Paul Sherer on building privacy infrastructure for decentralized finance

0:01i'm ashton addison from eventchain for investmentpitch media in the cryptocoin show and today on blockchain interviews we have paul shurer the director of findora research paul welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time to be here today it's great to be here with you ashley happy to be here likewise i'm really excited for our discussion if we could kick it off

0:22first i'd love to hear a little bit of your background on yourself in blockchain and finance and and how that led to your involvement in fendora oh absolutely thanks for the question yeah i'm coming to you from silicon valley palo alto california across from stanford university and adjacent to a lot of many startups that everybody is familiar with my background is about 30 years

0:47in capital markets here in silicon valley so i've seen the benefits of raising capital i've seen the extraordinary innovation that comes from deploying that capital and i've also seen how it's a very very narrow market a very small number of participants have been able to benefit and overall uh use these markets definitely and now with the blockchain

1:11industry exploding in silicon valley it seems like there's becoming a lot more institutional interest and startups popping up out of there in the past few years it's really exploding right now and that's where fendora has started i'd love to hear an overview of you know what is findora and what is your vision and the mission of the platform oh absolutely thanks so much yeah the

1:33fendora focuses we're building a global decentralized financial network so nothing more abroad than that similar to what you saw on the internet a communication network that's accessible it's a financial network that's accessible we're focusing in three core areas credential management contract management and currency management so with those three building blocks you can uh globally

1:59build a trusted financial infrastructure which is owned and democratically secured by decentralized network of worldwide organizations and economically incentivized parties so trans from core center of two or three major investment banks or commercial banks and allowing that same role and facilitation by uh decentralized parties anybody that's incentivized

2:26definitely and i was researching into the platform and you have quite a different amount of services and that you're looking to solve and there's a couple core problems that are in blockchain right now at least the with the main blockchains that we have with bitcoin and ethereum then there's some problems there can you talk about the core problems that

2:45fendora is focused on solving really inside the industry absolutely it's relatively simple for us there's two core problems that relate to each other one is scalability and the other is privacy they tend to move in opposite directions so if you want to have a scalable network that talks to tens of thousands millions maybe billions of users in a particular

3:08application or capability like we see in streaming or other areas which would be fantastic in the financial area so any market is always improved by broadening the access to that market broadening the information share broadening the overall transaction capability every time you start to broaden that market you have a resounding difficulty you run up against

3:30the privacy problem who are the rogue actors whose credentials can be trusted how should we deal with that so it's a straightforward challenge it's all in front of us it's almost central to the blockchain industry a few solutions have provided early capabilities we want to make this available across developers institutions and users alike and that's

3:55the core problem we're solving scalability and privacy definitely and what would you say makes fendura unique and different from other open financial networks that are growing right now well first as i just mentioned it's ambition okay a global distributed network is ambitious to say the least okay and so it's exciting but it's a little bit more

4:23ambitious than a lot of point-to-point uh products for payment or credential management or identity and so it's it's more ambitious but at the same time what we've done is to reach out to two core constituencies to guide our work the academic community focus in the crypto market and the stanford community and mit communities have been very very good and you'll see

4:45more and more uh outreach here we want to open source most of these core capabilities to the community so already we put in uh z key snarks supersonics other core capabilities are now available and for others we want to obviously deploy them on our network but others could use them successfully in other niche networks and our network is always meant

5:11to be interoperable so where we could be a backbone there are other subnets that could be developed using some of our technologies or even proprietary technologies that would then integrate so first is that ambition and then secondly is the simplicity and the elegance of the solution so already you've seen our improvement in efficiency is a thousand-fold from

5:33what we've seen before that's game-changing when you can change that kind of capability then you can offer it on the scale we're talking about the third area i would mention is and i'm very excited about this we're recruiting economists from around the world nobel laureates others that are thinking deeply about economic solutions so that we will have technologies not

