Norwegian Government ‘Embracing Public Ethereum’, Says Symfoni Founder and CEO

On Friday (June 24), Jon Ramvi, founder and CEO of blockchain startup Symfoni, which is sponsored by Etheruem Foundation, said that “the Norwegian Government just announced that they are releasing a solution on public Ethereum.”

A Twitter thread posted by Ramvi on June 24 had this to say about this solution (“a cap tables platform for unlisted companies”):

  • The platform will be natively on Arbitrum, a layer 2 scaling solution for the public Ethereum network. Arbitrum is faster and cheaper to transact with than the Ethereum main chain but still gets the full security of the main chain. Layer 2s is Ethereum’s scaling strategy.
  • The ERC1400 standard represents the shares. This standard fulfills the requirements for securities and is a combination of ERC20 and ERC721. At the core, the platform is built around Consensys’ ERC1400 implementation.
  • Ceramic is used for personal data. The EU privacy regulation (GDPR) dictates a right to be forgotten. Hence personal data needs to be able to delete, e.g., a shareholder has sold her shares ten years ago and now wants her ever being a shareholder to be deleted.
  • For legacy backend and web 2.0 developers to be able to understand and use the platform, an SDK is available. Symfoni developed it. This allows both government agencies and the private sector to retrieve data and extend the platform’s functionality.

Arbitrum, which is built by Offchain Labs, is “a suite of Ethereum scaling solutions that enables high-throughput, low cost smart contracts while remaining trustlessly secure.”

According to a blog post by Offchain Labs published on 17 December 2021, here is why Arbitrum uses optimistic rollups instead of ZK rollups:

We built Arbitrum as an Optimistic Rollup (OR) because we believe that OR is the best way to meet users’ realistic needs for a secure, trustless, EVM-compatible L2. We chose optimistic over ZK because of the inherent scalability and cost advantages of optimistic systems; we would still make the same choice today...




Optimistic can provide the properties that users want, at lower cost, because of the very high off-chain costs of constructing ZK proofs…

Because ZK proofs are so expensive, full participation in a ZK protocol probably requires special-purpose hardware and/or massive parallelism, making the network effectively more centralized…

The claimed advantages of ZK either are available to optimistic systems too, or require sacrificing important security or usability features.

Optimistic rollup wins big on the cost of operation, because executing code is much cheaper than computing complex cryptographic proofs about it.

Image Credit

Featured Image by “ELG21” via Pixabay.com