Findora with Matt Arney
Brief Information
Findora is a public, decentralized, multi-purpose transactional system, with tools for people and financial applications to operate over a ledger in a publicly-auditable, yet confidential way. The system hosts transactions, assets, and programmable contracts that can be proven compliant, without compromising on privacy.
Introduction AMA
Eric: So here with us is the Findora Team building a new layer 1 project! Welcome @mattarney and @KenB7!
Matt: Great to be here
Ken: Hello Eric and everyone
Eric: So first, please introduce yourselves to the AMA Room community. Your role, your background and tell us how you discovered crypto.
Matt: Sure, I’m Matt Arney and before joining Findora, I co-founded and successfully exited from three international startups in the enterprise language & technology space. I discovered crypto while searching aroujnd for a better payment mechanism for paying overseas contractors
Ken: Hello — my name is Ken Berniklau. I’m Director of Product Management at Findora and happy to be here today and talk about our project. My expertise is in launching early stage start-ups, product development, leadership, and managing in a growth environment.
Eric: So tell us, What is Findora?
Matt: Coindesk has recently described Findora in the media as a decentralized finance (DeFi) public blockchain project.
To go a bit deeper, 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.
Eric: Privacy is a great feature to have for a layer 1 project. Can you tell us how its achieved in Findora?
Matt: 1st generation blockchains store transaction data in the clear, failing to provide privacy protections required by the nature of financial services. Findora’s ledger is confidential and highly secure.
By default, identities, transaction amounts, and transaction metadata are not stored on chain. Even validators and storage providers can’t read the data. Users hold their own keys, and are always in control of their identity, assets and financial data.
Eric: Ive heard a lot about Findora and a bunch of partnerships. Can you tell us about them all?
Matt: Sure, Ken and I are both in growth roles so we deal a lot with partnerships.
In July of last year, we announced a partnership with Tencent Cloud that enables us to provide the world’s first confidential ledger products on top of Tencent Cloud (zkLDG as you mentioned above). The integration supports encrypted transaction and asset issuance, processing, verification and storage. Together we are creating the world’s first zero knowledge Transaction-As-A-Service cloud, a direct answer to AWS’ QLDB.
We are also working with over a dozen companies in the payments space, ecommerce providers and even an auto parts store.
Eric: Thats a heavy hitter for sure! Tell us about the utility token. what does it do?
Matt: FRA is the native token of the Findora platform and is required for access to its core features and functionality, including staking, governance, payment for transactions, privacy-enhancing features & access to advanced financial application building tools and other services.
We completed our successful public sale a few weeks ago and once we roll out mainnet we’ll annouce plans we have for exchanges etc.
All the info regarding requirements, allocation can be found on our website here: info.findora.org
Eric: What benefits can one who decide to hodl FRA?
Matt: Our token is the source of the network’s utility, and we have a lot of ways to increase the token value both intrinsically and with regards to the utility. For instance, we have hard-wired deflationary burning mechanics into the TRX fees. We have also designed many use cases where you have to lock and stake large amounts of Findora tokens to access mining, application building, and premium features.
While we can’t offer investment advice we like to think there will be a lot of benefit to hanging onto FRA
Eric: Nice. What are the ways that your project generates profits/revenue to maintain your project and what is its revenue model?
Matt: Findora is building both powerful blockchain solutions and industry-leading tokenomics. We believe blockchain is fundamentally different from the traditional startups. However, decentralized protocols still need to have a revenue model and the revenue should come from utility and asset transactions.
Eric: What can you tell us about the founders and why they started this project?
Matt: 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 generating revenue for Findora. We also provide side ledger services to business users. Such services will require staking and pledging Findora tokens and will also contribute a large revenue stream to the public blockchain. 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 pleased to see that Findora tokens are becoming increasingly valuable utilities.
Eric: Wow. Findora can become an L2 to other chains. thats pretty awesome
Matt: From day one, Findora’s founders set a goal to leverage blockchain technology to revolutionize financial services. We firmly believe the incumbent financial system is long overdue for change.
