Dear Community,
Thanks all for participating in our Findora AMA. We really appreciate all your support. There were really good and thoughtful questions that were asked. For those who missed our AMA, this blog post is for you.
Introduction!
Mayank – Hello @lily52099 welcome to CryptoNationIN 🥳 Glad to have you here
Lily – Hi! How are you guys!
Mayank – Fine! what about you?
Lily – Honor is mine to be here tonight! I am excited! happy to present Findora to friends at CryptoNation!
Mayank – Great! Before we start, I request you to tell about yourself and about Findora to the community.
Lily – 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.
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. Created by a team of Stanford academics and entrepreneurs, including John Powers, former CEO of Stanford’s USD $25 billion endowment fund, Findora will be accessible to anyone in the world, whether individuals, small and medium enterprises, or industry giants. Our team has extensive collaboration with leading cryptographers in the world and our comprehensive cryptography library includes implementation of state of the art Zero Knowledge Proofs such as Plonk, Bulletproofs an Supersonic. For more information, visit www.findora.org.
Findora is being operated by a decentralized network of operators. But the software stack can also be deployed and operated by a variety of interoperable networks. It can be used by a traditional bank to replace the infrastructure they currently run on, deployed in the cloud, or It is a platform for issuing assets of any nature, including cryptocurrency. Findora’s mission is to address the challenges necessary to support this broad class of assets and diverse financial use cases. One of the primary challenges is providing confidentiality while retaining the transparency and public accessibility of other blockchains. Achieving this privacy-preserving transparency is Findora’s major focus and product differentiation.
Mayank – That’s amazing 🎊 Such an elaborative intro
Lily – Thank you! We have amazing people at Findora
Mayank – Great!
Twitter Questions
Q1. One of its partners is Tencent Cloud! How does this association generate profitability for the Findora ecosystem? Besides this, what other partners support the project?
Lily – This will be very (extremely) profitable. And the revenue streams flow into the Findora public chain constituents. The nature of our partnership is to deploy an elastic and highly scalable Transaction-As-A-Service side ledger to Findora public blockchain. Fintech companies and businesses can subscribe to the services to outsource their transactions (be it game assets, banking transactions, API based banking balance and more) without worrying about the security of a cloud and of course, these transactions exist on the Tencent cloud in the form of ZK proofs so they are auditable and interoperable. We are working with many partners including banks, enterprise blockchain application builders, DeFi entrepreneurs and stable coin issuers to sign them on to this service. Tencent Cloud is a strategic infrastructure and co-sale partner.
Q2. What are the ways that you generates profits/revenue to maintain your project and what is its revenue model ? How can it make benefit win-win to both investor and your project ?
Lily – Great question! We build great blockchain and great tokenomics. We believe blockchian is very different from the traditional TMT startups. However, decentralized protocols still need to have revenue model. 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 making revenue for Findora. We also provide side ledger services to the business users that are willing to pay. Such services will require staking and pledging Findra tokens and will also contribute large revenue stream to the public blockchian. 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 happy to see the Findora tokens are providing increasingly valuable utilities.
Q3. What was the biggest milestone your project has? What is plan in the future ?
Lily – Our main achievements so far: 1. invented a very unique DAO, DeFi fund management system that support privacy preserving asset operations voting/onchain governance. We believe such blockchain based organizations will change the world; 2. be responsible for discovering one of the most efficient trustless Zero Knowledge Proofs systems; 3. has built an entirely new blockchain based on the newest ADS technologies from the ground up purely using Rust + WASM; 4. completed one of the world’s most comprehensive cryptography libraries- ZEI. 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 and the DeFi infrastructure. We will deploy ZK Rollup, Accumulator based storage, confidential liquidity bridging and Dark Pool Dex.
From the Day One, Findora’s founders, including John Power and me, set a goal to leverage blockchain technology to revolutionize financial services. We firmly believe the financial infrastructure has a long overdue change. We envision an open, fair and transparent financial infrastructure that can serve billions of people, providing financial democracy. Today, I still feel the freshness of this goal. In the future, I would wish Findora’s technology and its democratically run network will be the backbone of Web 3.0, providing the necessary transparency and protection to everyone. Our future plans rely on developments in the following areas: 1. General community’s awareness and adoption of Findora utility assets; 2. A happy and healthy developer’s community that is sustainable; 3. Major breakthrough in enterprise business applications and adoption. The real financial infrastructure will be boundless and seamlessly bridge the crypto and conventional world.
Q4. You mentioned that you view the community as the key to your success. How do you involve the community with the Findora ecosystem and in what ways does the community contribute to Findora and its growth?
