AMA RECAP — Whale Blockchain Enthusiast with Findora
On 26th January 2021, Findora conducted an AMA in the Whale Blockchain Enthusiast. Our guest is Matt Arney, Head of Growth and Ken Berniklau, Head of Product.
Lots of questions as usual from the Community about Findora progress. The Findora team took part in a very interesting AMA session which included Project introduction, Questions from twitter, and a live AMA session with the Whale Blockchain Enthusiast community. If you missed the AMA in person, read this recap for a deeper insight into Findora.
Let’s take a look at the most interesting points of our conversation.
🐳 Segment 1: Project introduction
Could you please introduce yourself and introduce Findora to our community?
Matt Arney: My name is Matt Arney and I manage growth and partnerships at Findora.
The media has recently described Findora as a decentralized finance (DeFi) public blockchain project
Findora is building a global decentralized financial network for the creation and use of confidential assets and smart contracts. The Findora blockchain achieves privacy-preserving transparency, operates with the best in class security features, and uses ZK-Rollup technology. Its flexible technology can also be used to replace enterprises’ current infrastructure or be deployed in the cloud as sub-networks (side-ledgers) — all interoperable with the public Findora blockchain.
Ken Berniklau: Hello — my name is Ken Berniklau. I’m Director of Product Management at Findora and happy to answer some questions about our project.
What services or products does Findora offer to users or the community?
Matt Arney: The Findora platform is divided into three layers; financial service applications, developer tools and a distributed ledger protocol.
The financial service applications sit at the topmost layer. Findora is developing several applications, including things like Smart Investment Funds and P2P lending applications.
The middle layer provides security tokens, financial passports (Findora’s identity tool), privacy-preserving compliance tools that use special-purpose zero-knowledge proofs, multi-party computation audit, and asset-tracking tools.
The base layer is an underlying distributed ledger protocol that supports confidential payments, smart contracts, multi-signature accounts, and non-custodial exchanges.
Can you explain Tokenomics Findora? And use case findora token? Then, are you the long-term benefit of Findora token holders?
Matt Arney: Sure, the first step is a good tokenomics design and a forward-thinking token distribution model and unlocking strategy. We have designed an excellent economic model (with help from several renowned economists) that fully aligns the interests of token holders, developers, validators, and network users.
We are confident our token holders will realize the value of their investment when they see the Findora tokens are providing increasingly valuable utilities.
What is the total “FRA” supply?
Matt Arney: All of the detailed token info can be found at info.findora.org — FRA’s Genesis Total Supply is set at 21 billion FRAs.
There will be up to 835.8 million FRA tokens (3.98% of the Genesius Total Supply) in circulation at Genesis.
What makes Findora different from other projects?
Ken Berniklau: Richard, one of our key differentiators is how we go about our goal of bringing scalability and transparency with Privacy to the blockchain ecosystem. This difficult-to-achieve combination is the barrier to mass adoption. Given Findora’s aim and unique technology, we are confident that there will be a strong demand for us in the market.
We have vibrant communities and partnerships. Findora was built to solve real world problems. We have attracted thousands of users and developers to participate in our testnet, resulting in a wide range of partners building business solutions across industries as well as a global community of supporters.
What achievements has Findora achieved so far? And what are findora plans this year?
Ken Berniklau: Here’s a report card to begin with:
Our main achievements in 2020 include inventing a unique DAO, DeFi fund management system that supports privacy preserving asset operations voting and on-chain governance. We believe such blockchain based organizations will change the world.
We are also responsible for discovering one of the most efficient, trustless Zero Knowledge Proofs systems. Findora has also built an entirely new blockchain based on the newest ADS technologies from the ground up purely using Rust + WASM. Finally, we completed one of the world’s most comprehensive cryptography libraries: ZEI.
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.
almost done — promise! Here’s a graphic of the roadmap
🐳Segment 2: Questions from the Twitter
Question from @Coin_Travolta
“Findora is committed to the privacy protection project”. How do you protect the privacy of your users? Have you experienced any negative incident regarding the data?
Matt Arney: 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. To date we haven’t had any negative incidents at Findora.
Question from @iseker1905
How is Findora different from other networks like #Monero, #Dash or even #ETH? What is the most special feature in Findora that others don’t have?
Ken Berniklau: Unlike privacy coins like Zcash and Monero, Findora is a smart contract platform with auditable privacy features. As a financial public chain, Findora has always regarded compliance and auditability as two of its core functions (see Findora’s white paper), and has identity functions such as financial passports, the first of its kind in blockchain.
The Findora mainnet token FRA is designed to comply with FATF (Financial Action Task Force)’s VASP compliance requirements. All tokens created and issued on Findora will have privacy features and will be very different from other privacy coins: Key points are:
1. Findora is auditable while the others are not (which is why Zcash and Monero have raised some regulatory concerns).
2. Privacy preserving coins on Findora support smart contracts (while the others do not) allowing you to program these coins just like those on Ethereum.
Question from @MesutGunerri
Your mainnet is around the corner, congratulations in advance on that. Can you tell us some of the steps you’ve taken to help ensure its gonna be a success?
