Henry Yan, chief product officer of Findora, and Paul Sherer, chief director of the Findora Foundation, revealed on Dec. 17 during Cointelegraph China’s Hub interview that a solution for organizations seeking to satisfy the increasing demands of regulatory compliance, while maintaining full privacy and confidentiality, would be the key for blockchain mainstream adoption.
Yan continued by saying that Findora, a decentralized financial privacy public chain, has been developing this solution and trying to give users the power to choose how much and what information is visible to selected parties, which is called “privacy-preserving transparency.”
According to Yan and Sherer, the Findora test network, Forge, provides complete functions including asset issuance, account setting, asset transfer, transaction verification, etc. All transactions on the test network adopt the world’s most advanced zero-knowledge proof cryptography system, which provides a wealth of fine-grained functions while fully protecting privacy.
Yan said that by using zero-knowledge proofs and other technologies, one party has the possibility to verify the validity and value of any approved set of data without the other party needing to disclose the exact value to a validator.
Yan predicts that in the future, privacy will be the key for finance and blockchain to enter the mainstream. DeFi products, on the other hand, can allow people all over the world to participate in some financial activities in a peer-to-peer manner without relying on intermediaries such as traditional banks. Sherer also added:
“DeFi is clearly the cornerstone of opening up the early cryptocurrency market opportunities. We will build a private scalable network to support the DeFi ecosystem we want. What we have to do is to keep DeFi developers away from this complexity.”
Sherer believes that financial auditability and privacy are two extremes, but finding a good balance between the two can bring great momentum for blockchain technology to enter the mainstream.
Yan said that cryptocurrency is becoming a mainstream financial asset, so most regulations will want to regulate accordingly. He revealed that the modern encryption technology used by Findora can build encryption transparency, and anyone can verify that the transaction is true.
Except for both parties to the transaction, others do not know its details. This is the result of a carefully designed zero-knowledge proof, which will also not be cracked by any computer, and private transactions will not be destroyed, manipulated or deceived. He said, “In this way, we can ensure the perfect combination of finance and blockchain and protect the privacy of users.”
Using the domain-specific language “Discret” developed by Findora, users can write asset systems and establish smart contracts. These contracts are built for predictability and static analysis. Discret is very different from Ethereum’s Solidity, but its focus is to cover the functions required by financial applications.
One of Discret’s design goals is to incorporate zero-knowledge proofs because it is the basis for most privacy and compliance guarantees in Findora. To this end, the asset system is directly compiled into the circuit and then a confidential asset system and smart contract are created together with the zero-knowledge compiler.
DeFi forecast for 2021
Sherer said that decentralized finance is obviously an opportunity in the nascent cryptocurrency market, and there are already some use cases. He predicts simple applications will grow just like the early stage applications for the internet. He added:
“I am looking for interoperability [...] If you can achieve interoperability, you will truly begin to release the value of the use cases you see. We intend to provide scalability and privacy for these networks because I do think that privacy will hinder our development to some extent.”
Findora is building a new era of decentralized finance, combining the strict privacy protection standards of traditional finance with the transparency of distributed ledger technology, and is committed to achieving goals that traditional finance cannot attain. The confidential distributed ledger technology developed by Findora enables banks and financial institutions to run financial applications and transaction systems without worrying about compliance, confidentiality, security and privacy issues and uses zero-knowledge proofs and multi-party computing technology.