune 500 company https://www.lenovo.com/
积分星STC: by 2345 (02345.HK), HK listed company https://www.2345.com/
云砖YZ: by 360 (NASDAQ: QFIN), Nasdaq listed company https://www.360.cn/
We are the ONLY crypto partner for Chinese listed companies to issue Storage and CDN tokens, and the crypto partner of more than 80% Chinese unlisted companies to issue Storage and CDN tokens. Most of Chinese Storage/CDN crypto individual investors started their first trade on Wangkejia platform. Millions of users from Binance/Huobi/Okex started their crypto journeys from Wangkejia. Wangkejia is the largest Storage mining community and early incubator in China.

Please share any relevant details to help substantiate information about your organization (website, named officers, links to social media profiles).

Website: https://www.wkj.link/
Named officer: Bruce Xie, Founder and CEO

Please share any relevant external information regarding your organization (e.g. news articles, social media profiles, etc.)

Due to China’s regulation in cryptocurrency issuing, and Wankejia is the largest Chinese cryptocurrency exchange platform in storage and cdn areas. 2 of our GR (government relation) team members work full-timely with medias just to have them remove all online/social media information regarding Wankejia. We do have hundreds of QQ groups and Wechat groups all together with online members over one million.
Given that, here we still got some footprint, which probably means our team members didn’t do their job well:
https://www.szxpc.com/btd/232.html
https://kuaibao.qq.com/s/20180726A1910800?refer=spider
http://www.ltk100.com/thread-251-1-1.html
https://www.jianshu.com/u/e26d15ce87bd
https://tieba.baidu.com/f?kw=%E7%8E%A9%E5%AE%A2%E5%AE%B6

Diversity and Decentralization

Use Case Diversity

(Optional) Any additional information you'd like to share about the use case(s) you plan to support?

Due to the extensive experience working with Chinese web 2.0 companies, and their web 3.0 projects, I think what we focus in China is not what’s good and cost-efficient for users, but what’s comfortable for the users. Once they joined the network and enjoyed the experience, which will be at least half a year later, then we start to talk about what use cases we’d like to take.

Allocation Plan

Concreteness of Allocation Plan

Allocation Strategy

How do you plan on allocating the DataCap requested above? Please describe your allocation strategy with as much specificity as you can.

I just had my perfect allocation strategy written up with a nice and clean excel table, then found out a couple of new notary applicants came up with more logical and executional strategy last night. I’d like to follow their process and optimize on the way.
To sum up Fenbushi and Performive, as well as earlier applicants IPFSMain and Filecoin Foundation, following information to be collected and evaluated for allocation:
1.Knowledge and commitment to Filecoin: the willingness to be partner of the network
2.Technical capability and resources: how much Clients could benefit from Filecoin
3.Expectation from DataCap: A way to investigate if the client would use DataCap seriously
4.Readiness: how much the organization prepared to be part of the network  
5.Branding and reputation: how likely to improperly use the DataCap
6.Allocation and subsidization strategy: how the client will use DataCap, the right way or misuse
7.Track record: encourage “good” Clients to keep using Filecoin network
8.Transparency: monitor the Clients as well as help developing DataCap business model
Many of the DataCap allocation tool from earlier applicants are very detailed. I picked the one easier to execution, more quantitative and less qualitative, with a bit modifications from us. 
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1F2oFrGwkUZUqH49XI0isjTAE_QTGU8Mfsm3b_88erPI

Are there any internal processes you plan on impelementing regarding the target, amount, or rate at which you'll allocate DataCap?

I initially thought there shouldn’t be much “internal” processes going on, as everything would be black and white and open to public. But I like the way Fenbushi listed things out, regardless internal or external, and I will do the same. The only difference between Fenbushi and mine is that I don’t distinguish individuals vs. organizations and businesses vs. non-profit. Data is data, we prefer not to pre-judge the owners of the data, and will leave the judgement to the due diligence step.
The process will basically be as follows:
1.Each applicant requesting DataCap is required to formally submit a written application (in pre-specified form) and other relevant supporting information to us for our review process to kick off
2.A preliminary review of the foregoing application will be made by our internal “Notary Taskforce” to pre-qualify the applicant
3.Each applicant failing the pre-qualification will be requested to provide additional information or be simply denied, as the case may be
4.For the pre-qualified applicant, our “Notary Taskforce” will conduct a due diligence to scrutinize its legal standing, operations and data concerned
5.Based on the due diligence result, a rating will be performed by us for each applicant in accordance with the preceding factors and criteria, following which we will assign a score to that applicant. 
6.We will resolve, in the form of a written decision, the denial or grant of requested DataCap allocation and (if granted) the amount of DataCap allocated, taking into account the applicant’s score and data size concerned, and will then implement the same.