We envision an open, fair and transparent financial infrastructure that can serve billions of people and provide financial democracy.
Our future plans rely on developments in the following areas: 1. General community awareness and adoption of Findora utility assets; 2. A happy and healthy developer community that is sustainable; 3. A major breakthrough in enterprise business applications and adoption. The real financial infrastructure will be boundless and seamlessly bridge the crypto and conventional world.
Eric: What about Findora’s advisors?
Matt: Findora has great leadership and teams in place consisting of leading experts in finance, cryptography and decentralized projects needed to execute our long-term vision.
We’re thrilled to announce that Dr. Whitfield Diffie, Turing award winner and one of the most respected cryptographers in the world joined the Findora Project as a Senior Advisor. Among many things, Dr. Diffie is the Founder of Asymmetric Encryption and inventor of the “Diffie-Hellman key exchange” technique. We’re super excited to have him on board! Here’s a photo of Dr. Diffie along with Paul Sherer founding director of Findora’s Advanced Research Center. Details of many of our staff can be found at the bottom of info.findora.org (http://info.findora.org/)
He was also just named an ACM Fellow
Eric: Damn, impressive!
Matt: Sorry — I like my photos
Eric: We love them too. so what is the status of Findora the product right now? What are the next few milestones?
Matt: Ken is our product guy — I’ll have him answer.
Ken: Our main roadmap items for 2021 revolve around launching our mainnet which will occur in Q1 2021. We also plan to focus on phase II which includes launching an RSA accumulator based storage optimization and our DeFi infrastructure. We plan to deploy ZK Rollup, Accumulator-based storage, confidential liquidity bridging and Dark Pool Dex. We will also optimize ZKPs for different use cases, hardware acceleration and MPC for blockchain use cases.
Matt: This quarter we’re all about launching mainnet
Eric: When can developers play around with it? are there developer grants planned?
Matt: Yes, testnet is fully open now to anyone that wants to play. Go to findora.org/testnet
We have grants available as well — click this graphic out for more details
Community AMA
Q: Tell me its 3 unique features that your competitor doesn’t have? How will people attract toward Your project?
Ken: There are a lot of things that set us apart including technology, product, problems we solve, the team, and the market strategy. But I wanted to focus on the technology and 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 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.
Q: What’s your next development step Findora? What do you want to achieve 2021–2022?
Ken: Our main roadmap items so far:
- 1st Testnet with confidential multi asset operations and anonymous transfers
2. Address Identity layer implementation
3. Phase I asset policy language and restrained virtual machine; 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 (RSA accumulator based storage optimization) and the DeFi infrastructure. We will deploy ZK Rollup, Accumulator based storage, confidential liquidity bridging and Dark Pool Dex. In 2021, because of a significant improvement and reorg of our research, we will be able to pool more resources to optimize ZKPs for different use cases, hardware acceleration and MPC for blockchain use cases.
Q: We can see Findora is in the testnet, so when will it be fully released? And How can I join the testnet? What are the benefits will early adopters get?
Matt: Testnet is currently open at www.findora.org/testnet for all to signup
Q: How does Findora ensure that it is not used by criminals for money laundering and terrorism sponsorship, because most privacy blockchains are promoting this kind of illegal activities?
Matt: Good question — first of all we comply with all KYC/AML requirements but also important Findora is not only confidential but also auditable. Findora is translucent, allowing compliance to be verified while still protecting critical user data. Breakthroughs in zero-knowledge proofs like Bulletproofs and Supersonic enable efficient selective disclosure. Users can prove financial transactions are correct and compliant without revealing sensitive information.
Q: So what is Findora different than other network like #Monero, #Dash, or even with #ETH? What is the most specialty from Findora that other dont have?
Matt: Another good question. All tokens created and issued on Findora will have privacy features with key differentiators from the aforementioned privacy coins: 1. They are auditable while the others are not (that’s why Zcash and Monero have raised some regulatory concerns); 2. privacy preserving coins on Findora support smart contracts (while the others do not). This is significant: users can program these coins like those on Ethereum. In the future, every token should have privacy features. Even Vitalik from Ethereum agreed. To us, the key is to maintain privacy (that everyone needs) while keeping their transparency.
