A warm introduction to Rayls

Q: What is Rayls?

Rayls is an EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) blockchain system built to unite Traditional Finance (TradFi) and Decentralized Finance (DeFi). We call this concept UniFi (TradFi + DeFi).

The name Rayls derives from the words rail (as in railway – often used in financial lingo ‘financial rails’) and ray (as in ray of light, the fastest object in the universe)

Q: But why do you need to unite TradFi and DeFi?

Today, TradFi and DeFi are two separate and extremely valuable ecosystems, each with its own advantages (and disadvantages) but currently there is no clear path to unite the two.

Traditional Finance is a very sophisticated industry, made of an ecosystem of global institutions that employ millions of people and that operate under strict rules and regulations. This industry has been evolving for hundreds of years and is the backbone of the modern world. However, it is also known for being slow to innovate, inefficient and difficult to interoperate cross-border.

Decentralized Finance on the other hand, is based on blockchain technology and has been around for just about a decade. It’s a nascent industry, innovates very fast, natively cross-border and mostly fully automated.
The vision of Rayls is that uniting both will unleash the financial rails of the future.

Q: Can you be more specific? What exactly is Rayls?

Sure. Rayls is composed of the Rayls Public Chain (an Ethereum permissionless L2) and Rayls Private Subnets (a permissioned blockchain system).

The Rayls Public Chain functions just like any other Ethereum L2, with the exception that all accounts are KYC’d.
The Rayls Private Subnets allow financial institutions to create a permissioned EVM blockchain environment to connect financial institutions with full privacy and enterprise-grade scalability.

The Rayls Public Chain and the Rayls Private Subnets are interoperable, so for example a financial institutions can tokenize an asset and then transport it to the public chain for distribution and a DeFi protocol can be created in the public chain and used by the Subnets.

Q: Is Rayls a novel technology? Or are you just using existing tech?

Rayls has a lot of novel technology, particularly around the Private Subnet system, which uses advanced cryptography such as Zero-Knowledge (ZK) and Homomorphic Encryption to provide the level of security and consistency that is required. All of these innovations were developed in-house by our team of cryptographers and engineers, and most of it is publicly available as scientific papers and posters, and also in Github.

Other parts of the system such as the public chain and even certain components of the Private Subnet are based on existing 3rd party offerings.

Q: What is so unique about the Rayls Private Subnet system?

Apart from the unique vision of uniting TradFi and DeFi, the Rayls subnet system is the first EVM permissioned system that can provide: Privacy, Scalability and Interoperability at the same time.

This means that financial institutions can create accounts for their clients in total privacy, issue tokens in total privacy and even transact with other financial institutions in total privacy using the battle tested ERC token format (ERC20, ERC721, ERC1155, etc.).

Q: Why would financial institutions choose the Rayls public chain

The Rayls public chain is like any other Ethereum L2, except that it requires KYC from every account. This means that financial institutions can have a much higher level of security from issues that tend to plague public chains, such as dusting attacks, AML/KYC concerns, hacking, etc.

The goal of the Public Chain is to provide a safer environment that makes financial institutions more comfortable in exploring the opportunities of DeFi. Over time, this will bring more liquidity to the entire Rayls system and potentially new use cases for DeFi can be unlocked.

Q: Why did you choose the EVM standard?

EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) became a standard for smart contract development. This means that it’s easy to find developers that understand it, and it’s easy to interoperate with the biggest and most popular protocols such as AAVE and Uniswap, since they use the same standard.

Q: Are you open source?

Yes, Rayls is an open source project. To start, not all components will be open source, as we perfect and improve the code and its functionality. Once a component reaches a level of maturity that we deem is safe for others to use and build upon, then we will make it open source.

The goal over time is to have 100% of the Rayls components open source.