Three minutes to understand Ola, which has won $3 million in financing

By angelilu, Foresight News

The popularization and development of the Internet has brought digitization of all people, and the traditional way of life of most people is threatened by the revolutionary changes in economic and social organizations. One of the ways in which this threat manifests is that capital power monopolizes the data of ordinary people and uses it free of charge. Obtaining benefits strengthens ordinary people's sense of insignificance towards individuals and their data, making most people unaware of the value created by their own data.

The emergence of the blockchain has sounded the horn of the data defense war. More and more people realize that there is value in the data, and the data on the chain created in a decentralized way can eliminate the monopoly of data use to the greatest extent. However, the openness and transparency of blockchain data allows users to view transactions and on-chain activity records by anyone. The key to truly keeping users' data in their own hands is "privacy" technology, which allows users to control their own data. right.

At present, more and more laws and regulations have been issued to regulate the use of data to protect user privacy, forcing many cross-industry giants to pay attention to privacy and data protection. The combination of blockchain technology and privacy protection functions may be a major development in the future. Trends that can drive the mass adoption of Web3.

Programmable Privacy Protocol Ola

Based on this background, public chains and protocols with privacy concepts have broad prospects. Ola, a rising star on the privacy track recently, just completed a $3 million seed round of financing in early July, co-led by Web3.com Ventures and Foresight Ventures, with participation from Token Metrics Ventures, J17 Capital, Skyland Ventures, LD Capital and CatcherVC.

Ola defines itself as a high-performance ZK-ZKVM (hybrid rollup), which focuses on programmability privacy, programmability expansion and multi-language compatibility. Among them, ZKVM refers to a system that uses ZK technology to realize a verifiable circuit system. The ZK-ZKVM system used by Ola solves the privacy problem in ZKVM on top of ZKVM. Users can conduct transactions on the public blockchain and guarantee their privacy. Sensitive information is safe and private. And Ola provides developers with an optional privacy design option through its ZK-ZKVM platform, dApp developers can develop private or public transaction functions in the application according to their needs.

To put it simply **Ola is building a Layer 2 infrastructure that integrates optional privacy and programmability, which can expand corresponding functions for platforms that do not have privacy and high performance without sacrificing the programmability of the public chain , while inheriting its network security, developers only need to deploy the corresponding verification contract on the corresponding chain. **

Ola's current progress and future plans

Tracing back to its roots, Ola was incubated by Sin7y Labs Research Institute in 2022. It was originally named OlaVM and then changed its name to Ola. Sin7y Labs Research Institute was established in 2021 and is committed to the research of ZK cryptography and ZK algorithm. Its R&D department is composed of more than ten cryptography engineering technology researchers who graduated from prestigious universities. It has produced more than 50 Chinese and English research papers article.

In addition to financing, significant project progress that Ola has completed so far includes the proof-of-concept (PoC) implementation of its ZK-friendly virtual machine OlaVM and the programmability of its smart contract language Ola-lang. Next steps include launching an internal testnet in Q3 and launching a public testnet by the end of 2023.

Ola's Architecture

As mentioned above, Ola was renamed from OlaVM, which means its evolution in the development process. Ola is a development framework for zero-knowledge application full-stack developers, and the ZK-friendly virtual machine Ola-VM has become Part of it, the other two parts implemented include the smart contract language Ola-Lang and the compiler Ola-Compiler:

• Ola-VM: is a ZK-friendly virtual machine, which uses a simplified instruction set and uses pre-compiled contracts to support complex calculations, that is to say, the results of complex calculations are first obtained by others in the Local computation (usually the prover himself), without any constraints. The VM then performs a validity check on the result of the computation.
• Ola-Lang: is a programming language for developing OlaVM smart contracts. It is Turing complete and can be used to write arithmetic programs. The syntax is close to C/C++ and Rust, making it easier for most developers Get started and is ZK friendly design.
• **Ola-Compiler: **The compiler can compile the Ola contract code into the assembly code supported by OlaVM.

In addition to these three core modules, the tools and modules listed in the orange box shown above are the modules that Ola will implement in the future.

OVP Incentive Policy

Ola started a community loyalty program called OVP in March 2023. OVP is the abbreviation of "Ola-vm Points", formerly known as "Ola Points". This program is designed to motivate and reward active and dedicated Ola community members , the more members contribute, the more OVP they will get.

There are two ways for community members to earn OVP: the first is to complete Ola-related tasks on the Web3 task platform Zealy; the second way to earn OVP includes translating Ola content and making valuable suggestions in Ola's Discord community , holding a certain number of Ola points will allow users to play a role in the governance of the Ola community in the future and earn corresponding airdrop rewards. The program is ongoing and will improve over time.

Ola's Compliant Design

Since the U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned the Tornado Cash incident, blockchain privacy-related regulatory risks have become a hot topic in the industry. The privacy technology and privacy transactions used by most projects involve regulatory compliance issues. Ola believes that privacy is the current blockchain world. Even the technology is much needed in the real world, but the development of privacy technology must be regulated, and if required, private transaction information should be provided to track private asset transfers.

Unlike Tornado Cash's complete privacy, Ola allows transaction information to be reviewed and tracked when necessary, and adopts a "view key" design through which users can disclose private transactions that have been executed. It is friendly to developers and ordinary users, and it also complies with regulatory requirements.

summary

Ola provides privacy and expansion services for all public chains that support programmability. It can supplement the performance and privacy of existing public chains on the basis of unchanged security. In addition, from the perspective of community development potential, Ola has a global layout and is actively promoting global It is promoting the development of the project in English, French, Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese, Persian and other communities, and is in the process of recruiting Ola's global ambassadors. However, as a project that has not yet launched the test network, whether Ola can achieve more breakthroughs and achievements in the field of programmable privacy still needs further actual verification and verification.