Suterusu Founders Series
An Interview with CEO Zhengpeng Hou
We are pleased to present our second installment in our “Suterusu Founders Series,” with CEO of Suterusu, Zhengpeng Hou. Please enjoy.
What is your name and what is your role with Suterusu:
My Zhengpeng Hou. Many of my friends from western countries call me ZP, which is the initial of my first name. I am the CEO of Suterusu.
You used to work in open-source technology — tell us a bit about your background and what brought you to the world of blockchain?
The first time I was introduced to the world of open source software was in 2000. I coincidently got a CD from an issue of a computer magazine, TurboLinux. Prior to receiving this Linux CD, I had been using MS-DOS and MS-Windows. I put the CD into the CD drive of my computer and nothing happened. I then rebooted the machine. The interface loaded and was a bit difficult for me, but it still looked really cool. That was the day my journey with open source began. It took me 5 years though to become a ‘pure’ open-source user.
The debut of Ubuntu changed my involvement with the open-source world. I felt that I could also do something to help others, so I began to contribute to the community. Soon after I got involved with Ubuntu, I co-founded the Ubuntu China community with some other folks, and also kept developing in Debian, Ubuntu, and KDE projects.
The reason I love open source is not only because it is free, but more than ever it is because it provides us with an alternative to the pan-national tech conglomerate system. What is so fascinating about blockchain to me is its resemblance to open source software projects.
What exactly is Suterusu? What market solution are you providing?
Suterusu is a launchpad for developers, companies to instantly launch privacy-preserving blockchains based on the state-of-the-art cryptographic technologies, including the most advanced zero-knowledge proof technique. The fundamental technology of our project is the advanced zk-SNARK which we call it zk-ConSNARK.
We will solve the problem with existing cryptocurrencies, which is the missing of essential function, privacy. With this problem solving, we will also to eliminate the barriers to developer privacy-preserving blockchain with our solutions.
In your words, what is the biggest problem with cryptocurrencies currently? What are the limitations to privacy?
Today, everybody calls bitcoin and other altcoins crypto coins, but the majority don’t have the attribute of privacy at all. For example, bitcoin exposes everything to the public, but this is not what people want to have. Everybody has the ability to know every transaction made by an account owner, it gives you a very low level’s security. I guess this definitely stops bitcoin’s adoption in payment.
How does Suterusu differ from other privacy technologies?
We don’t require a trusted setup as Zcash, and we will also significantly improve the performance of the underlying ZK-SNARK scheme used in the existing setup-free privacy coins. Our cross-chain protocol will guarantee the liquidity and interoperability of the Suter token.
Why are you confident the team behind Suterusu will be able to execute this vision?
To answer this question, I’d like to share some highlights of our projects.
1. Our team is very unique, the team is made up of people with different kinds of backgrounds, Dr. Lin has been working in the cryptography world more than 1 decade, Dr, Guo not only has seasoned experiences in blockchain but also has been working in the finance industry before. And as the CEO of this project, I also have been working in the IT industry and FLOSS community for many years.
2. Innovation. Since the beginning of our project, we have created the zk-ConSNARK and also adopt the latest technologies from the academic world. Despite zk-ConSNARK, some others like liquid democracy, the latest BFT, etc.
3. Engineering team. Those core developers on our team have been knowing each other for a long time, and more importantly, most of them have a deep background in mathematics and programming. This is also crucial to the development of cryptography technology.
4. Community driven. Not only we adopt the mechanism to achieve this, but we have been practicing on it since day one.
With all those, we believe that we can achieve what we want to do.
How do you see privacy coins making it onto the mainstage of the crypto worlds? How does this technology gain mass adoption?
In our point of view, privacy coins will fill the gap between the cryptocurrency today and what it is tomorrow. And our technology is to solve the problem
What do you see as the key to the adoption of privacy coins by the mainstream audience? Why is this technology critical to — and necessary — for the world?
There are some factors have great impact on the adoption, like, security, efficiency, and usability. Our technologies try to solve problem with theses in mind.
What is the timeline for launching Suterusu?
We are working hard toward the launching in Jun-Sep, 2020.
What other blockchain technology projects do you admire and why?
There are many projects out there in the market, some of them are doing well, some of them are not. No matter what is the status, they have been trying or tried in some ways. We appreciate their endeavors, success or failure, those experience are precious to us.
What do you think crypto will look like by September 2020? And September 2022?
Prediction the future would be hard for us, but one thing we know for sure is if we all contribute to it, the crypto world must be different from what it looks like today. We believe the maturity of technology will make a huge difference. With our mainnet’s launching, we will make zk-ConSNARK easier to be adopted.
To learn more and stay up to date follow Suterusu on our social channels:
Suterusu Medium: https://medium.com/suterusu/latest
Suterusu Twitter: https://twitter.com/suterusu_io?lang=en
Suterusu Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Suterusu/
