EthDenver was a rainbow whirlwind of projects, hackers, presentations, and conversations spanning nearly a week in beautiful Denver, Colorado. Our team arrived on Tuesday and spent several days before the conference at the Buidlthon, talking and working with hackers who had already started on their projects. This year the hackathon lasted 10 days, which allowed for more complicated projects and a chance for deeper integrations.
The official conference began on Thursday, and the zkBob booth was primed for action.
Privacy was a major topic of discussion throughout the conference - Vitalik mentioned it in his opening remarks about the need for better privacy applications to support important use cases.
As soon as the doors opened, the zkBob booth began seeing tons of visitors interested in privacy, zero-knowledge apps and of course our awesome swag! This constant stream of visitors kept up throughout the entire conference, with one final wheel spin for our last pair of BOB socks.
🎤 Presentation
The full presentation is available here ⬇️
The conference was the largest ever Ethereum ecosystem gathering, and zkBob made a big impression!
🎉 Hackathon Winners
zkBob was a popular choice for teams at the hackathon. We introduced a new feature just in time for EthDenver - direct deposits. This allowed projects to deposit BOB directly into the privacy solution with a simple call to the contract address. It greatly simplified the process, giving devs access to private and secure transactions from an external environment.
While 9 teams applied for our bounty, in the end 3 projects were selected which used the zkBob direct deposit features most elegantly in their hackathon solutions.
🥇 First Place: 5000 BOB to Alice’s Ring
Alice’s Ring created a solution for solvency proofs using ring signatures. A user can apply for a Soulbound token which proves their solvency, then request payment using the zkBob private payment solution. This solution has many possible applications - one highlighted by the team was for the landlord/tenant relationship where tenants can prove they have enough funds to rent an apartment without revealing their wallet address or transaction history. They can then pay with a private account, protecting their privacy.
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Work Link: https://github.com/KS-ETHDenver2023
🥈 Second Place Tie: 2500 BOB each to STACKS and TalentPay
STACKS
Stacks is an indie gaming platform where gamers can vote for their favorite games, increase their reputations, and pay for discounted game bundles using the zkBob private payments solution. A portion of the proceeds goes to support charitable organizations.
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Work link: https://github.com/bubblemelon/stacks
TalentPay
TalentPay is designed to match talent with commissioners seeking talent. Contractors (the talent) earn on-chain reputation from past projects and commissioners use this to find and hire them for their next projects. The solution uses zkBob to process private payments, which can be deposited without any outside monitoring or centralized services.
Demo & work link: https://github.com/carol-x/talent-pay
🎬 That’s a wrap
We really enjoyed EthDenver and are looking forward to attending more hackathons this year. Keep an eye out for zkBob at EthGlobal events including Tokyo, Lisbon, and Paris where hackathon participants will have more opportunities to build with zkBob!
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