Author | Qin Xiaofeng
Editor | Hao Fangzhou
Produced | Odaily
Author | Qin Xiaofeng
Editor | Hao Fangzhou
Produced | Odaily
An important feature of the blockchain is "openness and transparency". Transaction trends and on-chain transfers are clear at a glance.
As a global trustless financial infrastructure, Findora was originally created to solve scalability and privacy issues so that Web 3.0 can become the next generation of financial infrastructure. Moreover, Findora is public, whether it is an individual, a small and medium-sized enterprise or an industry giant, everyone can use Findora.
The following is a record of the community interview, organized by Odaily:
On March 29, Paul Sherer, Chief Director of the Findora Foundation, and Lemon Lin, CMO, visited the Odaily Chaohua community, previewing the upcoming mainnet and how Findora can better serve DeFi.
Lemon Lin：On the one hand, Findora will provide ZK Rollup and confidential transaction functions for existing DeFi applications on Ethereum, making them better, faster, cheaper, and more private; on the other hand, Findora is based on cross-chain and verifiable Computing technology, any Ethereum-based asset can be atomically transferred and traded on Findora.
The following is a record of the community interview, organized by Odaily:
Odaily: Founded in 2017, Findora is a financial network with both openness and privacy. It has also explored in the encryption market for four years. In view of the fact that many new investors lack systematic understanding of old projects, please give us a detailed introduction to the project (positioning, purpose, etc.).
Findora is a technology company from Silicon Valley. Its vision is to build a financial privacy public chain and become the financial infrastructure of Web 3.0, providing scarce high scalability and privacy.
Lemon Lin：The founders of Findora are Lily Chao and John Powers. John Powers is the former CEO of Stanford's $25 billion endowment fund and the co-chairman of the hedge fund department of Credit Suisse. In the process of forming their evergreen fund, two professionals in the financial industry were inspired by the pain points of the alternative investment market and began to study the possible impact of blockchain on the financial industry. But they soon discovered that two big problems with existing blockchains would prevent large-scale adoption of blockchains: scalability and privacy. Without these two resources, finance cannot truly be integrated with the blockchain. Findora is a dedicated organization, and all technical efforts revolve around how to solve these two problems.
Findora can be compared to building an open value exchange highway network, and its main application scenarios are DeFi and financial technology. The biggest problem of the blockchain now is its poor scalability and lack of privacy, so there are big problems when it comes to information exchange and data processing. We want everyone who participates in our public chain to enjoy the dividends brought about by growth. From a technical perspective, everyone can freely exchange information without worrying about privacy.
Odaily: The importance of privacy has long been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. At present, there are many projects in the encryption market that focus on privacy protection. For example, Monero, SERO, Oasis Labs, etc. have adopted different technical solutions. Compared with these competing products, what are the differentiating advantages of Findora?
We see Ethereum and Bitcoin as our competitors and collaborators. Because Findora's vision is to become a distributed operating system for all Web 3.0 (especially DeFi).
Lemon Lin：We believe Findora offers a very unique value proposition, the problems that Findora solves and the technologies it uses make it unique. Findora uses a variety of latest trustless and efficient zero-knowledge proof technologies to introduce effective encryption/anonymous asset operations/transactions into open blockchains; Findora uses cryptography to create encrypted identities and credentials for open blockchains; Findora uses the best-in-class zkSNARKS to create an optimized ZK Rollup to help improve the scalability of the blockchain; Findora innovatively uses various authenticated data structures to create efficient new blockchains.
Findora can do many things that Bitcoin and Ethereum cannot, such as privacy, high scalability, and encrypted identity. Some people think that we are also competing with privacy coins like Zcash and Monero, I don't think we are a major competitor, we can do far more than these privacy coins can do, tokens on Findora are not only private, but also Buy auditable smart contracts. At the same time, Oasis uses a trusted execution environment (Trusted execution environment) to achieve privacy, such as Intel SGX, which can efficiently achieve privacy, but it is difficult for us to trust hardware. We've also heard of various hacks recently that undermine the trust foundation of the Trusted Execution Environment. But Findora does not use a trusted execution environment, and our privacy is achieved through cryptography.
