AMA Recap| BitWell * FIO Protocol— Embracing Web3.0: The Past, Present and Future of FIO Protocol
On December 21st, BitWell, an international digital asset derivatives trading platform, announced a strategic cooperation with FIO Protocol, a Web 3.0 infrastructure provisioning protocol. The two parties will cooperate on all aspects of trading convenience and security, lowering the user threshold, and improving the on-chain transaction experience.
On December 28st, 12:00 UTC time, Lucia, a representative of FIO Protocol Chinese community, visited BitWell Chinese community and brought a wonderful sharing on the topic of “Embracing Web3.0: The Past, Present and Future of FIO Protocol”.
The following is a complete review of the content of this sharing.
Host: Catherine, VP of BitWell Overseas Market
Catherine：Could you please give us a brief introduction of FIO Protocol and what problems it intends to solve?
Lucia：The FIO Protocol is a Layer 2 Usability solution for the entire blockchain ecosystem. It is a self standing blockchain that sits beside all other chains handling, in a decentralized self-sovereign manner, the complex steps that lead up to transactions on other chains and making them easy, less risky and joyful. Today that means users no longer have to see or even know that complex public address exist and, instead, can use a human readable FIO Address crypto handle. It also means that transactions can start with a payment request versus starting with ‘send’. An invoice, an order cart, a note to request to your roommate for their share of rent all can be done using FIO Requests. And it means the ability to include data like notes, order carts, invoice details, etc. as part of every transaction. In the near future it will also mean things like being able to sign an NFT with the FIO Address to prevent forgeries. To securely and easily route multi-signature requests. To recover your lost private key recovery phrase and much more. And this is all accessed through your favorite crypto product as FIO is integrated into them.
FIO Protocol is an open-source usability-layer solution aimed at dramatically improving the cryptocurrency user experience by bringing the industry forward into the next generation of finance. It is integrated into existing crypto products such as wallets, exchanges and crypto payment processors.
With the FIO Protocol, fumbling with long and complicated public keys has become a thing of the past — eliminating the need to handle many different wallet addresses.
Before FIO: 1KXHDC2mqGL4ProHbjBF6WL6YHoikX9kWY
After FIO: username@exchange
Catherine：What are the Primary Features of the FIO Protocol?
Lucia：The FIO Protocol currently provides several features, with a robust roadmap of future items that may be added. Currently, the FIO Protocol enables the following:
- FIO Crypto Handle (aka FIO Address) — a human-readable wallet identifier (such as john@edge or alice@gold) which eliminates the need to see, or even know of, blockchain public addresses. FIO Crypto Handles automatically support any token in a wallet/exchange, and requires no manual mapping.
- FIO Requests — the ability to request funds from any other wallet, utilizing in-wallet/app notifications and simple approvals. FIO Requests are fully encrypted between counter-parties, and do not interfere with the actual underlying blockchain transactions.
- FIO Data — encrypted metadata that can be attached to any transaction, such as a simple memo, structured data (like an order cart) or hashes and references to off-chain data. FIO Data can accompany a send of funds directly to a wallet, or be attached to a FIO Request.
All features are now available on the FIO Chain Mainnet for developers to integrate into their respective products, though not all features must be included at the same time depending on the product’s needs and/or resources available.
There is a growing list of future potential capabilities including potential functionality like secure decentralized mutli-signature request routing, recurring payment capability, fee splitting and more.
Catherine：How Does FIO Protocol Work?
Lucia：Cryptocurrency users interested in a more joyful experience spend FIO tokens to purchase a FIO address from the blockchain.
The FIO chain is a highly performant and modified EOSIO-based network. Within their FIO-enabled wallet or service, users then map their native blockchain public addresses (like a BTC or ETH address) to their FIO address so other users can send those tokens to them by using their own FIO-enabled wallet or service that performs a basic lookup on the FIO chain to translate a username@wallet FIO address to a native blockchain address. At this point, a normal native blockchain transaction takes place for the token being used.
In addition to sending funds to a FIO address, users can also request funds from other FIO users with a FIO request. They specify which chain, which token, and which address they want the funds delivered to, while also having the option to include a memo describing the request. This information is encrypted using the request recipient’s FIO public key using Diffie-Hellman shared keys and stored on the blockchain, or it can be included off-chain with a URL and hash of the data stored on-chain.
The overall experience allows users to interact with human-readable addresses when sending and receiving cryptocurrency and never have to see a long, complicated string of characters in a public key. This provides a familiar financial interaction they’ve come to expect from the traditional centralized and controlled financial ecosystem but in a decentralized, self-sovereign way. There are even some FIO-enabled products and services which offer, in partnership with the Foundation for Interwallet Operability, free FIO addresses paid for by the foundation.
Catherine：How does FIO Protocol Compare With Other Wallet Naming Solutions?
Lucia：FIO Protocol is focused on making cryptocurrency interoperable and easy to use while maintaining privacy. The FIO Protocol is blockchain and wallet agnostic, similar to a couple of other solutions.
However, FIO differs in crucial ways.
First, the FIO Protocol offers more than just “wallet names.” It is an entire usability layer already enabling decentralized payment requests and cross-chain metadata. In the future, it is anticipated that FIO will enable other usability solutions such as secure routing of multi-signature requests, request for signature capabilities for decentralized apps, validation of NFT ownership, and more. Human readable wallet names are necessary but not sufficient to solve blockchain usability.
While some of the other wallet naming efforts are centralized companies, the FIO Protocol is a community-driven decentralized autonomous consortia — made up of block producers from around the world, token holders, board members for the Foundation for Interwallet Operability, and ecosystem partners such as wallets, exchanges and service providers. Technology companies integrating the FIO Protocol have the opportunity to benefit from FIO’s token economics and earn income — as well as users who participate in the network’s governance.
Even with respect to human readable wallet names alone, FIO has distinct advantages. With the FIO Protocol, users are able to maintain privacy control through encrypted FIO request transactions that remain private, whereas other wallet naming solutions require users to always publicly associate their wallet name to their public addresses. In addition, it is difficult and expensive to map a human readable wallet name to a public address on most other wallet naming solutions. By contrast, it is extremely inexpensive on FIO, and this is included in the cost of address registration.
Catherine：Does FIO Protocol have any exciting initiatives that are planned in the pipeline?
Lucia：NFT signatures, FIO Token Staking, FIO Token Wrapping and new integrations that will be released. Read the FIO Blog for articles about many of these! (https://medium.com/fio-blog)
Please click the following links for further information about BitWell:
Twitter | Telegram (Official) | Telegram (Announcements)
Visit us on https://www.bitwellex.com/
