Sikoba November 2020 — Update. In November, we announced a partnership…
By: Sikoba Network
Tags: Sikoba, Financial Inclusion, Sikobapay, Horizen

In November, we announced a partnership agreement with Horizen, a major public blockchain, which we will use to “anchor” Sikoba’s private blockchain data. Development of the Sikoba Network is proceeding at a rapid pace and we are on track to launch our mainnet in 1Q2021.

Partnership announcement with Horizen

We have announced a partnership with Horizen (ZEN), a technology platform enabling businesses and developers to create their own public or private blockchains. We will “anchor” Sikoba’s private blockchain data on the Horizen public blockchain, using the Zendoo sidechain technology.

This announcement was widely picked up by crypto news sites, including Coinmarketcap. Following this announcement, we held an AMA with Rob Viglione, co-founder and CEO of Horizen Labs [Sikoba X Horizen AMA on Youtube].

Sikoba Development Update

Transaction log

As the system is nearing mainnet launch, we’ve implemented a first version of the transaction log. This log allows users to inspect the transactions that have been generated by them, or that they are party to.

Private / business accounts

The notion of private and business accounts is now fully implemented. With this, we are able to provide different functionality and solutions to our users, depending on their needs, whether in a personal or in a company context. Completing this allows us to proceed with the development of sub-accounts, a concept which is another stepping stone on our roadmap.

E-mail service implementation

An e-mail service has been added to the system. It will be used to send various notifications to our user and also it will be an alternative form of verifying their account, alongside phone number verification. The full extent of this functionality will keep evolving and our users’ requirements change.

Admin API

The Sikoba platform made a significant step towards scalability with the implementation of the Admin API solution. The system, which is basically a role-based access right system, will eventually allow users themselves to create and manage access to their own API and functionality. As of now, this system is used to manage access to API of the Beki environment, which is being implemented for our Luxembourgish partner de Kär.

e-Beki

The forthcoming launch of the e-Beki and the BekiPay app was announced in Synergie Nr 59, the regional magazine of the canton of Redange [article in Luxembourgish].

In November, we completed the e-Beki onboarding procedure, which includes three elements: 1) user registration, 2) approval by a Beki admin, and 3) initialization of all data required in the Beki environment. The next step for our development team is to complete the Beki payment functionality, adding fees that will be specific to the Beki.

Blockchain layer

This month, we have started to integrate Horizen’s zk-SNARKs library into Sikoba, working closely with Horizen’s technical team. Horizen’s library is a fork from another library that was originally developed by a team of scientists, notably from UC Berkely. We have integrated their implementation of Merkle tree hashing, which is based on an optimized batch version of Poseidon hashing, into our blockchain protocol.

In the future, we will be able to produce zk-SNARKs proofs compatible with Horizen’s Zendoo sidechains. This will allow us to not only to publicly demonstrate the correctness of our blockchain protocol, but it will also allow our users to generate publicly verifiable claims if they want to prove that another user has a debt towards them.

Making Sikoba fully decentralized has involved a lot of work, you can refer to this article for more details about how we added the blockchain layer to Sikoba: Empowering blockchain to build complex fully decentralized real-world applications.

#sikoba #sikobaPay #financialInclusion #reduceMoneyDependency #boostLocalEconomies #iouEconomy