Odaily: At present, an important means of realizing privacy protection is zero-knowledge proof. There are three main zero-knowledge proof technologies: zk-SNARK, zk-STARK, and Bulletproof. Which technology is used by Findora, can you please introduce its specific implementation path in detail?
We believe that Zero Knowledge Proof is one of the biggest breakthroughs in blockchain and cryptography in the past 10 years. Zero-knowledge proof is a data encryption scheme and an important way to realize data privacy protection on the chain.
Four years ago came Zcash, one of the early applications of zero-knowledge proofs, and they took advantage of a breakthrough in zero-knowledge, zk-SNARKs. However, the application scenarios of Zcash are limited, and there are some disadvantages, such as the need for trusted setup (trusted setup), high time complexity and space complexity. Bulletproofs, invented in 2018, is trustless. Privacy is suitable for transactions with low and medium complexity. The time complexity and space complexity are high. The more complex the statement, the longer it takes to prove it.
Supersonic has achieved a certain technological breakthrough, because Supersonic not only does not require trusted settings, but also has high speed and small capacity. The new SNARK technology Supersonic (supersonic) combines Sonic and DARK compilers. It is the first non-interactive short proof that does not require trusted settings. Under the premise of 1 million logic gates, the proof size can be compressed to 10-20KB, and even There is room for optimization, and these technologies will help Findora have efficient privacy and auditability at the same time.
Paul Sherer：Our zero-knowledge proofs are one of the key tools we use for this purpose. A system like Bitcoin transparently publishes all transaction inputs and outputs on-chain. Also in Ethereum, all inputs to a smart contract are visible to everyone. In Findora, we can hide everything (sender, recipient, transaction details, and contract data) in a zero-knowledge proof. We use different tools for different types of transactions.
For simple transactions, such as basic confidential asset transfers, we use Bulletproofs. But if the transaction becomes complicated, it is too expensive to use Bulletproof verification. Therefore, for high-complexity transactions, we need tools similar to ZK-SNARK, which are still easy to verify even if very complex statements are used. This is where Supersonic shines: even when complex statements need to be proven, such as specific rules added to assets via Discret, it is still easy to verify. Like Bulletproofs, it doesn't require a trusted setup to function. "
We also used other tools that were available for special use-case scenarios, and they were tailored specifically for those use-cases to make them as efficient as possible. So instead of being limited to general-purpose proof systems like Supersonic, Bulletproofs or other SNARKS, we develop tools that outperform state-of-the-art general-purpose systems, but with a more specific scope of use.
Privacy protection, typically using the Merkle tree (aka hash tree) model, and the Diffie-Hellman model using symmetric key exchange, including all RSA encryption.
Our encryption technology is implemented in two ways: Bulletproofs (to power our encrypted transactions), zk-Snarks (to facilitate our asset tracking strategy).
However, Findora currently does not rely on zk-STARKs as it requires larger validation blocks, which would have a very negative impact on performance and scalability. Additionally, our team has invented a trustless version of zk-SNARKs called Supersonic, which is currently being optimized for higher performance.
Importantly, the Findora Foundation, of which Dr. Diffie is a member, is actively developing our conservation efforts with academia, including leading universities such as Stanford, MIT, Georgia Tech, University of Maryland and International Scholars in Germany.
We have incorporated Findora's advanced technology in the Findora protocol and FRA token, allowing large-scale usage in different networks. As such, the protocol can invoke a diverse and robust library of protectors, including all of the aforementioned zkSNARKs, zkSTARKs, and Bulletproofs. The Stanford Bulletproof core development team includes former and active members of the Findora team.
zk-SNARK stands for zero-knowledge succinct, non-interactive argument. Non-interactive protocols are particularly useful for applications between and across users with no specific relationship.
zk-STARK stands for zero-knowledge, concise, transparent, non-interactive proof of knowledge. In terms of establishing a transparent and credible foundation, zk-STARKs are similar to blockchain technology, but due to larger verification scale and increased vulnerabilities, bandwidth and storage requirements are significantly increased. Due to these issues, we are not actively deploying zk-STARKs today.
