Findora, a public financial chain, seeks a balance between privacy and auditability

The privacy financial public chain Findora hopes to build a trustworthy financial network underlying infrastructure, and the data of any financial application can be seamlessly traded on the encrypted, highly secure and auditable public chain. Findora team members Ben Fisch and Benedikt Bünz have important inventions in the field of blockchain and cryptography, including Bulletproofs, Verifiable Delay Function (VDF), and Filecoin's storage proof. In August of this year, Findora Foundation announced the completion of a new round of financing of tens of millions of dollars, led by Polychain Capital.

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Moderator: Could you please introduce your background and how did you get involved in the encryption field?

Lily: I started my career as a financial consultant in high school, mainly helping some Chinese companies to go public on NASDAQ or Hong Kong as FA. After college, I met John Powers. From 2006 to 2015, he was the CEO of the Stanford Endowment Fund. Before that, he worked on Wall Street and was a relatively well-known investor. When I met him, he was the co-chairman of Credit Suisse Private Equity. At that time, we set up some SPVs together and did some big company business, such as Uber & Lyft and SpaceX.

In 2017, we decided to set up a 5 billion endowment fund. In the process of building a fund, we found that it is very troublesome to manage information with LPs and the VC funds we invest in. At the same time, when we obtain KYC information, it is very troublesome, there are many steps, and lawyers are required to intervene . So we think about whether there will be a modern technology that can process and manage this information, while ensuring the privacy of the information, and will not reveal the confidential information of our invested companies and LPs during the information exchange process. We searched the market for a long time, but we couldn't find a suitable technology. He has a very good friend, John Hennessy, who is now the chairman of Google's board of directors and previously served as the principal at Stanford. He is the winner of the Turing Award and a big computer expert. At that time, he gave us some suggestions, saying that this belongs to the field of cryptography. You need to go to Stanford's cryptography laboratory to find some technologies to see if your vision can be realized. We went to Stanford at that time, found Ben Fisch and Benedikt Bunz, discussed many issues, and finally decided to make a product similar to the Microsoft Windows operating system for the personal computer industry, so that future digital finance can be built on the platform developed by Findora and Cryptography Toolkit.

For me, John Powes and I started to get in touch with the blockchain, that's the process.

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During this process, there were also some twists and turns. I went to work for a while, and then entered Stanford University to study for a Ph.D. in applied cryptography. There are also many other people here who are engaged in research on blockchain and Bitcoin. I was a Ph.D. student in 2015, when Bitcoin, Ethereum and encryption technology were hot again. Much of the research I do is also used by industry and has influenced several projects. I became an advisor to Filecoin and had a lot of communication with the Ethereum Foundation. One of the research I did was Verifiable Delay Function (VDF), which is an important technology for PoS systems. Trusted random beacons, and Filecoin's Proof of Space mining protocol, are some of my research projects during my PhD. Then I met Lily and John and started to join Findora.

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Tekin Salimi，Polychain Capital  General Partner

Prior to entering the crypto space, I myself represented a number of public and private companies in the US and Canada, specializing in securities and mergers and acquisitions law. One of the things that attracted me to the crypto space was the prosperity of Ethereum and the potential I saw in Ethereum as a new kind of P2P logical platform.

As an Internet generation, social media and mobile applications are ubiquitous, but financial facilities are relatively lagging behind, which I always find incomprehensible. And I think that in the future, the financial system will definitely develop into a form such as the Internet, driven by technologies such as Bitcoin, and I also want to participate in it.

Moderator: Please introduce Findora's team and vision?

Lily: Our team is a member of the cryptography team from well-known institutions such as MIT, Stanford, Columbia University, and Cornell University. For example, Ben and Benedikt are our core members. We now have about 50 people and 40 engineers. This is the composition of our North American team. More than 90% of them have a doctorate or above, mainly for public chains.

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Ben: The primary goal of Findora is to provide a usable system for financial applications, so from the beginning, we have focused on certain specific functions, such as DeFi, P2P lending, asset management, and issuance of various assets.

Our uniqueness is primarily a balance between privacy and auditability. Auditability is critical for financial applications.

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Findora invented some zero-knowledge proof technologies to achieve this balance. I also want to emphasize another function we have made, a system that achieves a good separation of network roles, in other words: the governance and consensus protocols are separated from the storage layer of the system, you do not need to have high computing power or storage resources, and Can participate in consensus. Even if you don't participate in consensus, you can participate as a storage or computing node. This modularity is also one of our unique features.

Moderator: Briefly introduce Bulletproof and Supersonic?

Ben: Bulletproof and Supersonic are the two zero-knowledge proof tools we use, developed by ourselves, for confidential transactions, and to balance confidentiality and transparency. The efficiency of both is why we chose them, and they don't require a trusted setup. A little background here: zero-knowledge proofs have grown enormously over the past 10 years, the most efficient of which are zk-SNARKs, which are used as both privacy and scalability tools. However, some of the most performant systems of these require a trusted setup, in other words you need to trust a committee or a group of people to set the system up, and if that process goes wrong, then the whole system goes wrong and you can no longer trust these Privacy tools.

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Moderator: What is Findora's business model?

Lily: When introducing the vision, I also briefly mentioned our business model, which is to build a value-exchanging, open expressway network, change the status quo of completely inaccessible privacy exchanges on the blockchain, and realize the great evolution of the open-source business model , that is, secure data exchange. Because although the blockchain is decentralized, banks and companies may not be willing to conduct non-private exchanges.

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Moderator: Tell us why Polychain Capital decided to invest in Findora?

Tekin: Findora is an investment of Polychain Capital that I led in 2019. People in the encryption field in Silicon Valley are very familiar with the research work of Ben and Benedikt. These works are not only crucial to Findora, but also promote the progress of the entire industry, and are also used in other projects, such as Ethereum and Filecoin, so When I learned that they decided to join a new project full-time, I decided to learn more about this project. In 2019, I worked with the Findora team for several months, did due diligence on them, and then promoted the investment of Polychain Capital.

I think this project, from a high-level perspective, is doing the privacy field that is the slowest progress in the encryption industry. In the past few years, there has been a lot of research on privacy, but there are few specific actions and implementations in the blockchain. In the market, we have seen many teams with strong financial strength, engaged in new scalable consensus mechanisms, Or do DeFi. But in the field of privacy coins, after Monero and Zcash, there has been little progress. But without computationally efficient and private computing, blockchains will never be suitable for real-world financial transactions. In 99% of cases, both parties to the transaction require anonymity, and semi-anonymity is not enough, because it will leak a lot of data, and the original transaction parties can be found. So for us, such a project engaged in cutting-edge technology research, implementing leading zero-knowledge proof technologies such as Bulletproof and Supersonic, for us, this investment decision is a natural one.

After meeting Lily and understanding her extensive financial experience in China and the United States, we believe that Findora will be a good platform with privacy technology and market strategy. So we are very happy to help Findora launch the main network and realize its vision to become a world-leading blockchain platform for financial transactions.

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Moderator: What is the difference between Findora and Oasis?

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Moderator: Is there any news about token issuance and listing on exchanges?

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Moderator: In addition to privacy, is there any other value basis?

Lily: In addition to privacy, Findora also has the industry-leading ZK Rollup technology, which is used to greatly improve the throughput performance of the blockchain. The value of a platform lies in how many people use it and how much value it has accumulated. Findora is developing Web 3.0 infrastructure for pan-financial industry adoption, which is why we focus on features like privacy, scalability, etc. to support mainstream financial applications. If we use our platform to conduct a large number of large-scale financial transactions, then the value accumulation and the value foundation of the platform will naturally appear.