In a report published in January of 2020, technology research and consulting company Gartner, Inc. predicted that “privacy-first” would become the industry standard when it comes to digital products reflecting a new narrative in consumer and institutional expectations.
According to the findings, the company predicted that by 2023, 65% of the world’s population will be covered under modern privacy regulations for their data, up from 10% in 2020, according to Gartner, Inc.
“With more countries introducing modern privacy laws in the same vein as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the world has reached a threshold where the European baseline for handling personal information is now the de facto global standard,” said Nader Henein, research vice president at Gartner.
“Lawmakers are introducing new privacy laws that seek parity with the GDPR. These regulations allow whole countries to move one step closer to achieving adequacy with the EU, where their local businesses can benefit from a larger market with their new “trusted” status.”
Given the emergence of this trend, data protection for blockchain networks and cryptocurrencies is expected to grow in prominence in 2022 and beyond. This is seen as the next step in addressing the relative lack of privacy and tracing prevention features on early generation networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Blockchain as a technology has shown great promise in boosting financial system transparency and efficiency. Bitcoin’s emergence signaled a desire for a new global currency free from third-party control.
As technological advancements around this have emerged into exciting new developments involving smart contracts, zero-knowledge transactions, and multi-signature wallets, the industry is witnessing even more far-reaching potential applications beyond digital currencies.
Blockchains are garnering a bevy of attention for their wealth of applications for enhancing transparency, trust, and transactional system coordination. A major torchbearer in this movement is Findora, an open public blockchain project designed to foster financial privacy.
Originally minted in 2017 as a university cryptography research project, Findora piggybacks off the latest breakthroughs in zero-knowledge proofs and multi-party computation, all of which allow users transactional privacy, selective disclosure, and audibility.
Findora’s efforts at present are primarily directed toward sectors of the financial industry that desperately need enhanced transparency yet whose privacy and compliance needs aren’t being met by prevailing public blockchains.
This includes investment funds, lending platforms, and security exchanges that quietly handle large volumes of assets, often in the trillions of dollars, creating an ecosystem that is highly susceptible to inefficiencies and fraud.
It’s here where Findora is trailblazing a new path where financial networks meet applicable compliance standards and are auditable at all times. These rules of tightened ownerships, transferability, and compliance are enforced by a network of validators that ensure trust.
The Findora team is creating a network protocol and toolkit to assist developers in curating platforms that are fully auditable and compliant according to regulatory standards. The aim is to ensure that major stakeholders of decentralized data structures are able to seamlessly cooperate with authorities and third-party regulators when required.
Designed with the intention of fostering a self-sovereign, privacy solution for financial applications, the Findora protocol possesses high scalability along with low operational costs, It features advanced toolsets for issuing and trading confidential assets among private self-custodial account holders, all in a more efficient and compliant manner. Included here are features like programmable smart contracts and Dapp creation that are currently under development
Warren Paul Anderson is VP of Product at Discreet Labs, which is developing Findora had this to say about the advancement of the project:
“We are building scalable privacy systems through a public blockchain, all with what we call programmable privacy. People have mentioned it's like a more programmable version of Zcash, a more ethical version of Monero or Avalanche with privacy.”
He continues:
“What this all means basically is that Findora is a stand-alone layer one blockchain that’s built using Tendermint for consensus. It has a very modular design. So for instance, consensus has its own component within the Findora blockchain network. We’ve also implemented a proof of stake using Tendermint to allow for staking and delegation so that users can participate in the governance by voting on validators to delegate with them.”
Anderson notes that the actual technology is called Bulletproofs, which, he says, have become pretty wide scale in the zero-knowledge proof category or niche.
“While this is currently being used in privacy coins like Monero, the team has decided to implement its own version of Bulletproofs on the Findora blockchain. This allows for transactional privacy so that end-to-end payments can be conducted anonymously. Moreover, it allows for the issuance of private assets, kinda like an ERC2 asset issue on Findora with privacy. A big use case for this is private stablecoins.”
The teams at Findora believe that a large percentage of total global transactions will ultimately be moved to the blockchain. Concludes Anderson:
“We are already working with partners to help small and medium-sized businesses migrate to a cloud-hosted blockchain-based transaction system. Such systems are configured as subnets of the Findora public blockchain. So the more that are adopted, the more market momentum and support there will be for our Findora master chain and pass-through utilities.”