Bulletproofs are concise non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs that do not require a trusted setup.
Bulletproofs can be used to implement efficient and confidential transactions of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, allowing users to hide their account balances and transaction amounts when transferring funds, allowing concise range proofs
Moreover, Bulletproofs supports proof aggregation, reducing the size of cryptographic proofs from over 10kB to less than 1kB.
If all Bitcoin transactions were kept private, and Bulletproofs were used, the total size of the UTXO set would be only 17 GB, compared to 160 GB for the currently used proofs.
Bulletproofs have many other applications in encryption protocols, such as shortening proof of solvency, shortening verifiable shuffling,
Lemon Lin：Confidential smart contracts, and as a general alternative to the Sigma protocol.
ECDH (Elliptic-curve Diffie–Hellman) is a key agreement protocol that allows both parties to have an elliptic curve public-private key pair and establish a shared secret on an insecure channel. This shared secret can be used directly as a key, or another key can be derived. This key or a derived key can then be used to encrypt subsequent communications using symmetric-key ciphers. It is a variant of the Diffie-Hellman protocol that uses elliptic curve cryptography.
Odaily: The blockchain pursues "openness and transparency". Privacy and transparency are natural opposites, but Findora wants to have both. Why is it designed like this?
Findora is a global trustless financial infrastructure. Findora was created to solve scalability and privacy issues so that Web 3.0 can become the next generation of financial infrastructure. Moreover, Findora is public, whether it is an individual, a small and medium-sized enterprise or an industry giant, everyone can use Findora.
Financial auditability and privacy are actually two extremes, but Findora hopes to find a very good balance between the two, which is why we think zero-knowledge proof is a very good method of cryptography and privacy computing way, because it can provide optional disclosure, especially in terms of regulation and auditing, which can bring a very large momentum for blockchain to enter the mainstream.
Paul Sherer：The primary goal of Findora is to provide a usable system for financial applications, so from the beginning, we have focused on certain specific functions, such as DeFi, P2P lending, asset management, and issuance of various assets. Our uniqueness is primarily a balance between privacy and auditability. Auditability is critical for financial applications.
How does Findora achieve such a balance? The answer is efficiency. We are committed to making our privacy tools extremely efficient using cryptography we invented. In other words, these features are native to the platform, and transactions with our privacy features are much cheaper than transactions on Ethereum.
Findora invented some zero-knowledge proof technologies to achieve this balance. I also want to emphasize another function we have made, a system that achieves a good separation of network roles, in other words: the governance and consensus protocols are separated from the storage layer of the system, you do not need to have high computing power or storage resources, and Can participate in consensus. Even if you don't participate in consensus, you can participate as a storage or computing node. This modularity is also one of our unique features.
Privacy is fundamental to user integrity and user adoption. If a platform or service cannot be trusted, adoption will of course be negatively affected.
This innovative, trustless security is the cornerstone of blockchain success and future growth. All of our products will use trustless authentication and distributed collaboration.
The original architecture used a non-encrypted approach to trust. However, we see the vast majority of financial and web services requiring secrecy. The transparency we achieve does not compromise user privacy as it only does 100% verification of data characteristics and does not publish the data.
For example, we can verify a bachelor's degree from a prestigious university without publishing an alumni list. If you are recruiting, this method is very useful for verifying academic qualifications.
If a central bank can guarantee that account balances are valid, held in authorized jurisdictions, and hold valid credentials to transact with others, then we have a confidential and trusted process.
We believe that these private and transparent verification processes will dominate the activity of blockchain networks for decades to come.
Lemon Lin：Most importantly, this privacy will drive Findora users to provide specific personal data for access, analysis, distribution and consulting services, which today is restricted or managed with a single service.
At the same time, we believe that our unique regulatory visibility will provide central banks and financial institutions with the assurance they need to become very active members of CBDT and stablecoins, and then provide services for tax compliance and investment advisory.
Odaily: How is Findora designed in terms of openness and transparency? In terms of regulation, what measures has Findora taken?
