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 Decentralised Finance (DeFi), bringing $100T of TradFi liquidity and the 6 billion banked population into DeFi.

The name Rayls derives from the words rail (as in railway, and as in the financial industry's own term, financial rails) and ray (as in a ray of light, the fastest thing 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, and at present there is no clear path between them.

Traditional finance is a sophisticated industry, made up of global institutions that employ millions of people and operate under strict rules and regulations. It has been evolving for hundreds of years and is the backbone of the modern world, although it is also slow to innovate, inefficient in places, and difficult to interoperate across borders.

Decentralised finance, by contrast, is built on blockchain technology and has been around for roughly a decade. It is a young industry that innovates quickly, is natively cross-border, and is mostly automated end to end. The Rayls view is that uniting the two will produce the financial rails of the future.

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

Rayls is composed of the Rayls Public Chain (a permissionless Ethereum Layer 1) and Rayls Sovereign (high-performance institutional blockchain infrastructure, with each instance operated by a single institution), which connect to form Rayls Private Networks (permissioned blockchain systems of connected Rayls Sovereign ledgers). Combined, these products satisfy institutional requirements for privacy, scalability, performance, interoperability, governance and auditability.

The Rayls Public Chain and the Rayls Private Networks are interoperable, so a financial institution can tokenise an asset in the Rayls Sovereign ledger and then move it to the public chain for distribution, and a DeFi protocol deployed on the public chain can be used from inside a Private Network.

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

Rayls carries a good deal of novel technology, particularly around the Private Network system, which uses advanced cryptography such as zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic Pedersen commitments to deliver the security and consistency institutions require. These innovations were developed in-house by the Rayls cryptography and engineering teams, and most of the work is publicly available as scientific papers and posters, and on GitHub.

Other parts of the system, including the public chain and certain components of the Private Network, build on existing third-party offerings.

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

Alongside the vision of uniting TradFi and DeFi, the Rayls Private Network system is the first permissioned EVM system to provide privacy, scalability and interoperability at the same time.

Financial institutions can therefore create accounts for their clients in total privacy, issue tokens in total privacy, and transact with other financial institutions in total privacy, all using the battle-tested ERC token formats (ERC20, ERC721, ERC1155 and others).

Q: Why did you choose the EVM standard?

The EVM has become the standard for smart contract development, which makes it straightforward to find developers who already understand it and to interoperate with the largest and most widely used protocols, such as Aave and Uniswap, since they run on the same standard.

Q: Are you open source?

Rayls is an open source EVM financial system with premium modules. The stack an institution needs in order to run Rayls in production is released under Apache 2.0 and is free to use.

Two components sit outside that. Axyl, the consensus algorithm, and Enygma, the transaction privacy framework, are released under Business Source License 1.1, which makes the source visible and free to test, and requires a commercial licence for production use beyond the Additional Use Grant. BSL 1.1 converts to Apache 2.0 after four years, at which point both modules become Apache 2.0 like the rest of the stack.