Which public chain can support the explosion of PriFi? Findora, approaching from the ecological perspective, is knocking on the door of privacy finance

On January 3, 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto presented a brand new world to the public, and the door to the crypto industry was opened with the birth of Bitcoin.

Unknowingly, twelve years have passed, a complete cycle has gone by.

A cycle is neither long nor short, yet the market landscape has undergone tremendous changes. From a development perspective, cryptocurrency, and even more broadly, blockchain technology, still seems to be underutilized, especially in gaining widespread acceptance in the financial sector.

The existence of such issues is largely due to the "double-edged sword problem" of cryptocurrencies: while blockchain can enhance the transparency, credibility, and coordination of transaction systems, it fails to meet the privacy protection and compliance requirements of the financial industry.

Therefore, how to leverage the efficiency of blockchain technology while maintaining complete confidentiality and interoperability has become an urgent issue for the crypto industry—this is precisely where Privacy Finance (PriFi) comes into play.

Privacy Finance includes a range of emerging decentralized applications that fully protect user privacy while supporting on-chain financial operations, minimizing the problem of anonymity exclusion in decentralized financial transactions.

If 2020 belonged to DeFi and 2021 belonged to NFTs, then 2022 is likely to belong to PriFi. But the question is, is the crypto industry ready for the explosion of PriFi? As the most important infrastructure in the crypto ecosystem, public chains have an unshirkable responsibility to undertake this task.

What is the relationship between Privacy Finance and public chains?

In fact, practitioners in the digital cryptocurrency industry have high expectations for PriFi, hoping to break the monopoly of traditional financial oligarchs and bring more innovation by combining "privacy" and "finance." The existence of public chain technology has gradually made people aware of the importance of privacy, data, rights, censorship, and identity.

Moreover, with the emergence of token economies and digital assets, users as individuals now have the opportunity to participate in Privacy Finance, achieving a positive interaction between developers and users, while the data they contribute can be exchanged for some income, which means a fairer and more reasonable system.

Undoubtedly, public chains will become the necessary infrastructure for Privacy Finance, but can the public chains in the current crypto market meet the developmental needs of Privacy Finance?

With this question in mind, let’s continue to analyze—

Why has the "rising star" Findora stood out? Focusing on ecology is key

Today, blockchain infrastructure dominated by public chains has its pros and cons. While we see this emerging technology driving progress in property ownership, currency, and finance, there are still many risks. The two key characteristics of transparency and open participation, which are the cornerstones of blockchain finance, come at the cost of privacy, which is an absolute requirement for most financial services.

Therefore, although complete transparency provides auditability, this characteristic also makes it difficult for most blockchain platforms to deploy the majority of financial applications. While "traditional" public chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum remain the core carriers of the current digital economy, in the context of increasingly rapid industry iterations.

Especially with the growing market demand for Privacy Finance, these two major public chains seem to be "unable to bear the weight of the industry." Hence, a batch of privacy public chains has emerged, including Findora, Nym, and Secret Network, among which Findora is particularly noteworthy.

Founded in 2017, Findora is a public blockchain with programmable privacy and full EVM compatibility. It utilizes the latest breakthroughs in zero-knowledge proofs and multi-party computation, allowing users to conduct auditable transactions with privacy through selective disclosure. With Findora, developers can create digital assets, applications, and smart contracts that transparently store information using advanced encryption technologies.

Findora is a market leader in zero-knowledge proof and multi-party computation technology, with strong distributed system engineering capabilities. In October 2020, Findora announced the completion of an "eight-figure" financing round, led by crypto venture capital firm Polychain Capital, with participation from Alchaineed, Krypital Group, Axia8 Ventures, Cabin VC, and Powerscale Capital.

We know that while Nym and Secret Network also have some market influence, these privacy public chains often prioritize anonymity over auditability, making it difficult to achieve perfect integration with traditional finance.

In contrast, part of Findora's value proposition is to link the components of traditional finance with privacy principles, aiming to create a "selective disclosure protocol" that allows third-party audits and brings privacy features into Ethereum-based networks, enabling people to build Layer 1 networks on this foundation (Note: Findora integrated EVM for smart contracts as early as September 2021).

Similar to Secret Network, Findora's privacy public chain also has programmability, and the crypto community even jokingly refers to it as the "programmable version of Zcash." More importantly, Findora does not limit itself to programmability; instead, it goes further by focusing on ecological scalability, hoping to accelerate the development of PriFi—this is another key reason why Findora stands out in the field of privacy public chains.

Unlike the somewhat isolated Nym and Secret Network, Findora has actively built a decentralized application ecosystem from the very beginning, allowing people to create their own tokens on its blockchain and incorporate stablecoins, while also laying out DEXs (such as FairySwap and VeniceSwap), lending and staking protocols, and cross-chain bridging across multiple verticals.

In terms of interoperability, Findora has launched cross-chain bridges Prism and Rialto Bridge, aiming to bring Findora's Privacy Finance (PriFi) revolution into the DeFi world.

Findora is one of the few multi-chain structures in the blockchain world. Prism connects Findora's native chain (UTXO) and smart chain (EVM). Generally, most blockchains follow one of two record-keeping models: the UTXO model or the account model. Blockchains like Bitcoin and ZCash use the UTXO model.