Findora mainly uses modern cryptography zero-knowledge proof and ZK Rollup technology to provide the privacy technology necessary for inclusive finance. We believe that privacy in the future must be the only way for finance and blockchain to enter the mainstream. Findora has the best zero-knowledge proof team in the world. In terms of blockchain performance and TPS, we have the best ZK Rollup technology. We can guarantee that DeFi applications on this public chain can be very well received. privacy protection.
Lemon Lin：At the same time, we will provide some auditability, because financial auditability and privacy are actually two extremes, but we hope to find a very good balance between the two, which is why we think zero-knowledge proof is A very good way of cryptography and privacy computing, because it can provide optional disclosure, especially in terms of regulation and auditing, which can bring a very strong momentum for blockchain to enter the mainstream.
Findora has a vast array of auditing tools, including proofs of solvency, proofs of range and whitelisted assets, proofs of endorsement, selective identity disclosure tools, crypto asset trackers, and more. These tools are all designed with one purpose: to allow public or certain privileged auditors to understand and verify certain claims in transactions while still keeping the original data private. In many cases, this kind of fine-grained review is necessary not only in the face of regulation, but also to protect privacy.
Odaily: Can you introduce Findora's current partners and what kind of help they have provided for project development and implementation?
Paul Sherer：At present, Findora has cooperated with American cloud service providers and consumer product providers: Travel USA Express, Menusifu, the House Club, WeMeet; financial innovation company YouWorld; Canadian financial institution service providers OTT Pay, MoneyMoov, IOT Pay, Kabu; China's leading The mobile payment company Swiftpass; the automobile chain service group Deuts Auto Service, the blockchain service network BSN International and a number of well-known enterprises have established partnerships in finance, insurance, ticketing, payment, travel, catering, real estate sales, Carry out in-depth case cooperation and joint application development in scenarios such as smart exhibitions and automobile sales services.
In the future, Findora's concepts, technologies and software will be combined with partners' businesses, thereby further strengthening their positions as market-leading innovators in their respective industries. We want to break down data silos and make a powerful infrastructure accessible to everyone, including entrepreneurs and fintech startups, that is cheap to use, scalable, highly compliant and ready to go.
Odaily: Are there any representative applications on Findora? Do these products have data and results in terms of the number of users and transactions for easy display?
Our initial application focuses on a private passport as a simple gateway for users to provide confidential financial services on a blockchain network.
An analogy is like an encrypted browser, you can visit websites, exchange information, and pay without revealing your identity in the process.
We're focused on these kinds of capabilities that expand access, support assignments, and provide users with advice and intelligence.
Our partners are leading digital payment platforms with millions of users. Together, we can protect user identities and preferences when the community transacts with e-commerce providers.
Our discussion includes global web platforms with millions of users seeking to secure user credentials and enable safe financial services under approved compliance regulations.
Additionally, we are actively working with financial and capital market leaders to transition closed financial and investment services to our trustless and confidential model.
Lemon Lin：Through our trustless service, Findora's partners can develop a vaccine registry to distribute and pay for ongoing global vaccines as needed.
In 2021, one of our plans is to actively cooperate with enterprise-level cryptography developers to promote the adoption of the Findora architecture for DeFi core applications.
Odaily: Recently, Findora has completed two strict security audits and will officially launch the mainnet at the end of the month. Under the wave of decentralized finance (DeFi) in full swing, how can Findora, which is launched on the mainnet, help the development of DeFi (performance, gameplay)?
The large-scale development of DeFi needs to solve scalability (speed) / privacy / verifiability at the same time. A public chain without privacy technology cannot meet the protection requirements of transaction data; if the Throughput is low, it cannot complete the matching requirements of fast transactions and rapid offensive and defensive prices when there are large fluctuations; if third-party verification cannot be performed under privacy and confidentiality, there is no fairness Regulatory issues of sex and clearing. Therefore, the three points of "efficiency", "privacy", and "verifiability" must be satisfied at the same time.