5:56necessarily in search of just profits but in concern of implementing economic shifts that can ultimately thrive going forward and that's very exciting i don't know of other projects that have gone to that level of interest definitely paul that's really exciting and there's a couple of great things you touched on there first of all i heard blockchain

6:17interoperability i think that's going to be a huge movement going forward as you know ethereum has the network effect and there's a couple other blockchain platforms that are also focused on this and i think that will allow fendora to easily connect into the network and to grow faster and he also talked about being very developer focused and having the tools needed for

6:37developers to be able to build on top of the network and to help it grow faster and that sort of leads me to my next question is as you continue to grow fendora will you incentivize uh developer adoption uh providers and and tools needed um or and or do you expect it most would be organic growth as you continue to grow oh i wish we had a token for that kind

7:02of incentive model yes we're looking at a public launch of a token to do just that kind of incentive to the community obviously people need incentives to do work uh that's meaningful otherwise it's really not going to be useful so absolutely that's at the core of our uh launch of our token coming up yes definitely oh that's great and in terms of developer ecosystem

7:26how user-friendly is it for developers you know for example with ethereum the developers had to learn a whole new programming language of solidity just to try and build on ethereum and it was a big inhibitor for developers to jump onto the network have you lowered the barriers to entry for others to help develop and grow fendura we strive towards that we're using rust

7:50protocols others that are simpler languages will support the core languages that are there to the extent possible but this is the challenge that we all face deep is the future of the networks and simplifying those uh tools and integrations is fundamental to that similarly though if we can take and make the privacy component world-class highly efficient highly

8:16scalable and you don't have to reinvent that you can simply use that capability that's massively supportive of a developer community because that will be the resistance point for uh private banks or any any type of account management and if we can take that off your plate and you can focus on your core deep by capability fantastic whether it's wealth management

8:40or or any type of capital trading any type of currency trading any kind of payments any type of supply chain management i mean what we want our developers doing is focusing on their core competence and not this extended area which is highly arcane very very challenging if we can make that simple and efficient then we think we've moved the whole uh blockchain forward that's great paul and

9:02i'm glad that you mentioned d5 there because i do want to jump into some questions surrounding the d5 industry for those that have been following the industry they've seen the exponential growth of the industry so far this year i think the value locked in d5 was less than a billion at the beginning of 2020 and now we're over 10 billion dollars with exponential growth so first with a

9:23general question about d5 how is findora following and watching and looking to penetrate into the d5 space again we're staying in our core lane if you will scalability and privacy great well and so we will be developing the newest large-scale distributed system for advanced cryptograph you know using zero knowledge proof so that's our core company adding to it

9:51we're not going to replace all the other work and activity that's going on in the d5 space we're going to enable these capabilities to take them to scale on a distributed basis globally and to secure them from a privacy basis from what they need definitely and i was researching into uh the default applications that fender is working on and what stuck out to me the

10:13most was privacy preserving decentralized finance applications so if i understand correctly that the zk snarks zero knowledge proofs and having that privacy protection with defy is really one of the main core goals that you're focusing towards yes and that's what the uh next phase will need to be if we're going to see success at the d5

10:40area um people can do it in clusters of intranets or close associations but that's not really the promise of the blockchain blockchain is about a globally distributed trustless network and that will require privacy for both the regulator side that can see things on a basis and on the user side to make sure their credential their currencies aren't being

11:01uh viewed inappropriate definitely and you touched on credentials twice now i wanted to just ask you about that it seems like there's a balance between having being privacy centric and having credentials that are on the blockchain to be able to verify the authenticity or legitimacy of your identity can you touch on how does your credential system work and how is it going to protect the

11:25privacy of users well i don't want to give away all the secrets right now most fundamentally though the key is to keep the credential off the chain so it never has exposure but you can do that you can create it validate it in sidenet and then you can use that uh information in the way that's the fundamental preposition

