Semaphore Community Grants: Awarded Projects

January 24th, 2023

We are thrilled to announce the awarded projects from the recent Semaphore Community Grants round. This grants round invited builders, researchers, developers and privacy advocates to build privacy preserving applications integrating Semaphore, an anonymous signaling protocol.

The project proposals vary broadly in scope and geographic representation with teams from Afghanistan, Argentina, Canada, Côte d'Ivoire, China, Costa Rica, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Kenya, Slovenia, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States.

Through a thorough selection process, the four selected projects are:

Block Qualified

Block Qualified aims to become an open education platform where anyone can create their own learning experience, gain credentials that attest to their knowledge, or verify the qualifications of others. All of this will be done directly on-chain, with verifiable data, and preserving the privacy of users via ZK proofs.

Semaphore will enable:
- Having a private reputation system for credential issuers, similar in scope to Unirep.
- Proving ownership of a given credential without revealing ownership of any other credential.
- Proving credential prerequisites without revealing their identity.
- Creating groups for users holding certain credentials.

Lens Protocol is a composable and decentralized social graph, ready for you to build on so you can focus on creating a great experience, not scaling your users.

Lens Protocol + Semaphore integration will allow users of the Lens protocol to create ZK Proofs using Semaphore that are verified and enforced by Lens to govern post interactions. This will allow users to regulate who can interact with their content (comment, mirror, etc).

zkPoH - ZK Proof of Humanity

The main idea of this project is to prevent doxing in Proof of Humanity (PoH) through ZK proofs.

Using Semaphore, a registered PoH user can anonymously prove their humanity and uniqueness. This provides a private sibyl resistance mechanism and prevents double-signaling.

TAZ - Temporary Anonymous Zone

TAZ allowed Devcon VI attendees to experience privacy and anonymity and explore the possibilities that can be built with Semaphore protocol.

Visitors were offered different paths to explore: anonymously ask and answer questions, give feedback, or co-create generative art. TAZ also included identity integrations with heyAnon (post anonymously on Twitter) and Zkitter (anonymous Twitter)

Semaphore identities were the centerpiece of TAZ identity management. Users generated a new Semaphore identity each time a physical QR code from Devcon VI was scanned. Users sent signals like feedback, art submission and posts. Each signal included a proof that the signal was sent from a member of the Devcon VI group.