Findora will participate in DeFi in two ways:
Paul Sherer：1. Findora provides ZK Rollup and confidential transaction functions for existing DeFi applications on Ethereum, so that DeFi applications running on Ethereum can be better, faster, cheaper, and can achieve more without privacy unavailable functions;
2. Findora is based on cross-chain and verifiable computing technology, any Ethereum-based assets can be atomically transferred and traded on Findora. We can provide scalability and cost advantages for applications built directly on top of us.
Private DeFi applications include a range of new DeFi products: Dark Pool Dex (which allows for secret large-ticket crypto transactions), Secret FX Pool (which can allow confidential cross-border remittances), to name a few. After the mainnet launch, we will release it as soon as possible. Technologies we use to build privacy-preserving definitions include Bulletproofs, Dark Compiler, Supersonic, Plonk, Advanced Cryptographic Signatures, and more. The Zei cryptographic library built by Findora is one of the most advanced and comprehensive Rust cryptographic libraries in the world.
We focus on the stability, performance and security of the mainnet. The recently passed security audit is part of our rigorous review of internal processes.
As we progress each month, our user community, partners and potential partners will gain valuable insights and data on our network's success.
Partners will be able to launch and improve their core services in our community. Additionally, user data will flow back to their teams for analysis and development of improvements and extensions.
In the past few years, this development progress has been limited to Findora internally, and with our mainnet launch, our partners and developers will be more active.
Additionally, we have been successful in recruiting mainnet developers and will continue to add to our team in the coming years.
Regarding DeFi, we believe our mainnet launch will demonstrate the very useful nature of confidential transactions on a public, permissionless blockchain. Ability to mask amounts and even asset types from the public
Regarding DeFi, we believe that the launch of the mainnet will demonstrate a very important feature, that is, conducting confidential transactions on an open, permissionless blockchain, masking amounts and even asset types.
Transaction logs are extremely valuable to any DeFi user looking to use a public, decentralized application but still maintain maximum privacy.
Lemon Lin：Frankly speaking, how many Ethereum DeFi users are there now. Want the whole world to know that you just completed a $1 million Ethereum transaction through a DeFi application? This is very private information, but now it is public.
Fortunately, Findora will change all that.
Odaily: Many investors are also concerned about the distribution of tokens after the Findora mainnet goes live. Can you please introduce the token and economic model design?
FRA is the value hub of the entire Findora financial ecosystem, which is reflected in several aspects.
FRA is the main network currency of the public chain, including the underlying consensus of the public chain, Gas, etc.
FRA is the value medium of Staking Rewards, giving back to Miners and long-term supporters who participated in the co-construction of the Findora mainnet
FRAs are payment-denominated tokens with special Premium features such as privacy and regulatory compliance
FRA is a cross-chain interaction medium and value distribution unit, such as the miner Work Token of ETH Rollup Service. When it comes to accelerating and adding privacy modules for other chains in the blockchain industry, FRA is the medium for realizing cross-chain transactions and the medium for capturing the value of Gas Fee. For example, the Ethereum network is congested recently, and the Gas fee is very high, so the use of Findora's ETH Rollup Service can reduce Transaction costs and increase privacy. Here, miners need to use the FRA Work Token Model to obtain ETH Gas Fee
FRA is the bridge of Findora's DeFi ecological value. In the future, the platform currency and liquidity mining of decentralized exchanges in the Findora ecosystem will revolve around FRA as a condition for participation. Ecosystem's core liquidity mining projects include: decentralized exchanges, derivatives issuance platforms, bulk trading dark pools, Yield Optimization platforms, lending markets, and decentralized stablecoin issuance platforms; they all need FRA Token as a starting point The mining medium is expanded, that is, FRA is the acquisition medium of the Shares initiated by these projects
FRA has a large number of scenarios where FRA Token is used as collateral to lock and issue derivative assets. For example, the issuance of self-synthetic derivative Token on the Findora main network requires the endorsement and mortgage of FRA Token. We found that there are a large number of derivatives trading needs in the blockchain industry, such as futures, insurance, index, etc.; the Findora network will be the best Programmable derivatives issuance and trading platform to meet the complete derivatives trading needs of the blockchain industry and The value depression that the exchange has not yet filled
Part of the income generated by killer applications in the Findora ecosystem, such as transaction fees, lending interest rate Commission, Loan Origination fees, etc., will participate in the repurchase of FRA Token in the secondary market
Future enterprise service Enterprise Adoption will also be carried out around FRA's mortgage certificate; for example, enterprises can cross-link into the Findora consensus through internal alliance chains, supply chain financial enterprise nodes, Wall Street's traditional financial assets on-chain liquidation, cross-border payment bank nodes, etc.
