Nocom Fi

*"Are you earning yield on your shielded ZCash?" "No comment." *
Private money market built on top of Aztec with first class support for cross chain/ shielded assets

NOTICE: See this link for the non-technical pitch video. as a better answer to "What problem it solves"

Problem

• There is over $10 billion USD in idle shielded capital
• Capital managers are forced to choose between composability/ productivity vs privacy
• There is likely billions more of capital that would prefer to be shielded given the chance, but can't handle the opportunity cost of leaving transparent DeFi

Solution

• Cross chain privacy-first money market
• Give already shielded capital the opportunity to be productive without risking surveillance
• Give already productive capital the ability to be shielded without risking opportunity
• Nocom Finance builds the intersection between the rapidly growing decentralized lending market (TVL up ~500% since 2022 to ~$60Bb) with the equally rapidly growing pool of decentralized shielded assets (TVL up ~100% YTD to ~$10Bb)

Features

• Entirely encrypted collateral: Nocom uses a version of the "secret escrow" pattern (read the link for explanation on pattern). Collateral for Nocom pools is stored in an escrow between borrowers and a liquidator TEE, meaning collateral is entirely private while still being constrained to follow the protocol of the smart contract.
• Anonymous borrowing and lending: Nocom pools allow lending and borrowing of a single debt asset backed by a single collateral asset. This mode of decentralized lending pools offers solid efficiency inside of ZK circuits (Aztec contracts) while maximizing usability. Of course, in the future, vaults combining individual pools can be built on top of this. Borrowing and lending occurs anonymously: addresses are hidden, and balances are shielded when the exit the pool, but the utilization ratio is public.
• Overcollateralized Stablecoins: Nocom also offers the overcollateralized zUSD stablecoin. Stablecoins are collateralized in the same way that isolated debt pools are, however there is no loaned asset on the other side. Stablecoins are minted on borrows and burned on repayments and liquidations. Since colilateral is private, a variety of markets can share the same stablecoin, meaning that if you use a natively private asset like shielded ZCash, it is impossible to tell that any ZCash was even used to collateralize the stablecoin (all the volume could come from the ETH market and the ZCash market could be dead, or vice versa)
• TEE-based health factor monitoring and liquidations: Nocom operates a Phala TDX instance that privately monitors position health. If a position enters liquidation territory, the TEE will execute a liquidation bringing the position into solvency. The TEE only has custody of the key material for escrows - if the TEE were to be compromised, all assets are still safe, although unshielded to key holders
• Mock price oracle in TEE: since no oracles exist for Aztec yet, we use a MockOracle we host ourselves that points to CoinGecko. However, to harden the price oracle, we bundle it with the liquidation service to add a layer of guarantee to the execution of price feed updates.
• Mock cross chain (ZCash) support: Nocom assumes a ZCash<>Aztec bridge will come from the Zypherpunk hackathon, and will employ Train Protocol's HTLC's in the case that solutions from this hackathon are insufficient. Other chains, like Solana or Eth L2's, can be serviced by Wormhole. Any

Future Improvements

(Asides from cleaning up all the rough edges of a hackathon)
(Not all of these are guaranteed to happen, but some ideas Nocom enables that I will explore)

• 1-click entry from any chain: using TEE relayers, users will be able to enter encrypted positions from any chain in one click.
• Aztec Connect (Lending Only): general purpose vehicle for going from transparent chain to transparent chain while integrating timing and sizing analysis protections
• Cross Market Lending: User A collateralizes on L1 Aave, User B collateralizes on L2 Morpho (using Aztec Connect style depositing through Nocom). User B can now borrow from privately borrow from Aave using their Morpho collateral (with Nocom being the accounting/ processing layer)
• Cross Chain PoL Lending: Nocom takes its L2 treasury and deposits into L1 lending markets like Aave. Users can collateralize positions on Nocom and borrow directly from the treasury's L1 positions. This breaks timing and sizing analysis attacks associated with traditional mixers while allowing the protocol to leverage its treasury further.