Columbus, Yellow Submarine, and Findora: A ZKP Adventure

When Findora launched Yellow Submarine — an advanced cross-chain vessel created in partnership with Project Columbus — it added new depth, speed and utility to existing zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technology.

Suddenly, crypto users gained greater flexibility in managing and transacting their Ethereum-compatible assets privately across all major Ethereum-compatible chains. Even while transaction validity is proven on a public ledger, key cross-chain transaction data like wallet address, amount, and asset type remain submerged.

Of course, the most famous Yellow Submarine journey happened more than a half century ago in the classic Beatles musical animation. That Yellow Submarine passed through vivid realms with names like the Sea of Time, the Sea of Science and the Sea of Nothing. Looking back, its colorful voyage almost seems like a portent of ZKP, where split-second transactions (time), computational power (science) and the promise of anonymity (nothing) make the once-unimaginable real.

Findora’s paradigm-shifting Yellow Submarine was released in April, and offers Web3 users a new level of privacy for their crypto transactions and assets, with only a few simple clicks.

Warren Paul Anderson, CEO of Discreet Labs, a core developer of Findora, explains the process this way: “Yellow Submarine is a decentralized application (dApp), using a practical implementation of ZKP, which abstracts away a lot of the technical complexity, to allow private transactions across BNB Chain, Ethereum and other EVM compatible chains. For the ELI5 crowd, this means that there’s an app that you can now use to send and receive any token on Ethereum or BNB Chain, privately (including but not limited to USDT, USDC, BUSD, ETH and BNB). Under the surface, Yellow Submarine uses Findora’s multi-chain architecture, which parallelizes the best of ZKP for scalability and privacy with the finest of EVM for programmability, interoperability, and composability.”

Discreet Labs VPE David Lin adds that by using this innovative new technology, “A transaction might start on Polygon and end up on Arbitrum, but when it travels on Yellow Submarine, there will be nothing to link the origin of the transaction with its destination. It’s just like a submarine — after it goes underwater no one knows where it will come back up except the people onboard. The concept of Yellow Submarine can be applied to many DeFi applications, including DEXs, DAOs, and dapps across a variety of use cases.”

From its earliest days, Findora has been focused on refining ZKP technology and enhancing its practicality for a wide range of personal, commercial and industrial applications. This is especially true in the realm of DeFi, where Findora’s ZKP advances are transforming financial relationships and empowering average investors. The technology adds layers of security and privacy to blockchain transactions ranging from loans and asset trading to banking and contracts.

Findora’s privacy-centric designs utilize zero-knowledge proofs to mask transactions and financial data without compromising network security. The platform is ideal for protecting user privacy on the blockchain. Users may selectively disclose transactions, based on their own personal preferences. The sender and recipient always have the option to unmask hidden data. The platform relies on Bulletproofs and specialized zero-knowledge cryptography such as turbo-PLONKs.

Findora’s partner in the project, Project Columbus, is an open-source, decentralized and DAO-governed community project focused on using DeFi and ZKP technology to make banking available to the billions of consumers around the world who have no access to financial services. According to its mission statement, “Project Columbus identifies and collaborates with leading ZK protocols like Findora to build all the necessary components of a Universal Privacy Settlement (UPS) layer across all blockchains” in pursuit of this goal.