BlockTalks x Findora AMA Transcript!
Hello! BlockTalkers & Blockchain Enthusiastic!
We recently hosted an AMA with Findora, on December 15th at 05.00 PM UTC. Many of you might have participated or many of not. But we make sure no one missed out from the knowledge shared by Matt Arney, Head of Growth & Lily Chao Founder at Findora, so here we are up with the AMA transcript, for those who missed the live session, this blog post will be a saver & feeder of knowledge for them.
INTRODUCTION —
Matt Arney — My name is Matt Arney. I an active cryptography theory aficionado and outspoken proponent for transforming traditional technology through blockchains. Before joining Findora as their Head of Growth, I co-founded and successfully exited from three international startups in the enterprise language & technology space. My expertise is in corporate development, partnerships and revenue generation. In my free time, I enjoy hiking, mountain biking and playing tennis.
Lily Chao — My name is Lily Chao. I founded the Findora organization along with John Powers, the former CEO of the Stanford University Endowment Fund. I am quite well connected as a young entrepreneur and investor active in Silicon Valley and Asia Pacific Rim. — Before founding Findora, I have a successful track record of investing and advising in early stage tech businesses and providing financial advisory to growth stage tech companies both in the US and in Asia. My expertise is in privatization, SPAC, merger & acquisition. Being tech-savvy generation who seeks to disrupt and improve legacy businesses, as opposed to following their lead, I am the original thought leader, along with the late John Powers, that devised the strategic and product vision of Findora Foundation. With one foot in Silicon Valley and another in the broader Asia-Pacific rim, I have seen the ways technology can create real world solutions across all corners of the globe. In my leisure time, I enjoy cooking, shopping and off-roading.
Introduction Questions Asked By Team BlockTalks
Q1. Could you please introduce Findora to our community in layman’s term?
Ans —
Findora is a globally trusted financial infrastructure owned and democratically secured by a decentralized network of worldwide organizations and economically incentivized parties. Findora was created to enable the creation of financial services that are transparently operated while preserving user and institutional privacy.
Q2. What are the advantages of Findora to other alternatives in the Blockchain field?
Ans — There are a lot of things that set us apart including technology, product, problems we solve and the team and the market strategy. But today I want to focus on the technology and product: Findora represents the cutting edge of blockchain technology: we are aiming to bring a breakthrough to Web 3.0 rather than incremental improvements. The problems we solve and the technology we use make us unique: we use a variety of the newest trustless and efficient zero knowledge proof techniques to bring efficient confidential/anonymous asset operations/transactions to an open blockchain; we use the similar technology to create confidential identity and credential for open blockchains; we use the best in the class zkSNARKS to create optimized ZK Rollup services to help scale up the entire blockchain sphere; we innovatively use a variety of authenticated data structures to make a highly efficient new blockchain.
Q3. What are the major milestones Findora achieved so far & what are in the future pipeline?
Ans —
Our main achievements so far: 1. We invented a very unique DAO, DeFi fund management system that support privacy preserving asset operations voting/onchain governmence. We believe such blockchain-based organizations will change the world; 2. We are responsible for discovering one of the most efficient trustless Zero Knowledge Proofs systems; 3. We have built an entirely new blockchain based on the newest ADS technologies from the ground up purely using Rust + WASM; 4. We completed one of the world’s most comprehensive cryptography libraries- ZEI. Our main roadmap for next year are: 1. 1st Testnet with confidential multi asset operations and anonymous transfers 2. Address Identity layer implementation 3. Phase I asset policy language and restrained virtual machine; Planning for end of this year/next year! — — Launching mainnet! We are ready to go!!! In 2021, we will focus on the phase II mainnet (RSA accumulator based storage optimization) and the DeFi infrastructure. We will deploy ZK Rollup, Accumulator based storage, confidential liquidity bridging and Dark Pool Dex. In 2021, because of a significant improvement and reorg of our research, we will be able to pool more resources to optimize ZKPs for different use cases, hardware acceleration and MPC for blockchain use cases.
Questions Asked on Twitter For Findora Team!
Q1. Findora lets you experiment on the testnet. Is any user allowed to access the network? What requirements do users need to access? What components do users have access to when entering the test network.
Ans — Good question. The testnet contains an instance of the Findora transactional system operated by a fixed set of servers called validators. The validators run a permissioned BFT consensus protocol to maintain a consistent log of transactions. They receive and process transactions and periodically publish updates to the public log of transactions. The public log is minimal and mainly includes authenticated data-structure (ADS) metadata, such as Merkle roots, that commit the current state of the database. There is a separate query server that responds to client requests for data content, such as asset records or transactions. The query server’s responses are authenticated against the ADS metadata.