How do you plan on securing the DataCap to ensure your organization (and its delegated members) are the ones allocating the DataCap?

The same as others, the address that will be allocated DataCap will have it's keys be secured on a hardware wallet.

Client Due Diligence

How will you vet your Client to ensure they are spending that DataCap responsibly?

This includes both on-boarding due diligence and post-allocation vetting
1.On-boarding due diligence
As one of the largest crypto exchange platforms, we have extensive local experience in this area and we never had any accident since we started. We also identify clients by collecting KYC & onboarding documents, once it passes our verification team, we have different 3rd-party vendors to help at different stage for a different price. We know what to do, when to do, and where to go for get it done. We would make sure no fraudulent from this on-boarding step.   
2.Post-allocation Vetting
The process is quite familiar for us as a crypto exchange platform, and thanks for Fenbushi to list it out in English, it saves us the time translating our process from Chinese to English. We developed a program for similar checking and investigation and would modify a little bit then might be able to share with all notaries.  
The post-allocation vetting of Clients will be performed regularly and constantly to avoid the allocated DataCap being abused or misused. The fundamental principle is that the Client is obliged to spend the DataCap exclusively for the approved uses.
To this end, at any time of the Client’s spending the DataCap, we may ask the Client to provide:
1.A consolidated Content Identifier (“CID”) list for verified deals that includes deal CID and miner ID (showing how the allocated DataCap has been used)
2.Description of the data being stored and how the data has been processed
3.Instructions on data retrieval
Receiving the foregoing information, we will perform random-sample inspections on the verified deals sent out by the Client on chain by checking the deal CID and retrieve it from the corresponding miners to verify the data authenticity.
In addition to the foregoing, other monitoring measures such as public monitoring, auditing.
Since the DataCap will be allocated by stages, we may penalize the Client by delaying or even cancelling the outstanding DataCap if discovering any improper or fraudulent spending the allocated DataCap.

What questions will you ask to ensure the Client can properly handle the DataCap you intend to allocate to them?

I would borrow a full list of questions from an earlier applicant, and also some sample questions from here https://github.com/filecoin-project/notary-governance/blob/main/notaries/templates/sample-client-application.md. With this full list of questions, and people will most likely keep adding more onto it. We would absolutely not pass this questionnaires to the clients and knowing the good ones will scare away. Questions to the clients will be case by case, and the goal for the questions nothing but to be able to rate each client accurately.  
1. Could you introduce yourself and your organization? include links to social media / news mentions etc.
2. Please describe the nature of your organization, project, or use case. For organizations, please include your relationship with the organization the size of the organization, and time since inception. For projects and other use cases, please link to relevant web pages or Github. Please include as much relevant detail to provide contextual information (with external links).
3. How much do you know about Filecoin network and what motivates you to choose it for your data storage?
4. How much do you know about Filecoin DataCap and what’s your expectation from using your DataCap once approved?
5. Do you have resources and budget from your organization for your Filecoin data storage project?
6. Why do you apply for DataCap and what kind of your data storage worth of spending DataCap?
7. Do you plan to store more data than DataCap allocated? 
8. How much DataCap would you like to request?
9. What is your use case for the DataCap being requested? 
10. What is the Filecoin address you would like me to allocate the DataCap?
11. How long has your company been using cloud storage? How much do you store in cloud?
12. How much DataCap would you be requesting in future? What % would you expect to allocated from current cloud storage to Filecoin network?
13. What type and source of the data you are looking to store on Filecoin, e.g. public data vs private data etc.?
14. Would you be open to post transaction links to the public, once awarded data cap?
15. In which country/region do you intend to use the DataCap? If you intend to use the DataCap in multiple country/regions, please specify. 
16. Do you plan on allocating a substantial portion of your DataCap to a single miner, or will you spread it across many miners? If you have a specific miner(s) you would like to allocate a DataCap, please specify.
17. What’s your process for ensuring proper allocation of your DataCap?
18. Are you aware of and do you intend to use the features you may specify (e.g. Fast Retrieval) with your storage deals? If so, please specify the feature. 
19. How do you plan on securing the DataCap to ensure your organization (and its delegated members) are the ones allocating the DataCap?
20. Will you be cooperative to our ongoing inspections on the verified deals that you may place to miners after DataCap allocation?
21. Do you agree to use the DataCap to only store data that abides by local regulations and in compliance with the recipient miner’s terms of service?
22. Have you been approved for a DataCap previously? If so, please link to any previous decisions that have been made, and the details of the last allocation decision (who approved your DataCap, what your plan was for spending it, how you executed on that plan)? 
23. Are there any disputes open against you from your previous DataCap allocations?
24. Have you ever previously violated 1. your own attested allocation / audit plan? 2. been found to be in violation of the Principles of Filecoin Plus?