Blockchains like Ethereum and Polkadot use the account model. Both models have trade-offs. There are many debates online about which method is better, but why choose one when you can have both? Findora has chosen to integrate both models into its chain structure to fully leverage their advantages. These parallel chains are integrated by Prism (formerly known as Internal Transfer), allowing the two chains to automatically exchange tokens and work together as a whole without trusting a central intermediary.

On the native chain, tokens are referred to as "FRA—Native Token," used for staking to secure the network, paying transaction fees, and voting on Findora improvement proposals. On the smart chain, the FRA token is referred to as "FRA—Smart," used for paying transaction fees and interacting with DApps built on Findora EVM.

The Rialto Bridge is a fork of Chainsafe ChainBridge, customized to support the Findora network, allowing users to transfer tokens bidirectionally between EVM-compatible blockchains and the Findora blockchain— and vice versa. Currently, this bridge is only deployed on Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and Findora, with Ethereum network support coming soon.

To a large extent, the Rialto Bridge locks BEP-20 tokens (BUSD, BNB, USDT, etc.) in smart contracts on the BSC testnet, while the corresponding smart contracts on Findora will mint equivalent Findora smart tokens (i.e., Findora's version of the ERC-20 token standard).

Once tokens are bridged to the Findora testnet, users can utilize these tokens within the Findora smart chain and ecosystem, including privacy-focused decentralized exchange (DEX) applications like the aforementioned FairySwap and VeniceSwap.

All projects built on Findora will be able to leverage its inherent privacy-protecting blockchain architecture, which also means that Findora is becoming a permissionless, decentralized privacy hub for DeFi transactions.

In terms of DEX, at the beginning of March, Findora successfully launched FairySwap after completing full EVM compatibility on the mainnet and initiated a twelve-day cold start. FairySwap is the first automated market maker (AMM) decentralized trading platform (DEX) built on Findora, dedicated 100% to privacy protection, auditable transparency, and permissionless access.

By utilizing Findora's EVM and Rialto bridge integration, FairySwap can provide users with rapid cross-chain exchanges with Layer 1 chains like Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain, not only creating zero-knowledge synthetic assets to protect traders' privacy using cryptographic algorithms, including atomic swaps and anonymous transfers, but also minimizing fees and maximizing efficiency. The Findora Foundation also announced a $3 million liquidity incentive program for FairySwap on March 17.

According to official data, during the cold start phase, FairySwap's locked volume has exceeded $6 million, with an APY of up to 1400%. FairySwap also opened liquidity mining and trading features at 0:00 UTC on March 20. https://fairyswap.finance/pixie_drop

It is worth mentioning that FairySwap is also actively expanding into the NFT market and launched its first FairyNFT series named "Pixie Power" on International Women's Day, celebrating inclusivity, equality, and the contributions of women in creating the digital virtual world. FairyNFTs can not only be used as avatars in the virtual world but also have practical features such as staking and granting special governance rights.

FairyNFT holders will be eligible for whitelisting in future FairySwap events and can use the NFT in the upcoming "play-to-earn" RPG game in the Fairyverse. In the future, FairySwap's native NFT marketplace will grant more community rights to NFTs and introduce innovative measures such as platform NFT buybacks.

In terms of staking, Findora is actually one of the earliest privacy public chains to launch staking services in the crypto field, having launched the mainnet Beta v0.2.0 version last year, supporting staking and delegation. Validators can contribute to consensus, participate in future governance, and act as stewards of the organic evolution of the Findora public network.

As part of the consensus mechanism, validators can earn algorithmic rewards by proposing and signing blocks on Findora. FRA holders can also choose to delegate their tokens directly to other validator nodes to support the public network without needing to technically run a validator node themselves.

Delegators can set their own fee-sharing arrangements with each validator node and share rewards with the validator node, which can be set up and managed through the Findora reference wallet or any other platform that supports delegation on Findora.

After launching staking and delegation services on the Findora mainnet Beta version, Findora quickly followed up by launching a $100 million ecological fund, which is likely the largest fund in the privacy public chain sector, accounting for one-fifth of the FRA supply.

As part of a long-standing community-led commitment, the Findora ecological fund will support research, development, infrastructure, and liquidity funding projects built on Findora's privacy protection technology.

Any project that has established protocols or DApps on the Findora blockchain, used Findora's privacy technology, or meaningfully impacted the Findora ecosystem can apply for funding from the fund. This also shows that Findora is not just superficial but is actively supporting the PriFi ecosystem through concrete actions.

Conclusion

In the blockchain field, public chains have always played the role of "operating systems," supporting various application products and DApps. As the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic gradually lifts, people are filled with more hope and expectations for the future. For public chain projects, there is a desire to carve out a path in the red sea of decentralized finance. Although market competition is becoming increasingly fierce, Findora has found its way to develop by leveraging its unique "privacy" characteristics.

In the future, whether for asset transfer or information sharing, it will rely on a privacy pathway that supports data, applications, services, and underlying protocols. From this perspective, Findora seems to provide a perfect entry point for Privacy Finance (PriFi). Once the door opens, we will undoubtedly see a new world of stars and seas.

"PriFi" is likely to become the next new trend in the crypto industry, and privacy public chains like Findora will undoubtedly be key to supporting the development of PriFi, with a promising future ahead.