Lily – We view the community as the key to our success. We divide community into several sub segments: general crypto community; developer and researcher’s community and enterprise users as a community. We believe these communities should be equally strong and benefit each other. On the general crypto community side, we have teams around the world to raise awareness of Findora brand and services, deploy all kinds of growth programs including incentivized participation, gamified application experiments, bounty program. We also have a privacy preserving stable coin project that is designed to help solve lack of banking access and cost efficient international remittance issues.
On the developer and researcher’s community side, we have Advanced Findora Research Institute consisting of established researchers, economists and computer scientists. We have specialized funds to sponsor and support research projects for both private and public domain especially cryptography. We are willing to invest and flourish a developer’s community, an ecosystem fund is being set up to invest in Defi and other applications.
Finally, enterprise adoption is huge for blockchain. We firmly believe, practically, a large portion of the world’s total transactions will be moved onto the blockchain. And we are already working with partners like Tencent Group to help move small-to-medium sized enterprises onto cloud hosted blockchain based transaction systems. Such systems are configured as Findora public blockcain’s side chains and the more adoptions, the more support to our Findora main chain and token utilities.
Q5. Findora breaks open data silos allowing easy interoperability… How can data be easily reachable and shared, but yet secure and private?
Lily – Thanks to the newest development in large scale distributed system and advanced cryptography (especially breakthroughs in Zero Knowledge Proofs technology), Findora is able to achieve high-performance confidential blockchain: the Findora blockchain can be viewed as a trustless warehouse of zero knowledge proofs: such proofs can prove transactions of all types while no any third party can see through the meta data of the transactions – that’s why it’s called zero knowledge. That being said, the Findora blockchain nodes process and validate the ZKPs of the transactions. The nodes don’t know the transactions themselves. Only authorized parties can view the transactions on a block explorer—- this is very very different from Bitcoin and Ethereum, where everybody can see any transactions.
Since the privacy on a blockchain is guaranteed, we can break the data silos: even competitors can do transactions on the same Findora blockchain without being worried that they can see each other’s business secrets. — Is that interesting?
And those Zero knowledge Proofs technologies we are using, are the newest and best transparent algorithms that no pre-Quantum computers can break. They are extremely secure.
Telegram Questions
Q6. What is the role of Findora in the DeFi ecosystem in general?
Lily – In my personal view, DEFI is what blockchain about and in the future, people will only care about the DEFI applications themselves, rather than the underlying chain. But now, Defi is all about Defi on ETHEREUM and/or ERC20 tokens. Findora participates in the Defi in two ways: 1. Findora provides ZK Rollup and confidential transaction capability to the existing Defi apps on ETHEREUM as that Defi apps running on Ethereum can be better: faster, cheaper and can realize a lot more features otherwise impossible without confidentiality; 2. Findora is based on cross chain and verifiable computation technology, any Ethereum based assets can atomically transfer, transact on Findora. We can provide scalability and cost advantage to apps built directly on us.
Private Defi applications include a series of new defi products including Dark Pool Dex (allow secret large ticket crypto transaction), confidential FX pool (that can allow confidential cross-border money transfer), just to name a few. We will release soon with mainnet launch.
The technology we use to build privacy preserving defi includes Bulletproofs, Darker compiler, Supersonic, Plonk, advanced cryptography signatures and more. The Zei cryptography library that Findora built is one of the most advanced and comprehensive crypto lib in the world.
Q7. What is the most unique thing Findora brings to the blockchain community? Currently is a difficult time when many industries are still affected by the pandemic, but Findora still has outstanding progress, so what factors have made Findora success in the present time?
Lily – I would say the most unique thing Findora brings to the table is Transparency with Privacy. We haven’t seen Pandemic slowing down our growth. On the contrary, I think the Pandemic generally educated people around the world with a sense of security. We see increasing demand for our kind of services.
Q8. Findora uses a consensus algorithm called FINSENSE Finsense how it works and what are its unique features and similarities when compared to popular consensus algorithms like POW (Proof of work and POS (Proof of Stake) & BFT (Byzantine Fault Tolerance)?
Lily – Finsense is Findora’s consensus algorithm, which enables a stable, high- throughput, and public network secured by both real-world trust anchors and stake. Finsense uses FIN tokens to represent consensus seats. The total supply of FIN tokens is large enough so that in theory anyone in the world could participate in consensus, however, individual validators may own more than one seat. A validator’s influence in the protocol is proportional to the number of seats it holds.
So long as the FIN-based consensus protocol appears to be operational and secure, honest41 validators leverage the protocol itself to process all FIN transfers. However, if honest validators detect a security break or the FIN- based consensus gets stuck then these validators fall back to an FBA system to help resolve the error. In this sense the consensus protocol consists of two “channels”: a main PoS channel and a secondary FBA channel that is activated only when the PoS channel fails. This consensus is designed for asset deployment.
