We completed our demo day on May 24, 2024! To watch the recording, check out youtube.com/watch?v=rT7zLiOYX8s. To view our other workshops and brainstorming sessions, you can view youtube.com/@sigsing/streams.
We are bringing together teams that are taking useful signed data and wrapping it in ZK proofs for succinctness (on-chain use cases), ownership (raw signature never revealed to server), and selective disclosure (only revealing relevant info). We are also supporting teams building applications of MPC/FHE to do verifiable and privacy-preserving computation across collections of signatures.
We are laser focused on shipping cryptographic applications E2E, so we are interested in hosting any of the following skillsets: cryptography researchers, engineers, designers, and frontend developers!
Programming
Our focus is to have highly focused workdays for teams, with a focus on finding synergies between similar efforts and sharing our learnings and expertise. There will be fairly minimal programming, limited to:
- biweekly standups
- 1 recommended workshop per team to educate/onboard residents
- 1 public workshop open to local Japanese developers and enthusiasts
- 1 larger, recorded final demo day at 6pm JST on Friday, May 24. We will post the streaming link here on the week of May 20th.
We live stream all workshops and presentations, and many informal discussions — you can watch them live at twitch.tv/zksig and youtube.com/@sigsing, with recordings preserved on YouTube.
Logistics
The residency will be in Osaka, Japan from April 27 - May 29. During these dates, residents will have living fully covered in one central house and two smaller houses nearby. We can give up to a $1000 stipend for travel costs to Japan. All residents will have 24/7 access to FUTRWORKS, a beautiful coworking space in the center of Osaka with tons of amazing food nearby.
The core residency will run for 4 weeks from April 29th to a final demo day on May 24th. The final days from May 25th - 29th will be focused on writing up retrospective blog posts that are required from each attending team.
We are excited to use digital signatures in Japanese IDs to run local experiments with Japanese Myna cards, building off work from the MynaWallet team. And Japan has recently introduced 6-month digital nomad visas, making it very friendly for team members to travel and potentially stay there!
Why is this interesting?
Advanced cryptography is one of the most potent tools we have for equalizing and defensive technology over the next few decades. Certain pockets of hard-tech projects using tools like ZK and FHE have been pushing the narrative in new and interesting directions. In our minds, the most compelling directions build on top of verifiable data like signatures to make interesting and useful proofs, computation, and coordination possible. If the data we’re ingesting into advanced cryptography tools isn’t signed, or otherwise given provenance from some authority, then the strength/importance of claims we can make is very limited.
We have seen this proven again and again based on adoption (see: proof of passport, zk email, zkp2p, and cursive). And we believe that building tooling, apps, and community around this concept will be powerful for broad ZK adoption, leading to a world in which you own your own data and make cryptographic statements about it to external parties, not where corporations sell it for profit.
Who is involved?
The core teams for this residency are proof of passport, zk email, zkp2p, Cursive and anon-aadhaar, and we will invite some external people who are excited to pursue high-impact novel projects in adjacent domains — these include nozee.xyz, Myna wallet, and Gitcoin Passport.
This residency is primarily supported by the Privacy & Scaling Exporations team of the EF, with additional support by Public Good Crypto, Gitcoin Passport, and donors to the Zuzalu Gitcoin Events Round. Organization and curation is led by Vivek Bhupatiraju and Aayush Gupta.
These were all the final teams who gave presentations:
ZK-P2P (Alex, Richard, Sachin)
Cursive (Vivek, Andrew, Rachel)
Proof of Passport (Florent, Remi)
Anon-Aadhaar (Yanis, Saleel)
ZK-Email 2FA (Aayush, Aditya, Sora)
MynaWallet (Nico, Hiro)
Client side ZK research with zk-boogie (Sora)
ZK Email front-end (Chrisandra, Eesha)
Gitcoin x zk-email (Lucian, Elo)
MoPro - Mobile Proving (Vivian, Oskar)
ZK Proof of Location/Photo via App Attest (Kaylee, Sofiane)
OP Attestations x ZK Email (Laura, Elo)
ZKML KYC Face Verification via EZKL (Emma)
Questions?
Feel free to ask us questions by dm’ing any of the core organizers on telegram or twitter!
Â