Building a better payment system, a user friendly cross vertical blockchain!

BRAVO is focused on building a better payment system with simple user centric experience for mobile applications and a robust blockchain back end protocol. To fulfill a community need, we are working on a new protocol with several functionalities applicable to payments and other industries. 

Our Protocol:

Hybrid Blockchain: 

BRAVO's innovative hybrid blockchain technology consists of a hybrid "mash up" of a public and private blockchain, all decentralized and immutable. The BRAVO blockchain integrates two different protocols together allowing them to interoperate seamlessly, and synergistically giving the end-users control over transaction speed, privacy and cost. The public blockchain is based on Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) consensus algorithm while BRAVO's private blockchain is based on an anonymizing Proof-of-Stake algorithm. Both protocols require low computational power.

We believe on user privacy and that users only want to share a payment, not their information. This is seamlessly executed with our technology with regulatory compliance.

BRAVO Blockchain supports two different ways of transferring funds: public transfers and private incognito transfers. Public transfers are coin transactions that are logged and viewable on the blockchain. Like Bitcoin and Ethereum, it is possible to trace funds going from one wallet to another. For transactions that do not need anonymity, public transfers using the BRAVO blockchain provide a fast, low-cost method of sending payments or recording other transactions (titles, legal documents, etc).

However, in line with privacy regulations akin GDPR regulations, BRAVO understands that people value their privacy and wish to send funds anonymously when needed. In fact, 70% or more of users only which to share a payment, not their private information. To support this, BRAVO Blockchain offers anonymous transfers of BVO Coin on-demand through what is known as "Incognito Transfers". This is achieved with auto-conversion into BRAVO Private Coin (BVO-P) on the backend through an algorithm that utilizes anonymizing technology. While accomplishing this, BRAVO also follows strict regulatory compliance that gives the end user safety and comfort.

Components:

Privacy Protocol: BRAVO blockchain will anonymize transactions on the BVO-P PoS blockchain by utilizing the zerocoin protocol. The zerocoin protocol basically pools all BVO-P into predetermined denominations and sends sets of these denominations when a transfer is initiated. For an analogy, let's use water as a currency. Water is heavy, hard to transport and takes up space so instead of storing and transporting water on your own, you exchange your water for water tokens which have different tokens that represent cups, pints, quarts and gallons. You give 10.5 gallons of water to the water exchanger; the exchanger pours the water in a large pool and gives you newly minted tokens (2 gallon tokens and 2 quart tokens). If you want to send 2 gallons of water to a friend, you give the exchanger 2-gallon tokens and the address of the friend. The exchanger then delivers 2 gallons of water to your friend from the common pool.

Federated Byzantine Agreement: Understanding the Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) consensus algorithm requires understanding its predecessor, the traditional Byzantine agreement. The Byzantine agreement ensures consensus even if you have some misbehaving members in your network. This has two advantages. First, consensus can be fast and efficient. Second, trust is entirely decoupled from resource ownership. This means that a small vendor has as much power as a wealthy, large organization which helps keep them both honest. On the downside, all parties must agree on the exact list of participants. Generally, membership in Byzantine agreement systems is set by a central authority or closed negotiation.

In practice, traditional non-federated Byzantine agreements require every node to be involved with every transaction to reach quorum. This is akin to letting every city mayor in the state know you're about to plant a tree in your yard and getting most of them to agree to it. This is unnecessary and a waste of everyone’s time and resources. In BRAVO's FBA system, each node can decide whom to trust and be part of their decision-making group, which we are referring to as a quorum slice. Following the earlier example, you only have to let your neighbors know (your quorum slice) that you want to plant a tree in your yard and get them to agree to it. Furthermore, the system-wide agreement is reached when overlapping quorum slices communicate the transactions. To continue with the tree-planting example, after you and your neighbors agree to plant the tree in your yard, you bring it up to your local city council, who in turn legitimizes the action for the rest of the city.

Interaction and Conversion: BVO-P integrates into the BRAVO mobile app and supports an Incognito mode for payments and transfers while still maintaining the intuitive, easy-to-use interface of a public transaction. When a user wishes to send payment anonymously, BRAVO's incognito transfers work by performing the following steps automatically:

1. Convert sender's BVO to BVO-P
2. Send BVO-P anonymously to receiver
3. BVO-P automatically converted to BVO and placed in receiver's wallet

Incognito transfers require more computation resources and have higher transaction fees. Since incognito transfers are performed on-demand, users have the choice of instantly switching between the fast, low-cost public transfers and the anonymous incognito transfers.

Our payment App:

BRAVO pay, BRAVO’s payment application, validates the need for our technology and offers a simple payment tool (currently on FIAT beta in US) with inter-App cryptocurrency payments between users with our token without need for external exchanges, biometric log in, no need for long keys to pay or get paid with our cryptocurrency and social login recovery.

BRAVO community and ecosystem: Collectively, users who materially participate in the operations of the BRAVO Blockchain will be known as the BRAVO Blockchain Consortium (BBC). Members of the Consortium are select community members and small or large merchants who provide computing resources through existing or new computing infrastructure to keep the BRAVO Blockchain running. Our consortium is constituted by our hybrid FBA and PoS protocol supporters. Each member of the Consortium is, in essence, a partner of BRAVO with a vested interest in keeping the network from being compromised while benefiting by taking a portion of the transaction fees for services rendered.