Testnet users and developers communicate with the system using four main tools: a wallet application, a command-line interface, a JavaScript library interface, and a raw web interface.
Q2. Findora is a Zero knowledge blockchain. So, it means we can do Anonymous transaction on Findora blockchain. Right? If yes how regulation will be handled?
Ans —
By operating financial services over the Findora system, many classes of fraud can be prevented and regulation is made easier. Common examples of fraud, such as Ponzi schemes, result from opaque capital management. An investment fund, lending platform, or other capital management service that operates via confidential accounts on a deployed instance of the Findora system would be able to demonstrate compliance with regulations, verifiable claims about performance, or show that it is not embezzling funds. We offer both Confidentiality with Auditability — Findora uses state-of-the-art zero-knowledge proofs and secure multi-party computations to support a wide range ofmany privacy-preserving features, ranging from anonymous transactions to private smart contracts and asset policies. UsersPeople are no longer required to revealNo longer do people have to leak all of their data to take part in open finance. Thanks to Findora’s sSpecialized zero-knowledge proofs, transactions can allow Findora to be publicly audited, while data remains confidential. Another example is with digital payment services like Venmo and WeChat Pay. They have been replacing cash and credit card transactions in many parts of the world. However, there are many concerns over privacy with these popular services. In particular, WeChat Pay’s international adoption is limited by the fear that all transactions could be visible to the Chinese government. Users of digital payment services that run the Findora system can transact without revealing information to the servers operating the system. The companies would not have any customer data to pass to a government agency. Transaction policies may enforce regulatory compliance, but would be transparent to the user. Changes to the policy cannot be made without the user’s knowledge and cooperation.
Q3. Findora have a lot of features such as a variety of auditability tools, a rich selection of confidential transaction parameters and asset policy customization. Are there plans to have all these in an application so users can have easy access to them?
Ans — Findora represents the cutting edge of the distributed system and blockchain architecture. We use a system called Findora blockchain programming interface as the basis for our modularization design. Ledger, Zei crypto lib, consensus, query API, etc are all designed to work via APIs. We provide working specs of such APIs and both the Findora core dev team and any third parties can build consensus implementation and make them work with our blcockhain stack. Since these components are developed with the unified specs, they are interoperable.
Q4. “In Light validator node, Participate in consensus with limited storage. Enabled by Findora’s innovations in authenticated data structures!”
An authenticated data structure’s operations can be carried out by an untrusted prover,how can the verifier efficiently check as authentic?
Ans — Light validator nodes: Participate in consensus but do not participate heavily in storage. They mostly verify and vote on blocks of transactions that are proposed by the full validator nodes and must operate at the throughput rate of the network. They do not need as high processing capability as the validator full nodes which do the bulk of the work in filtering bad transactions and sorting transactions by their dependencies. This is being enabled by RSA Accumulator, an efficient Sparse Merkle Tree. This badass ADS has several efficiency advantages for the distributed setting:
Verifying that all nodes in the network agree on the current state of the ledger records and history only requires comparing short data tags. Users (who do not store the whole ledger) can retrieve a portion of the ledger from a single node in the network along with an authentication proof that it is correct and consistent with the same ledger replicated on every other node in the network.
Q5. For Findora’s auditability, why use zk-SNARKS rather than zk-STARK? from some article I read, zk-STARK now being touted as the new and improved version of the protocol and can addressing many of the previous drawbacks of zk-SNARKs. What’s your opinion maam?
Ans — No. No.
Look at the benchmark below:
ZKP System
Transparent
Parameter size
Proving time
Verification time
Proof size
Supersonic
yes
<1 KB
7.5 s*
~75 ms
10 KB
STARK
yes
<1 KB
134 s
~40 ms
300 KB
This table displays concrete proof sizes and verification times for the systems in Figure 4 when applied to a statement of complexity 1 million arithmetic gates. This complexity is 250x larger than the statements required for basic confidential transactions (hiding transaction details), for which we use Bulletproofs. I have to paste in the table
So you can see: for a medium level of complexity statement, the Supersonic ZK-SNARKS is much faster in generating proofs, and very very importantly for the blockchain, the proof size is much much smaller!!!
I don’t see a reason why we will favor ZK-STARKS over ZK-SNARKS
Questions Asked by our BlockTalks Community Members during live Session to Findora Team!!
Q1. Is FINDORA a global project? Can local communities take part in FINDORA?
Ans — Yes it is a true global project and all communities could participate in the ecosystem. now we have Testnet open, and very soon in just few week the product will be full launched.
