For this week’s special feature, we will cover Bankex, a New York-based company that focus on the development of easy-to-use blockchain solutions for banking necessities, like payments and asset management, while implementing new protocols for users to actively take part of the consensus.
New Bases for New Services
As Bankex are trying to fulfill all the needs current banks cover, they needed to figure out a way around the current limitations of blockchain: transaction price and scalability. To do this, they created Plasma, a daughter chain of the Ethereum network where transactions are processed by a smart contract without requiring consensus from the nodes of the main network and are confirmed by end users instead, making them faster and cheaper to register, reaching up to 100,000 transactions per second.
Solid Ground
The way Bankex managed to create a fast and cheap Ethereum based transaction validation method is through what they call Zk-SNARKs (Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge). First implemented in ZCash, Bankex took the concept one step further and used it as a base for their personal Plasma blockchain.
The concept of Zk-SNARKs is that one party, the prover, can verify the existence and validity of a transaction to another party, the verifier, by sharing encrypted information that can undoubtedly prove said characteristics. Given that the hash is generated with an element of randomness, the verifier only needs to confirm that the hash was correctly created by the algorithm, and the prover needs not to reveal the content of the transaction.
Great Results
With the foundations for their products created, they released Bankex Pay, an open-source electronic payments platform that supports ERC-20, ERC-223 and ERC-781 tokens, supported by iOS and Android devices. This platform links the user with a universal Ethereum address, usable to invest in ICOs and airdrops, while benefitting from a private address for Zk-SNARKs.
Besides the payment platform, Bankex also developed the Proof-of-Asset protocol, an asset tokenization method based on a sequence of smart contracts that precisely define the value of the asset, creates the correspondent tokens with transparency towards all the participants of the market. This completes the circle of digitization that Bankex is trying to draw, merging the traditional industry with blockchain technology and moving a step closer to full integration.
Bankes also offers security solutions via custody services for persons and enterprises, a library which contains a variety of solutions combining IoT sensors with the Proof-of-Asset protocol to enable continued monitoring of assets that have been tokenized, a blockchain-based supply chain monitoring platform and Bankex Scan, a software to monitor a company’s history of transaction within the blockchain for the purpose of precise auditing.
Bankex is making a solid effort to migrate banking to blockchain-based platforms, moving us a step forward to a completely trustless system where every user is entirely in control of their data, assets and transactions.