Thank you to everyone who joined AMA Blockelite x Findora on 21st November at 6 AM UTC I 1 PM UTC+7. Here is the recap for those who missed this AMA.
Our special guest today is Lily Chao, Founder of Findora
Segment 1: Introduction about Findora and Lily Chao, Founder of Findora
Q1. Can you briefly introduce yourself as well as Findora?
Lily Chao, Founder of Findora: 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. – I have a successful track record of investing in early stage businesses both in the US and in China. 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.
Q2. How is the Findora blockchain different from the current projects on the market? What solutions can Findora bring and will it be useful in the future?
Lily Chao, Founder of Findora: There are a lot of things that set us apart including technology, product, problems we solve and the team and the market strategy. But I wanted to focus on the technology and product: Findora represnts the cutting edge of the blockchain technology: we are aiming to bring breakthrough to Web 3.0 rather than incremental improvements. The probelms 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.
Findora provides a complete set of tools to help world’s finance move onto the Blockchain without sacrificing the scale, the privacy and viability while gaining the transparency.
The tools will include a lot of cryptography empowered auditing protocols including proof of solvency, confidential asset tracing, proof of any balance sheet items, just to name a few; the trustless ZK Rollup – the ultimate scaling tool; the components to build Dark Pool Dex – so the Bitcoin Whales won’t be watched when they move assets :).
View our application layer as a Shopify for DeFi!
Blockelite Host: Very detailed, thank you
How does Findora Blockchain compatibility compare to other blockchains? @lily52099
Lily Chao, Founder of Findora: Out level of compatibility is high. Or in other words, Fndora is highly interoperable. Assets can be moved in and out of the Findora ecosystem seamlessly. I wanted to address this in several ways:
1. Findora is very user friendly: we do have our own completely new codebase built from the ground up using Rust. But we provide ample APIs and various compilers to facilitate Solidity, Java, and another languages.
2. Findora is cryptographically secure and designed with Verifiable Computing Framework. Cross chain asset movements are seamless and trustless and can be verified ANYONE in a blink of the eyes, thanks to Zero Knowledge Proofs.
3. Findora, from Day One, is deisgned with enterprise grade rigidity. We have a modular architecture. The Findora’s enterprise deployment is almost identical to the public chain. The enterprise deployments can be viewed as subnetworks and can easily inter-operate with Findora mainnet
Blockelite Host: When’s Findora mainnet will launch?
Lily Chao, Founder of Findora: Stay tuned. SOOOOOOON
Q3. Can you introduce a little bit about the consensus protocol that Findora will use? What innovations does Findora bring for Distributed Consensus?
Lily Chao, Founder of Findora: 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 fairly distributed 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, honest 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. FBA = Federated BFT
Finsense works as a pure proof of stake consensus till the network has consistency issues such as large scale nodes colluding, 51% attack, interest rate attacks
Q4. Could you explain the main utilities and use-cases of the Findora token ($FIND)? What are the user benefits of holding the Findora token ($FIND) in the long-term?
Lily Chao, Founder of Findora: Yes. Our Findora token is a utility token. 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 menegement will be required to pledge our system tokens.
The tokens will also be used for running ZK Rollup nodes to share the revenue. The long term benefit to hold these tokens is of increasing scarcity and growing utility.
Q5. Findora wants to build an open zero-knowledge blockchain network enabling transactions with privacy-preserving transparency. What is the market strategy of Findora to get mass adoption by millions of users and investors into your project?
Lily Chao, Founder of Findora: This is an excellent question. We firmly believe the future backbone of Web 3.0 will be privacy preserving public bockchain: where everyone enjoys the benefit of decentralization and openness without worrying about being nake. Findora is buiding one and we believe zero knowledge is the most robust solution for the foreseeable future.
Our go to market strategy relies on several layers of efforts: 1. building a household brand name and gaining community support from around the world; 2. actively sponsor enterprise adoption and encourage business applications to move onto public blockchain for better interoperability; 3. working with out network of developers and support them to build a variety of game changing use cases.
Lastly, a privacy preseving stable coin is under planning with partners to boost cross-border payment activities
Segment 2: Questions from Twitter
Q1: (From @nguyenthuthuy90) What are the core value propositions of the FIND market that go above and beyond today’s popular markets?
Lily Chao, Founder of Findora: The core value proposition is here: Transparency with privacy!
We are very different. There are a lot of things that set us apart including the technology, the products, the problems we solve and the team and the market strategy. But I wanted to focus on the technology and the product: Findora represents the cutting edge of blockchain technology: we are aiming to bring 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 identities and credentials 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. All these solutions are very useful and future-proof. With the scalability and privacy we bring to the Blockchain, DeFi can go much farther!
Q2: (From @Smilingface686) The middle layer of Findora provides a “financial passport.” What are these financial passports? How do they work? What requirements must users meet to obtain these passports?
Lily Chao, Founder of Findora: These are very cool passports! Everyone wants one!
Financial Passorts, are, actually, Zero Knowledge Decentralized Identity
It exists on Findora chain as some sort of ledger object maybe a Merkle Tree we call it. With a lot of leaves of commitments and proofs containing some statements of all leveal of credentials: sex, name, balance, accreditation status of yesterday, etc.
It is confidential so no third party can see through it on chain. But the owner will be able to attach it with his balances (UTXOs) via AIR (Address Identity Registry).