Matt Arney: we’re still on track for a Q1 release of our mainnet. Our testnet, named Forge, has been live since the Summer of 2020 and many users have tested, tried and built applications on it already. On Forge, you can create, issue and transfer what we call “secret assets,” also known as confidential crypto assets.
After mainnet, we will focus on launching RSA accumulator-based storage optimization and its broader DeFi infrastructure. This includes the deployment of ZK Rollup, accumulator-based storage, confidential liquidity bridging and Dark Pool Dex. The infrastructure will also optimize ZKPs for various use cases, hardware acceleration and MPC for blockchain use cases.
We’re pleased with our progress and confident that our rollout will be a success.
🐳Segment 3 : Free Asking / Live Questions
Telegram User: How can an audit be accomplished without sacrificing privacy? What are the auditability tools that Findora implements to prevents fraud?
Ken Berniklau: Thanks to the newest development in large scale distributed systems and advanced cryptography (especially breakthroughs in Zero Knowledge Proofs technology), Findora is able to architect a high-performance, confidential blockchain. Think of the Findora blockchain as a trustless warehouse of zero knowledge proofs which can prove transactions of all types while no third party can see through the metadata of the transactions. That’s why it’s called “zero knowledge.”
Telegram User: How will FINDORA solve the scaling problem and how will it overcome the threat of centralization? How easy is it to use Finfora Platform in an existing infrastructure?
Ken Berniklau: Thanks Corrie for understanding my John Travolta reference:) Findora is built to scale. We feature fast and high-throughput confidential asset transfers, scaling to thousands per second, with expressive policies ranging from simple KYC checks to complex asset tracing capabilities. It is superior to other confidential transaction protocols in combined efficiency and flexibility. Findora’s cryptographic accumulator allows validators to store megabytes instead of terabytes.
Telegram User: can you explain about the Findora Research Grand? What types of projects are eligible for the Findora Research Grand? And how the grant program works?
Matt Arney: We highlighted our research grant process today on our blog — ck it out here: https://findora.org/2021/01/findora-welcomes-applications-for-its-funded-research-grants-program/
Telegram User: When looking to FINDORA roadmap, lot of great updates are coming in near future, what are the most important upcoming Milestone ? Does Your Project have Great team and Financial support to achieve that milestones ?
Ken Berniklau: As we mentioned, RSA accumulator based storage optimization and our DeFi infrastructure. We plan to deploy ZK Rollup with the others. Executive team as an awesome vision and built the staff to get us there successfully!
Telegram User: Blockchain has practical applications for a number of industries, such as FINDORA applications for data storage, but the technology is often explained in difficult terms. How do you encourage people and businesses to adopt blockchain when many don’t understand what it really is?
Matt Arney: I totally agree with your question/comment Jungkook! The industry is full of jargon that most can’t understand. Part of my job is to simplify our offering to the world — one example is when explaining Zero-Knowledge Proofs. Here’s an example of how we try to explain things. 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.
Telegram User: DeFi project is very popular and there are many DeFi projects right now, what are your plans for now? what makes $FRA unique ?
Ken Berniklau: As Matt mentioned, its the community! Our strategy is to distribute tokens evenly and fairly across jurisdictions, demographics, and holders’ profiles in the sense of initial distribution. We try our best to distribute to community members, rather than over-indexing on institutions.
Telegram User: Most projects are just talking about their strengths and what they have achieved so far. At this time we will talk about difficulties and challenges. What difficulties have you faced and how have you overcome them?
Matt Arney: Privacy and scalability are the core problems we are solving. Back in 2017, when we started Findora, we saw that blockchain had the potential to become the new global financial infrastructure. But we soon realized that current technology could not support these lofty ambitions. The existing blockchain was increasingly unable to process transaction efficiently, it was expensive and it was lacking in privacy features.
Lacking scalability and privacy, 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 mainstream institutions will always be slow or outright refuse to adopt solutions lacking in those areas.. The Findora team figured out a way to leverage state-of-the-art Zero Knowledge cryptography to achieve both scalability and privacy.
Thank you for answering all questions and thank you also for introducing the Findora to our community. Before ending AMA, is there anything to say to the Whale Whale Blockchain Enthusiast community. Before I opened the chat again. 🐳
Matt Arney: Thank you to you and your community for all of your interest and questions — we’re sorry we couldn’t get to all of them but hope you’ll stay in touch with us on Telegram and/or our other social channels.
Ken Berniklau: We’re excited to share our project with the community and really appreciate your time today!!!
For more information and future AMA, join our Social Media channels:
🐳 Whale Blockchain Enthusiast Group: https://t.me/WBEcommunity
🐳 WBE News: https://t.me/WBEnews
🐳 WBE Twitter: https://twitter.com/WhaleBlockchain
🐳 More information on Findora:
🔸Website: http://www.findora.org
🔸Whitepaper: https://bit.ly/3pTD06R
🔸Telegram: https://t.me/findoraen
🔸Telegram ANN: https://t.me/FindoraANN
🔸Twitter: https://twitter.com/findoraofficial/
🔸Medium: https://medium.com/findorafoundation
🔸Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/Findora-Foundation
🔸Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/findorafoundation/
🔸Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/findoraorg