Q2. In how many ways or what are the ways your project generate revenue? What is the revenue model? How it can be beneficial for both investors and for project itself?
Ans — We build both great blockchain and great tokenomics. We believe blockchain is very different from the traditional TMT startups. However, decentralized protocols still need to have revenue model and the revenue should come from utility and asset transactions. Findora plans to act as the blockchain transaction hub by leveraging our expertise in cryptography. Not only serving the applications on Findora, our ecosystem play includes providing cross-chain ZK Rollup to Ethereum, helping lower the GAS fee while generating revenue for Findora. We also provide side ledger services to business users that are willing to pay. Such services will require staking and pledging Findora tokens and will also contribute large revenue stream to the public blockchain. Onchain L2 liquidity mining and cross-chain asset transfers are also part of the business revenue generation plan. I am confident our token holders will be pleased to see that Findora tokens are providing increasingly valuable utilities.
Q3. It’s quite unfortunate that many projects have infiltrated the market with just white papers without having any genuine use cases. What are the main utilities of your coin?
Ans — The first step is a good tokenomics design and a forward-thinking token distribution model and unlocking strategy. We have designed an excellent economic model (with help from several renowned economists) that fully aligns the interests of token holders, developers, validators, and network users.
Our token is the ultimate source of the network’s utility, and we have a lot of ways to increase the token value both intrinsically and with regards to the utility. For instance, we have hard-wired deflationary burning mechanics into the TRX fees. We have also designed many use cases where you have to lock and stake large amounts of Findora tokens to access mining, application building, and premium features.
Our strategy is to distribute tokens evenly and fairly across jurisdictions, demographics, and holders’ profiles in the sense of initial distribution. We try our best to distribute to community members, rather than only focusing on institutions.
Our private holders have a long locking period and are encouraged to participate in staking and validation activities.
Q4. Now, there are many hackers and leaked news in this cryptocurrency field. How to ensure that the assets of Findora users are safe and reliable?
Ans — Yeah.I will address one by one: The Findora blockchain is build around one of the world’s most comprehensive cryptography library — ZEI, developed by Findira team. We not only have a lot of innovative zero knowledge proofs implementation, but also have optimized hash functions, signatures and other goodies. The authenticated data structures we use are very comprehensive and secure including Merkle Tree, Sparse Merkle Tree, Accumulator, and more.
On a market where there are still public blockchains that do not support multi-signature, we are like being equipped like a combat tank.
And most importantly, we are a zero knowledge blokchain. The name says it all!
There is no knowledge on the chain 😂
Seriously, this is the ultimate protection to the users. The transactions and their metadata are not stored onchain.
Voila! So that’s why Findora is extremely safe for users!
Speaking of smart contract and its related virtual machine and language, Ethereum smart contracts are vulnerable. I felt sorry about the recent loss. At Findora, our smart contract mechanism is different. We develop a domain specific language for asset operation called Discret. Discret is the smart contract language people easily learn and use. It has automated bug detection. It can supports other code while keeping control and enables privacy. It is safe by design: fights bugs and exploits while offering the power of a high-level language. The virtual machine is restrained. Recursion will be detected and causes an immediate failure at module load. Our Atomic transaction will roll back if error occurs. You can see ours is much more secure and efficient and designed for DeFi. We used multiple third parties to audit pout codes.
Q5. How does Findora plan to dominate the DeFi market?
Ans — I believe we addressed Defi previoiusly too but I’ll copy this down again…Wew believe that DeFi is what blockchain is all about, and in the future, people will only care about the DeFi applications themselves, rather than the underlying chain. For now, DeFi is all about ‘DeFi on Ethereum’ and/or ERC20 tokens.
Findora participates in the DeFi space in two ways:
We have added ZK-Rollups and confidential transaction capabilities for existing DeFi apps on Ethereum, which means that that running DeFi apps on Ethereum can be better, faster, cheaper, and can realize a lot more features that would otherwise be impossible without confidentiality;
Findora is based on cross-chain and verifiable computation technology. Therefore any Ethereum based assets can atomically transfer and transact on Findora. We can provide scalability and cost advantage to apps built directly on us.
We will be releasing a series of new private DeFi applications, including ‘Dark Pool Dex’ (for secret large ticket crypto transactions) and ‘Confidential FX pool’ (for confidential cross-border money transfer), just to name a few. These products will launch alongside our mainnet.
Here are some important links of Findora👇
🌎 Website: https://findora.org/
📱Twitter: https://twitter.com/findoraofficial
📢 Telegram: https://t.me/findoraen
📢 Discord: https://discord.com/invite/aPuyZd8mBJ
🗄 Medium: https://medium.com/findorafoundation