There is no real limit to the types of data a user can aggregate. It can be for insurance, income, accredited investor status, etc. It all depends on the types of entities that are handing out credentials. A user will be able to control their financial passports much like they control other cryptocurrencies. As long as you own your keys, the data can’t be compromised. And We can make sure everyone has one even it’s empty!
Q3: (From @xiaodan48297229) Fidora own an the open zero-knowledge blockchain. Does that mean it will be a privacy coin? Do you think we need another privacy coin on the market? And has Fidora been audited?
Lily Chao, Founder of Findora: All coins on Findora, including the Findora mainnet coin, have privacy features by default. So Yes, they can be called privacy coin in this sense. But they are so different with today’s Privacy coin on the market: Zcash and Monero. Findora’s tokens can have different levels of privacy: confidential or anonymous and can be auditable and programmable (smart contracts ready). These are not today’s privacy coins
As Vitalik put, we will definitely need privacy preserving stable coin as a world money. Maybe the community can create one
In my personal view, in the future, all cryptocurrencies should have privacy features.
As for auditing, yes, we work with muliple parties to audit our codebases of all kinds.
Q4: (From @summaryYui) Can anonymous transactions be performed on the #FIND blockchain to hide transaction details to help protect the confidentiality of user information and tokens?
Lily Chao, Founder of Findora: Yes. We have very efficient anonyous transactions. The anonymous transaction is empowered by ZK Snarks to hide either of all of addresses, asset type, asset amount, timestamp and more. You can have an anonymous transaction that is completely invisible on block explorer.
Yet you can still generate some selective revealing proofs to show some statements about this anonymous transaction: such as balance >XYZ.
Segment 3: Live questions.
1. Southeast Asia is a very vibrant market and many project developed here so with your project what do you think about Southeast Asia and do you have any plan to develop here?
Lily Chao, Founder of Findora: Southeast Asia is pivotal to the global cryptocurrency market. We have strategic interest in the region and sincerely believe the technoloy and utility Findora brings can add value to the region’s financial democracy and liberty. We aim to develop a robust community and also have a plan to work with the businesses in the region for cross-border payments, ecommerce settlement and micro finance. Bullish on Vietnam!
2. What problems is Your project trying to solve to make it easier for Crypto users? Please let us know how evolving the roadmap is right now. What will happen this year and in the future?
Lily Chao, Founder of Findora: in addition to scalability, we want to solve a simple issue: there is no privacy on the blockchian: this is preventing the mass adoption. Our roadmap is to launch the mainnet 2020Q4-2021Q1, 2021-Q2 cross-chain liquidity bridging (privacy preserving), Q2-Q3, L2 liqudity mining ready, Q3-Q4 ZK Rollup for ETH community and sometime within 2021, privacy stable coin.
3. Are you a global project or local project? Can anybody anywhere use Your project without any restrictions?
Lily Chao, Founder of Findora: We are a global project: a global team, a world class research and engineering team, backed by global tier 1 investor; a mindset for globalization. You can access Findora without restriction from anywhere.
4. Findora and Tecent Cloud partnered to offer World’s First Zero-Knowledge Ledger , could you please tell us how it is going and what major milestones have been achieved?
Lily Chao, Founder of Findora: The ZKLDB – Zero Knowledge Ledger Database is Findora’s response to AWS’ cloud base QLDB, but better and more secure and more interoperable. We are deployig the base layer on Tencent and the co-sale teams are being set up. I am cofident the commercialization will be soon to happen!
5. One of the biggest issues for dapps is onboarding. What solutions do you have or the team found for try to resolve this problem?
Lily Chao, Founder of Findora: Most of the Dapps are still developed with a developer mindset. A lot more user experience improvement and integration are needed. A lot of cryptography related operation should be behind the scene. What we found useful is to design RestFul APIs, easy to use SDKs and invest in sample apps. I am confident DAPPs should be as smooth and easy to use as iOS apps in the future
6. How important is the community to Your project? and how can we collaborate or help share token for the development of the project?
Community is extremely important to Findora. We aspire to be the global decentralized financial infrastructure with fair access. We have a well balanced token distribution plan to decentralize the allocation across jurisdictions, demographics and industires. We have action plans to work with communities of all kinds to distribute the Findora tokens through bounty, incentivized adoption, mobile payment seeding and other plans.
7. What is the GAP you are addressing in the market? What is the opportunity you are exploring? What is the problem you are trying to solve?
Lily Chao, Founder of Findora: Findora tries to address the GAP between Crypto and real world finance; we are exploring the huge and unprecedented opportunities of the decentralization of the world’s finance. The exact problems we are solving is 1. transparency WITHOUT privacy, 2. low scalability
8. Findora is a privacy-protecting project,
Then how do you ensure your users their privacy are not been monitored by you?
Lily Chao, Founder of Findora: First, Findora is decentralized in the sense that no single party can manipulate and censor the nwtwork transactions. Second, unlike the most transparent blcokchains 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 for joining today AMA! It was awesome! Would you like to address the community before we open the chat? 😉
Lily Chao, Founder of Findora: Thank you all for your time and interest! I wish Findora will be part of the community. Well rooted and benefit the local communities! I wish you all a nice weekend!
Our AMA session is now over !!!
More information about Findora
Website: https://findora.org/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/findoraofficial
Telegram Group: https://t.me/findoraen
Telegram Channel: https://t.me/FindoraANN
Medium: https://medium.com/findorafoundation
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/findorafoundation/
