Finance in IT

On December 12, it became known from Nginx's employee Twitter that the company's office was searched due to the criminal case under Article 146 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation 'Violation of Author's and Neighboring Rights'. The claim belong to Rambler Group was, although formally the complaintant is Lynwood Investments CY Ltd, to which the rights were transferred. The last-mentioned is related to the co-owner of Rambler Group, Alexander Mamut.

The point of the claim: Igor started working on Nginx as an employee of Rambler and only after the tool became popular he founded a separate company and attracted investments.

Here is how the events unfolded.

According to one of the employees Nginx's Moscow office is being searched due to the criminal case brought by Rambler Group (the official response of the company's press office to this issue and confirmation of claims against Nginx is below). The photo of the search warrant is provided as the evidence of the criminal case initiated on December 4, 2019 under Article 146 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation 'Violation of Author's and Neighboring Rights'.


It is assumed the complaintant is Rambler, and the defendant is still an 'unidentified group of persons', and in the long run — the founder of Nginx, Igor Sysoyev.

The point of the claim: Igor started working on Nginx as an employee of Rambler and only after the tool became popular he founded a separate company and attracted investments.

It is not clear why Rambler revised its 'property' only 15 years later.

Hello Habr! Now that is summer vacation season. Many of you will take a flight to a place far from your everyday routine at home. Before this hot vacation season starts, we should discuss an interesting and useful method on how to save money using a VPN.

One of the easiest ways to see the value in this is looking at car rentals while on vacation.

The last decades the world economy regularly falls into this vortex of financial crises that have affected each country. It almost led to the collapse of the existing financial system, due to this fact, experts in mathematical and economic modelling have become to use methods for controlling the losses of the asset and portfolio in the financial world (Lechner, L. A., and Ovaert, T. C. (2010). There is an increasing trend towards mathematical modelling of an economic process to predict the market behaviour and an assessment of its sustainability (ibid). Having without necessary attention to control and assess properly threats, everybody understands that it is able to trigger tremendous cost in the development of the organisation or even go bankrupt.

Value at Risk (VaR) has eventually been a regular approach to catch the risk among institutions in the finance sector and its regulator (Engle, R., and Manganelli S., 2004). The model is originally applied to estimate the loss value in the investment portfolio within a given period of time as well as at a given probability of occurrence. Besides the fact of using VaR in the financial sector, there are a lot of examples of estimation of value at risk in different area such as anticipating the medical staff to develop the healthcare resource management Zinouri, N. (2016). Despite its applied primitiveness in a real experiment, the model consists of drawbacks in evaluation, (ibid).

The goal of the report is a description of the existing VaR model including one of its upgrade versions, namely, Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR). In the next section and section 3, the evaluation algorithm and testing of the model are explained. For a vivid illustration, the expected loss is estimated on the asset of one of the Kazakhstani company trading in the financial stock exchange market in a long time period. The final sections 4 and 5 discuss and demonstrate the findings of the research work.

In today’s world, Kazakhstan carries out significant improvement work for the economic situation of the country. As part of a commission from Head of State, National Bank of Kazakhstan has revoked licenses of three commercial bank pursued high-risk policy (NBK, 2017). Furthermore, over the past 10 years, 7 second-tier banks have gone into liquidation as well as the liabilities of the commercial banks as a whole have increased by 70 per cent or 5.5 trillion Tenge (Hereinafter — KZT). NBK plans to continue treatment the real economy sector, withdrawal of financial institution, restructuring its assets to well-balanced entities.

On the other side of the world, the digital and mobile banks namely, Starling bank, Monzo, N26 are becoming increasingly popular among society in the United Kingdom. As a vivid illustration, Starling Bank has increased considerably the number of customers for 8 times (up to 400 000 people) at the end of the 2018 year (Starling Bank, 2019). At the same time, one million clients have joined and used Monzo’s services (Monzo). Such tendency establishes substantial competition for all players including high-street banks in the payments market.

In consequences, the main object of the paper is identification the advantages of digital bank and illumination capabilities to deploy analogous mobile bank in Kazakhstani real financial sector.

Zero-knowledge proofs/arguments are an emerging cryptographic technology that promises to bring us closer to the Holy Grail of blockchain: providing data privacy and auditability.

Potential applications for zero-knowledge include, but are not limited to:

• Inter-bank transfer systems (see a research paper by Narula et al.)
• Privacy-focused management of digital assets (see a proof of concept by J.P. Morgan and zCash)
• KYC (see a proof of concept by ING)
• Self-sovereign identity (see an attribute-based credentials EU project)
• Voting (see a proxy voting prototype by Russian National Security Depository)

Another application for zero-knowledge proofs is helping blockchains scale. ZKPs allow for the “compressing” of computations for blockchain transactions without sacrificing security.

In this article, we describe how zero-knowledge (specifically, Bulletproofs) can be applied to build a privacy-focused service using Bitfury’s Exonum platform.