Financial Statements on Solana

anchor test showing increment of accounts and transfer of funds
Basic concept - accounting logic programmed to populate financial statements at time of transaction
Pseudo code before writing Solana program using Anchor
Concept of a single transaction, and all accounts that would be affected at point of transaction

Would appreciate any feedback! Please let me know if you have any advice for next steps and potential issues. Thanks! johnzhengyuliu@gmail.com

Inspiration

Image a world where any business or individual has access to accurate and automated real-time financial statements produced through smart contracts which preprogram accounting logic and appropriately account for transactions at the time the transaction occurs.

What it does

The idea is to populate financial statements from transaction data at the time transaction occurs. This provides the opportunity to provide real time financial data, verified by program logic, which increase accurately and timeliness of financial reporting, while reducing cost. Financial statements produced using a blockchain protocol would also allow users of financial data the flexibility to analyze data from custom setting. (Ex. financial statements of specific data, or covering custom period of time, as opposed to only quarterly reports 3 times a year and 1 annual report)

The intent is to bridge traditional financial report and crypto economy, to both provide metrics conventional financial industry understand while providing improvements for a real world application. An additional result would be the displacement of the incumbent firms in the accounting industry by providing more accurate and more secure financials, at fractions of cost. (Ex. provide alternatives to public accounting firms which extract value from businesses by providing paper guarantees which are required by regulation) Program accounting logic, and automatically account for transactions at the time transaction occurs.

How we built it

On Solana using Anchor framework

Challenges we ran into

For this idea to work, it will require a way for companies to maintain the privacy of their transactions in some capacity. It appears zero-knowledge proofs could potentially provide a solution, however, there does not currently appear to be a way to incorporate zero-knowledge proofs on the solana network. I also found the zk-starks from Starkware as a possible starting point for building a layer 2 alternative on Ethereum, but would require significant centralization trade-offs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning how to write and test a Solana program. Creating a basic program which can create a category of accounts, which stores a list of line items. Creating basic functions which increment the appropriate accounts when payment is either sent or received.

What we learned

Anchor framework for programming on Solana Exploration into possibilities and current limitations of different zero knowledge proofs. (zk-snarks, zk-starks) Exploration into different frontend frameworks (although not implemented yet)