11:50of a zero knowledge proof is that you really don't have to put that information onto it you can prove it without actually exposing the underlying data and that's a fundamental shift for the blockchain itself so um it's just natural that we would make that a a core capability to uh the privacy because that's the starting point for everybody if we could prove that at scale

12:16essentially we're talking about a global audience aren't we if everybody could retain their credential uh you're already approved and now you're only authorized where uh you have either you know staked or you you should go but we can prove that out for you at scale which is just pretty exciting again that's what we want to do so it makes a a contract a d5 that you would

12:40develop available on a basis you could never even imagine yourself you're never going to have the time to recruit all those individuals and get them to trust you that's what we've seen there is no trust identity good enough so we have to solve this through a technology solution and that's the fendora opportunity that's great paul thanks and now you touched on when i asked about

13:00incentivizing developers and adoption of the platform you touched on the fendora token the fra i want to move back to that and ask can you overview the the main functionality of the token within the ecosystem and how it creates a sustainable ecosystem obviously what we've just said is there's tremendous value to be unlocked by a scalable decentralized network that

13:26could be retain the privacy of the user base so we're going to unlock untold trillions really in value by supporting that capability we need to incent as you mentioned the developers to implement use and interact with that network and that's the foundation of the pandora token now looking forward to the future can you talk about what are the major

13:52milestones and and developments that your team is going to be working on as we move into 2021 and for the whole year of 2021 yeah good question so uh early in the year we're launching our main net uh with uh some of the core uh applications very simple applications really just to demonstrate the uh primary capabilities that we've been

14:18discussing um we've announced several partnerships to do that in collaboration uh tencent cloud and bank of asia and we can talk about those more deeply later but uh that those will be rolled out in this coming year we'll be recruiting uh as i mentioned more research into the team very very deep very very high uh level capability you'll you'll recognize the names

14:42if you will in both the crypto space and the economic space as i mentioned so that's very exciting because over this then 2021 we're going to look at some fundamental capabilities that we might be able to deliver more than point-to-point product that's not our focus in this year but we really want developers doing their products and then through the privacy and scalability

15:05we'll deliver uh we might be able to do some things that no one has really even conceived of yet and that's why we want to have the very best minds considering those things and then you know by the end of the year then you would see a fully validated operating uh network that would be usable that's very exciting and now we're running short on time but

15:28i do want to ask you a follow-up to that as you just mentioned maybe a little bit about your prospective entry into the asian region southeast asia and and how you're going to continue to grow with those partnerships with 10 cent and as you mentioned thank you so much um just first off we're thinking globally not regionally but you can't think about globe without thinking about

15:55asia so um we have a core development team in asia uh we have founders from asia um we think uh just holistically though i mean we're in the united states we're in asia we're in europe and so it's really not developed for anything specific there uh necessarily but uh obviously both from the token participation

16:21from the network participation from the d5 from the communities we'll be working with asia is a vital cornerstone of everything we're working on today and going forward definitely and to create that truly open global decentralized network you really need the participation of of all of these continents uh so that's great that you have uh reach in those areas already so

16:47that's great paul now we're running out of time but what is the best way for the viewers and developers and potential strategic partners to get involved with findora and to learn more and to get into the community yeah we have a newsletter you can subscribe to our site and we do uh periodic releases uh we're doing quite extensive uh amas we like to use the community

17:11in place this is much better than anything we would publish because it's it's your own community and everything you've developed so hope you know invite us back we'll we'll take those opportunities to keep you updated but um we're easy to see and find and follow and there'll be more and more public available media events we're probably doing a dozen amas you

17:34know over a short period of time so um feel free to uh use our um subscription and and join our newsletter but obviously just uh stay in with whoever you trust and and have them uh have us on we'd rather be interviewed than just produce media ourselves thanks definitely paul thanks for that i will leave those links in the description box below for all the viewers

17:58all the best with fendora moving forward and let's follow up in the near future let's do it thanks so much justin terrific meeting you you