Vivo Pay: A Zero Knowledge Payment System
Crypto hasn’t reached the mainstream yet. A lot of people are talking about it, and may have even used an exchange like Coinbase, but the number of users using blockchain is still extremely small.
Starling Protocol and Harmony One have teamed up to create Vivo Pay, the easiest to use crypto payment system on the market. Anyone who knows how to use Square Cash or Venmo should be able to set up, request payments and send payments using Vivo Pay.
Vivo Pay will be in beta soon, sign up at vivopay.me to get notified.
The Big Picture
Some of you might know Starling Protocol from our work in the Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) space. So why are we launching a wallet? To answer that, let’s look at the current blockchain challenges, and in particular DeFi. We’ve seen an influx of new innovative DeFi solutions recently: Ampleforth, Yield, Yam and many others.
The popularity of these new DeFi concepts lead to a surge in the Ethereum gas price as the network got clogged with transactions and smart contract invocations.
The concept of gas exists because the miner computing power needed to execute smart contracts is a limited resource. There is a limited number of miners, and to keep the network safe, all miners do the same work. If a user invokes a smart contract, that contract is executed with the user’s input by every single miner in the network. Running smart contract on miners is wasteful and a bottleneck.
We have learned from user tests is that the concept of gas price and gas limit can be confusing to end users as well. Gas is a UX issue. Some wallets and DeFi front-ends have chosen to pay gas fees for their users. While commendable, it’s not sustainable. Especially when gas and transaction costs surge.
A Fundamental Change
These issues are not unique to Ethereum. Most blockchains face the same challenges. That’s why we think it’s time for a change. A fundamental change how blockchains work.
Interacting with blockchains should be cheaper, simpler, safer, faster and preferably more private as well. We have the technology to get there, and we have a roadmap. Step by step we’re going to introduce products and features that will bring us closer to our vision.
The first step is Vivo Pay. By making the wallet easy to use, we’re making blockchain accessible for many more people than possible today. We found the ideal partner to launch with: Harmony One. Harmony One is a new layer one blockchain with a super ambitious team. Vivo Pay will support Harmony’s ONE token for fast and easy payments.
Zero knowledge Wallet
The second step is where things get really interesting. We are moving smart contract execution from miners to the wallets, the edge nodes. Vivo Pay will get the ability to run smart contracts on your computer securely using Zero Knowledge Proofs.
Instead of all miners having to execute the same code when a contract is invoked, a Vivo Pay smart contract only needs to be executed once, by one wallet: your own. When ever you invoke a smart contract, your wallet will run the code and share the result (plus the mathematical proof you ran the smart contract correctly) to the blockchain. This makes Vivo Pay way less wasteful.
There are more advantages to this approach: since the contract runs on the user’s own device, there is no gas involved. That simplifies the UX and developers can create more complex smart contracts (complex smart contracts in traditional chains use more gas).
And since every user runs the smart contracts on their own device, Vivo Pay is basically a big parallel computer and scalable in a way blockchain isn’t: clogging the network is much less of an issue.
Front running will be less of an issue as well. In traditional blockchains, users add transactions and smart contract invocations to a public queue. These transactions and invocations are basically intentions. The transaction or invocation isn’t final until the miner has processed the intention. Intentions being public makes blockchains vulnerable to traders trying to jump the queue and replacing trades by paying more gas. By executing smart contracts on their own machines, front running will become harder, especially when smart contracts use another important property of zero knowledge proofs: privacy. For example, it’s trivial in Vivo Pay to create a private Ampleforth-style DeFi.
In other words: Ideal for the next generation of DeFi products. What started as a Venmo or Square Cash will become a decentralized investment bank with version 2.
How soon will this become reality? Very soon. In fact, we already have been working on developer tools for secure and client-side smart contracts for a while now, and will launch these developer tools at the same time we launch version 2 of Vivo Pay.
Want to stay up to date? Leave your email address on VivoPay.me and you’ll be the first to know when we ship.
Big Thanks
We feel extremely grateful we’ve been given the opportunity to work on a subject as futuristic Vivo Pay with ZKP smart contracts. I want to thank our investors who believed in us before we had anything to show and Harmony One for being a great partner.