Lemon Lin：Findora is also Shopify for Managing DAO. In a privacy-protected environment, creating and managing a custom DAO Governance community will be as easy as going online with one click
FRA Token is also a Governance Token. As the community expands and matures, Findora will open more modules to the community for co-governance at an appropriate time, allowing token holders to become the masters of the ecology
Odaily: Findora's team is well-known, including Turing Award winners. I would like to ask you to introduce the core team and the members of the advisory team in detail.
Dr. Whitfield Diffie, a leader in the field of cryptography and security technology, is the winner of the 2015 "Nobel Prize in Computer Science" Turing Award, and was selected for the 2020 ACM Fellows list of the American Computing Machinery Association. In 1975, Dr. Whitfield Diffie and Professor Martin Hellman developed the security protocol Diffie–Hellman key exchange, which is one of the earliest practical examples of public key exchange in the field of cryptography, and it is the foundation of Internet business security. Dr. Whitfield Diffie officially joined the Findora Advanced Research Institute in November 2020 and became a senior consultant of the Findora Foundation to assist in the development and implementation of the Findora ecological project.
Lemon Lin：Paul Sherer, lead director and committee member of the Findora Foundation. Paul is a veteran of the Silicon Valley technology industry and financial industry. He has extensive experience in cryptocurrency, entrepreneurship and venture capital. He is mainly responsible for the company's strategic expansion and overall strategy. Graduated from Duke University and Stanford Graduate School of Business (MBA). As Managing Director of the renowned Robertson Stephens & Co, he has held senior management positions in investment banking, equity research and capital markets for over 10 years. He also serves as a managing partner at VantagePoint Venture Partners, where he manages over $2 billion in investments. Paul has in-depth research and practice on cryptocurrencies, computer network game theory, decentralized financial applications, and blockchain-based autonomous financial organizations and stablecoins. Paul and Findora co-founder John Powers have more than 20 years of working experience together. Paul is also a member of Findora's founding team and has gone through the entire process of Findora from its establishment to its growth.
The Findora team is composed of well-known institutions such as MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia University, and Cornell University. We now have about 50 people, 40 engineers, this is the composition of our North American team, and more than 90% of them have a doctorate or above.
Lemon Lin：Odaily: What institutional financing has Findora obtained so far? Could you please introduce the current financing situation?
In August 2020, Findora Foundation has completed a new round of financing of tens of millions of dollars, led by Polychain Capital, a cryptocurrency venture capital company, with participation from Allchaineed, Krypital Group, Axia8 Ventures, Cabin VC, Powerscale Capital and other institutions, and the founder of HCM Capital Partner Jack Lee and other individuals also participated in the investment.
Odaily: After the mainnet is launched, what are the future development plans of Findora? Can you introduce the next roadmap?
In 2021, we have the following plans:
Confidential liquidity bridge, which can bring BTC, ETH, XPR to Findora and conduct encrypted transactions;
Develop a high-speed decentralized exchange with privacy protection;
Develop L2 liquidity mining program;
Lemon Lin：Increase throughput through ZK-Rollup;
The second stage of the storage layer based on RSA accumulator.
Community question: How does Findora plan for traditional financial markets? How to realize the connection between the cryptocurrency market and the traditional financial market, and attract the traditional financial market to join?
Findora's technology is ideal for linking traditional financial applications with the blockchain.
Findora provides anyone with the means to build and market non-custodial financial applications to help the unbanked store value, transfer value, and trade freely; for many unbanked, physical access and computer access to banks Very unlikely.