What processes will you employ to confirm that a Client is not improperly over-allocating DataCap to a single entity?

I agree with some people that we, as notaries, are not meant to discourage Clients find and work with the best reliable and useful storage. It’s not a fraud, if a client allocates the DataCap to a single entity, or a single miner, as long as there’s a logical reason behind it. We felt we should even have index or scoring system of miners, so that the clients could easily find the most reliable and useful storage and miners. Below are my processes to identify the “improper” over-allocating:
1.Clients’ Filecoin addresses will be closely monitored immediately after DataCap allocation
2.Client’s storage orders, verified deals, and relevant storage providers will be periodically inspected 
3.Single-miner allocation to be flag out and investigated; multi-miner allocation might be still to a single entity behind those miners, so that the investigation will be conducted as well.
4.Post-allocation due diligence with Clients to understand the logic of single-miner/single-entity allocation
5.If Clients do not misuse the DataCap, we can report and that might be the area we could improve the network
6.As DataCap is granted in batches, we could withhold the remaining DataCap anytime we identify the “improper” over-allocating activities, and further disqualify the client for next DataCap allocation.
7.Audits will be conducted throughout the data deployment process, internally and externally. Community members are encouraged to take part as the external auditor to expose any Client’s “improper” activities on Datacap allocation.
We’re glad to something automated will come out and help us detect “improper” behaviors. Our team can support with resources and experiences.

Bookkeeping Plan

Do you plan on keeping records of your allocation decisions? If so, with what level of specificity do you intend to respond to any audit requests?

Yes, we do. Luckily, this industry is not being regulated yet by Chinese government; otherwise, everything by law needs to be kept in clear format and in order for at least 15 years, and auditors from pretty much every department can come and investigate, even take everything away without necessarily our permission.
Although we don’t have to go that extreme, we do have the experience to keep records and respond to auditors. As for now, I would go with Fenbushi’s plan, unless someone says we need to do better.
1. The allocation guidelines and other supporting rules will be publicly available as soon as they are adopted, subject to updates from time to time.
2. Working paper, Client correspondences. supporting materials and decision reports that are generated or collected during our work, whether in electronic or physical copies, will be kept for at least 2 years.
3. We may maintain an internal database for storing the foregoing files and will grant authorized visitors access to the same whenever needed.
In most cases, our work records involve significant amount of Clients’ classified information that have not entered the public domain, for which we will usually be bound by certain confidentiality obligation, whether legally or contractually.  As a result, we can only accept private audits conducted by professionals (such as lawyers or accountants admitted in relevant jurisdictions) who are appointed through Filecoin community governance procedure.  Such an audit shall cover only such particular case as specified by the community governance and shall not expand to any other case or Client.  We will provide the auditors with full access to all the relevant files kept by us, provided that (i) such auditors shall be bound by the same level of confidentiality requirement; and (ii) certain data may be withheld until necessary prior permission of the relevant Client or governmental authority is obtained.
Besides, to the extent not to disclose any classified information of the Clients, we are glad to respond, in the designated venues of community governance, to such reasonable queries or interrogatories relating to our DataCap allocation decisions that may be raised by the community members from to time to time.

Do you plan on conduct your allocation decisions in public (e.g. Github repo), private (e.g. over email, Telegram, etc), or both?

At the moment, All allocation decisions will happen in public in the following [repository](https://github.com/keyko-io/filecoin-notaries-onboarding) for transparency purpose. Long-termly, some Clients might be reluctant to be too much exposed and may require us to minimize publicity. We could conduct our decisions privately for such Clients.

Track Record

Past allocation

Have you previously received DataCap to allocate before? If so, please link to any previous applications.

No

Cumulatively, how much DataCap have you previously successfully allocated?

None

Have there been (or are there still) any disputes raised against you from your previous DataCap allocations?

No

filecoin-project / notary-governance