Thank you to the Bang Pateng Community for participating in Ask Me Anything (AMA) with Findora Time on January 06th, 2021. This guest star Mr.Matt Arney (Head of Growth | Findora) | @mattarney. If you were unable to join the live AMA, no worries, here comes our 34th AMA recap!
Introduction Session
Host :
Hello Mr @mattarney welcome to the Bang Pateng community, It’s an honor to invite you to our community
Matterney :
Thank you, it’s an honor to be here. I appreciate your group hosting me today.
Host :
Before we start our first session can you introduce yourself, your background and your team if you have a team working with you on findora @mattarney & @KenB7
Matterney :
Great – My name is Matt Arney – Before joining Findora, I co-founded and successfully exited from three international startups in the enterprise language & technology space. My expertise is in corporate development, partnerships and globalization.
Ken Berniklau :
Hello – my name is Ken Berniklau. I’m Director of Product Management at Findora and happy to answer some questions about our product. My expertise is in launching early stage start-ups, product development, leadership, and managing in a growth environment. In my free time, I enjoy motorcycles, golf and off-roading.
Host :
Thanks for sharing your background. Good. AMA let’s get started.
Well we will continue to the first session, in this session I will give a question about The Borg, if you feel you have enough to give an answer, you can say “done”.
Matterney :
Ok, Great
SESI 1 (Poject Introduction)
Q1. Can you introduce Findora to our community?
Matterney :
Sure would love to. Findora’s founding team set a goal to leverage blockchain technology in order to revolutionize financial services. We believe that financial services industry infrastructure is outdated and needs to change. We envision an open, fair and transparent financial infrastructure that can serve billions of people, providing true financial democracy.
In the future, we hope that Findora’s technology and its democratically run network will be the backbone of Web 3.0, providing the necessary transparency and protection for everyone. Our future plans rely on developments in the following areas:
- General community awareness and the adoption of Findora utility assets
- An active and vibrant developer community
- Major breakthroughs in enterprise business applications & mass adoption
Q2. What are the core features of Findora? How are you different and unique from all other projects out there
Matterney :
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.
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 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:
- Findora is auditable while the others are not (that’s why Zcash and Monero and alikes raised some regulatory concerns)
- Privacy preserving coins on Findora support smart contracts (while the others do not) allowing you to program these coins just like those on Ethereum.
Q3. I saw that Findora has its token named $FRA, can you explain what the token is $FRA? What benefits can we get if we hold tokens $FRA? And how to buy?
Ken Berniklau :
Just last week we announced our pre-registration phase for our public token sale and you can find more info at sale.findora.org We plan to open the token sale on Dec 28th and it will only run until Jan 11th. FRA is the native token of the Findora platform and is required for access to its core features and functionalities, including staking, governance, payment for transactions, privacy-enhancing features & access to advanced financial application building tools and other services.
Our token is the ultimate 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.
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 only focusing on institutions. All the info regarding requirements, supply and allocation can be found on our lawyer approved website here: sale.findora.org
Q4. Nowadays Farming or staking is very popular. Have you provided your Farming or Staking Facility to $FRA Investors? if you have, can you explain how to staking and farming $FRA?
Matterney :
Good question – currently we are in public sale so we can not provide however upon the launch of mainnet we will provide side ledger services to business users that are willing to pay. Such services will require staking and pledging Findora tokens and will also contribute large revenue stream to the public blockchain. More info on staking can be found at info.findora.org
Q5. Could you please explain, what are your upcoming plans in a couple of month/years?
Matterney :
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 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.
SESI 2 (Twitter Question)
Matterney :
This is a great question @Rogeralbertoz – Findora implements auditability tools, without sacrificing privacy of users. What are these tools, how transparent they are? When would an audit be necessary? — We have a huge toolbox of auditability tools, including proof of solvency, range proof, proof of whitelisted assets; proof of accreditation; identity selective revealing tools, confidential asset tracers.
These tools are all designed with one purpose: allow public or certain privileged auditors to understand and verify certain statements on a transaction while still keeping the raw data confidential. Such fine grained audits are very necessary in many cases (and protect the privacy), not just under a regulatory circumstance.
All tokens created and issued on Findora, including our system tokens, will have privacy features. Privacy coin and privacy preserving stable coins can also be issued and circulated on Findora. In this market, we have zcash and monero as the main privacy coins. What we can issue using Findora is very different:
- Tokens on Findora are auditable while the others are not (thats why they raised some concerns)
- Privacy preserving coins on Findora support smart contracts (while others do not)
Matterney :
Financial passports aggregate information about a user, starting with basic information about the user’s accreditation and financial identity, to credit rating/scores, AML whitelisting, etc. It’s very useful under a public blockchain setting.
All the information in a user’s passport is verified and signed by at least one authority and can be brought in by confidential oracles from the out-of-the -blockchain world. These signed statements are presented in the form of cryptographic selective disclosure credentials. This means the information is authenticated in such a way that users can selectively reveal components of their identities without unnecessarily compromising the privacy of their entire personal financial profile.
Furthermore, users can demonstrate complex statements about their authenticated profile (e.g. an income range, or threshold conjunction of several qualifications) without revealing any precise personal details at all.
Financial passports function much like the public key infrastructure of the Internet. There are a set of root authorities who are able to issue credentials to users and also endorse other sub-authorities with the privilege to issue credentials. Users can then store and manage their own credentials just as they would manage their cryptographic keys, and they may also elect to share or store their credentials with a third party custodian.