Q: There are some common problems in crypto. Such as scalability, Interoperability, security and Privacy. How does Findora plan to resolve this problem?
Matt: Aha — someone has been reading our website:)
Findora solves four core problems inherent in blockchains today:
Confidentiality
Scalability
Interconnectivity
Auditability
Ken: This is so true and a very good question. We see the lack of scalability and privacy as the great majority of the world’s financial applications would not be able to work. Many applications such as exchanges all require certain performance thresholds and without privacy we guarantee the majority of the population and institutions will never adopt. So our team figured out a way to leverage state-of-the-art Zero Knowledge cryptography to achieve both scalability and privacy.
Matt: As we mentioned above privacy coins like Zcash , Dash and Monero are not auditable and because of this are facing issues with regulators and exchanges. In fact, Bittrex just announced they would be delisting Monero, Zcash and Dash on Jan 15th because of this. Findora’s tokens are auditable and also support smart contracts.
Q: Findora is a really interesting project. I don’t know much about technical issues. Can you give more realistic reasons for becoming a Layer investor?
Matt: Great question — We believe that the financial services industry infrastructure is outdated and in need of innovation. Findora’s goal is to leverage blockchain technology in order to revolutionize financial services. We envision an open, fair and transparent financial infrastructure that can serve billions of people, providing true financial democracy. Findora’s technology and its democratically run network aims to become the backbone of Web 3.0, providing the necessary transparency and protection for everyone.
Q: What is the principle of controllability and transparency of zero-knowledge proofs on data and how does Findora ensure interoperability between master and side ledgers?
Matt: A zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) enables one to convince others that a statement is true without revealing any information on why this is the case.
Let’s take a closer look at zero-knowledge proofs and how they work. Imagine there’s a door with a keypad lock next to it, and Bob is trying to persuade Alice that he has the correct password for the keypad lock. By unlocking the door with the keypad lock, Bob has given Alice a compelling argument of him knowing the password, without directly revealing what it is. In other words, Bob has convinced Alice that his statement about knowing the password is true, without revealing any additional knowledge about the statement.
To achieve privacy-preserving transparency, Findora uses these types of zero-knowledge arguments, or zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), to prove many complex statements without revealing anything about their contents.
Q: Unfortunately I missed out #FRA token public sale now how can i buy your token.. When will list your token on the exchange?
Matt: While we can’t publically disclose any information regarding exchanges we plan to annouce something in Q1 about this matter. Thanks for your patience and understanding 🙂
Q: What your plans in place for global expansion are Findora focusing on only market at this time?Or focus on building and developing or getting customers and users or partnerships?
Matt: We are actively in talks with partner companies around the world to help with our global expansion. We’re especially strong in Asia and have footprints in many countries in the region. We also have plans to localize our offering into several languages so that more users can learn about what we are up to
Ken: We see this as a global community. 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.
Closing Remarks
Eric: How will Findora compete in the crowded Layer 1 space with the big Ethereum and DOTs already in there and Algorand , EOS, TRX and others also?
Matt: We think there’s plenty of room for an offering like ours. We are a Layer 1 protocol aiming to be the backbone of web 3.0’s financial infrastructure. We have developed the financial roadmap needed to achieve this goal and have successfully raised only what was needed according to our plan. We believe when comparing Findora to Polkadt and EOS, our raise is quite moderate.
Eric: Alright! Please invite everyone to your channels to know more about this fascinating project of yours
Matt: Thanks Eric and the AMA Room for having us — we’re on Telegram, Twitter and other social channels. https://t.me/findoraen
Ken: Eric, and everyone at the AMA Room, thank you for spending time with us and learning more about the Findora Project.
Eric: @mattarney when is TGE again?
Matt: Ah, after mainnet.
Here’s a bit more info on what’s coming — we plan to make more announcements in the very near future
Thanks Eric and your great community!
