An audacious China-backed plan to reboot the internet with blockchain

He Yifan wants to rebuild the internet. It’s an audacious mission to truly decentralize the web so that no one – not even tech giants or governments – has control over your data. And he wants to do it with blockchain, but without cryptocurrencies.

It’s an impossible goal, until you realize that He – the founder and CEO of Red Date Technology – has the support of China’s government.

The implications of what He calls a “public IT system” are immense. If he succeeds, it will allow netizens to finally monetize their browsing data if they wish and choose how to do so.

It also paves the way for a new era of trust and interoperability for data custodians like social media networks, which have been vilified in recent years for violating data privacy and fostering tech addiction.

But the CEO faces an uphill battle to earn the trust of the mainstream public, mainly because He carries the stigma of being backed by the Chinese government.

It’s a double-edged sword that not only gives him immediate credibility for executing large-scale data infrastructure projects in the country and but also stirs suspicion from political critics averse to anything “Made In China.”

He says that the journey to bring his vision to fruition may take decades, but he is in it for the long haul.

Up until that Eureka moment

In 1996, at the height of the dot-com bubble, a wide-eyed computing student arrived in the US to study at New York’s Stony Brook University. Just a week after getting off the plane, he powers up a PC and for the first time in his life, sends an email, and gets a reply.

“I immediately knew that this was going to change the entire world,” says He, laughing as he describes his amazement at how fast email could connect the world. The future CEO added that back then, snail mail from the US took two weeks to reach China, and responses would come in another month later.

Fascinated with the growing World Wide Web, He launched his first internet company in 1998, even before he could converse in English.

One of his first projects was an online bookseller and news aggregator for the Chinese community in North America. He says that traffic for the website was pretty respectable at half a million visitors each day.

Business then expanded to online groceries. One of his shareholders owned a Chinese supermarket, and so He and his team set up shop in the basement where they could run the website and pack inventory such as canned food, instant noodles, and snacks.

The nature of the business brings to mind some parallels to another Chinese ecommerce giant that was launched at the same time: Alibaba. However, He insists that he is not a contemporary of Alibaba founder Jack Ma.

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Playing the long game