Matterney :
Good question @kobt02 Technology is not enough to create a great and lasting ecosystem. Besides sophisticated blockchain technology, we also feel you need great tokenomics to suceed. We believe blockchain is very different from the traditional startups and to support long term growth decentralized protocols need to have a revenue model. The revenue for Findora will come from providing utilities and asset transactions.
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 fees while generating revenue for Findora. We also provide side ledger services to the business users that are willing to pay.
Such services will require staking and pledging Findora tokens (FRAs) and will also contribute a large revenue stream to the public blockchain. On-chain Layer 2 liquidity mining and cross-chain asset transfers are also part of the business revenue generation plan. I am confident our token holders will be happy to see the Findora tokens are providing increasingly valuable utilities.
Matterney :
DeFi has been one of our “key focus areas” and we will solve issues such as a lack of financial inclusion around the world, overcollateralization and a lack of interoperability and scalability. We believe that DeFi is what blockchain is all about, and in the future, people will only care about the DeFi applications themselves, rather than the underlying chain. For now, DeFi is all about ‘DeFi on Ethereum’ and/or ERC20 tokens.
Findora participates in the DeFi space in two ways:
- We have added ZK-Rollups and confidential transaction capabilities for existing DeFi apps on Ethereum, which means that that running DeFi apps on Ethereum can be better, faster, cheaper, and can realize a lot more features that would otherwise be impossible without confidentiality;
- Findora is based on cross-chain and verifiable computation technology. Therefore any Ethereum-based assets can atomically transfer and transact on Findora. We can provide scalability and cost advantage to apps built directly on Findora. We will be releasing a series of new private DeFi applications, including ‘Dark Pool Dex’ (for secret large ticket crypto transactions) and ‘Confidential FX pool’ (for confidential cross-border money transfer), just to name a few.
These products will launch alongside our mainnet. The technology we used to build our privacy-preserving DeFi infrastructure includes Bulletproofs, Darker compiler, Supersonic, Plonk, advanced cryptography signatures, and more. Furthermore, the Zei cryptographic library that we have built is one of the most advanced and comprehensive cryptographic libraries in the world.
Matterney :
Thanks for asking @ryuuuubtc12 (that’s a lot of u’s) we have signed more than 10 MOUs just in the last 60 days that we plan to announce just as soon as our PR teams can get them out. In 2020 Findora has signed on a number of strategic partnerships including Tencent Cloud and Tokensoft.
Among the newly signed partnerships are a large mobile payments company, a popular restaurant POS system and a leading travel booking service. Our plan is to continue to expand our partner network and bring real world solutions like these to an outdated financial services industry. I’d love to go to the moon with you!
SESI 3 (Telegram Question)
Jade | @JoanaZ
🟫 8% of the total supply is destined to something called “DeFi incubator”, so can you explain us what is gonna be the purpose of these funds exactly?
Matt Arney :
Hi Jade – These funds will be distributed in accordance with the decisions made by the community for new DeFi projects that run on Findora. Good question!
Ken will be helping to select questions too
Manugotsuka | @Manugotsuka
The $FRA token is represented as very Unique token, can you share us what are its principal usages?
Ken Berniklau :
Hi Manugotsuka, Our token is the ultimate 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.
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 only focusing on institutions.
CRIS JHON 🇮🇹 CM | @BrianLEM
Which major target exchange will register findora $FRA?
Matt Arney :
We haven’t yet annouced any news about exchanges but hope to do so after we release mainnet
Rosana | @Gbasdfg
🍀How is the Findora technology better than other projects? what is your strategy in order to make real finance meet with blockchain?
Matt Arney :
Hey Rosana – Privacy-preserving Transparency… The Findora blockchain doesn’t make trade-offs between confidentiality and auditability. Users can choose to selectively reveal only what they want others to know.
Significant Innovations…The Findora blockchain incorporates some of the latest groundbreaking innovations in cryptography and distributed systems. The renowned Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange sets the foundation for modern cryptography and blockchain. Its recent paper on Supersonic described the most efficient transparent zk-SNARKs to date (btw – Turing award winner Dr. Diffie is one of our Senior Advisors)
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 global supporters’ community.
You can also build private Defi apps on Findora – The Findora public blockchain can host confidential and anonymous assets and smart contracts, allowing for privacy-preserving DeFi applications and more with rock solid security.
Cosmo | @Giniwhite
🍎What do you think About Web 3.0? How this s going to take may help Findora to solve scalability and privacy issues?
Matt Arney :
From Day One, Findora’s founders, set a goal to leverage blockchain technology to revolutionize financial services. We firmly believe that financial infrastructure is due for a long overdue change. We envision an open, fair and transparent financial infrastructure that can serve billions of people, providing financial democracy.
Today, we still feel the freshness of this goal. In the future, we wish Findora’s technology and its democratically run network will be the backbone of Web 3.0, providing the necessary transparency and protection to everyone.
CLOSING
Well… We declare AMA’s Series Bang Pateng with FINDORA is Done. 🥳🥳🥳🥳 Thank you to the participants who have attended this event to the end. the winners will be announced soon🥳🥳🥳
Social media
📍 Twitter : https://twitter.com/findoraofficial
📍 Telegram Chat : https://t.me/findoraen
📍 Medium : https://medium.com/findorafoundation
📍 Website : https://findora.org/