Q9. What is $FINDORA token used for? What is the role of $FINDORA token in your ecosystem? Do you have any plans to scarce and increase the value of $FINDORA token?
Lily – Findora toke plays a pivotal role in Findora ecosystem. Such token is the ultimate representation of the utilities on Findora blockchain. Our token economics is designed by experts in game theory, computer network economy and financial engineering. The goal is to make sure the token will directly reflect the growth of the network and the aggregated asset scale on the network while keeping reasonable scarcity. In addition to the common use cases of the tokens such as staking, gas fee, block creation rewards etc, such tokens are also being required for L2 liquidity mining, asset pooling, deployment of commercial applications and side ledgers, and more. For instance, the enterprises that deploy side ledgers for multi-party supply chain finance, trade financing, equity swap trading and KYC management will be required to pledge our system tokens. The tokens will also be used for running ZK Rollup nodes to share the revenue.
Q10. Tell me more about Findora’s 6 nodes . What is their missions in Findora ecosystem ? What kind of data is needed in Data provider node ? As I read in the website : “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 ?
Lily – This is a complicated thing involving different kind of authenticated data structures we use. simply put, because we use RSA Accumulator (a kind of sparse merkle tree) to decouple storage and validation, we will be able to shrink a full node’s storage burden by maybe 1,000-10,000X. And a new type of role – data storage provider (node) surges. This is great for enabling light clients and increasing the level of participation.
Q11. What are some of your goals for the near future? What are your plans to expand?
Lily – From the Day One, Findora’s founders, including John Power and me, set a goal to leverage blockchain technology to revolutionize financial services. We firmly believe the financial infrastructure has a long overdue change. We envision an open, fair and transparent financial infrastructure that can serve billions of people, providing financial democracy. Today, I still feel the freshness of this goal. In the future, I would wish Findora’s technology and its democratically run network will be the backbone of Web 3.0, providing the necessary transparency and protection to everyone. Our future plans rely on developments in the following areas: 1. General community’s awareness and adoption of Findora utility assets; 2. A happy and healthy developer’s community that is sustainable; 3. Major breakthrough in enterprise business applications and adoption. The real financial infrastructure will be boundless and seamlessly bridge the crypto and conventional world.
Findora Advanced Research Institute, advised by world renowned cryptographer and experts including Dr. Whitfield Diffie, 2015 Turing Award Winner, is working on a public key infrastructure. This will benefit the general public.
Q12. Only getting users, holders etc is not everything. In my opinion, a project needs to deal with solving a real world issue or problem What is the problem that your project primarily focuses on?
What can we expect to see from this project in the short-term (at some point in 2020) and 2021 and beyond (long-term goals)?
Lily – You are right. We focus on solve the issue of global financial friction. Our goal is to apply a blockchain based infrastructure to minimize the friction and democratize the financial services.
Q13. Could you tell us about the updates you have in mind for next year? Will you have new updates?
Lily – Sure. We are announcing our public sale very very soon. I think community members can soon be participating in the token sale. We will soon launch the Findora mainnet and a bunch of updates are on the way. Top on my list are ZK Rollup, confidential liquidity bridging, anonymous Identity.
Q14. Do we earn anything from staking or holding ?
Lily – My guess is: YES!
Q15. We are witnessing many projects entering blockchain industry with very good plans, promises to do good work but disappear in time and lose community. So for not losing the believers, how can your will survive in this challenging blockchain?
Lily – We have been there since late 2017. We are quiet and invest heavily in research and development. We prove ourselves to be long term player in this market.
Q16. Could you give me proof that no single party can manipulate and censor the network transactions ? How Findora keep users’ data privacy is fully protected ?
Lily – First, Findora is decentralized in the sense that no single party can manipulate and censor the network transactions. Second, unlike the most transparent blockchains on today’s market such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, there are no transaction data at all on Findora blockchain —- this sounds strange right? Let me try to explain: Findora is a zero knowledge blockchain. The Findora blockchain nodes process and verify the zero knowledge proofs of the actual transactions. These proofs are secretive, so that no nodes and 3rd party can read into the content. Because no actual transaction data on chain, users’ data privacy is fully protected. If you transfer 100 dollar on Findora to your friend via confidential transfer, no one can see this transaction through a block explorer. So to answer the question directly, not just Findora, literally no one can monitor a confidential transaction on Findora without users’ permission.
Thank you to Lily Chao (Founder) and Community for participating in the AMA. Have a nice day.
