Which apps satisfy these Web3 critieria? Decentralized on open blockchains, financialized with staked tokens, nonfungible with soulbound collectibles, social with seasonal humans, and cryptographic with zero-knowledge proofs.
Decentralized (Blockchains)
- Open: Any 100+ people can run any actions (submit, execute, verify, settle).
- Free: Any can fork or compose its values (patents, codes, assets, deploys).
- Safe: Any can dispute for valid transactions against 1-second finality.
Financialized (Tokens)
- Swap: Trade with any assets at a liquid price below 1% fees.
- Stake: Lend assets for any time periods above 5% fixed rate.
- Bridge: Cross assets with 10 ecosystems at 3% take rate.
Nonfungible (Collectibles)
- Name: Multiple anonymous identities, with contextual displays.
- Badges: Earn only by time and skills, with global rankings.
- Soul: Bound among community, no transfer but revocation.
Social (Humans)
- Circle: Follow at most 10 people or 3 topics weekly.
- Focus: Like at most 10 posts or reply 3 conversations.
- Seasons: Decay beyond 3 months or 30-mile locality.
Cryptographic (Proofs)
- Succint: Rollup millions of actions in 1-kilobyte zero-knowledge states.
- Private: Mixup any 100 end-to-end actions within hours.
- Fair: Cannot bias or predict any choices, but verifiable.
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Industry Showcases
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Harmony’s ZKProof Games
- 🌳 Blue Forest (ZKProof strategy game) is a Play-to-Earn version of Dark Forest, which is gas-expensive even on Gnosis Chain (sometimes queuing up into weeks for a game turn). Also, Blue Forest allows tournament betting for cash prizes as well as for no-loss options.
Gaming Platform: wallet integrations, tournament escrow, embedded marketplaces
Harmony 2023: Uniform Scaling & Onchain Security
Harmony in 2026: Scaling Web3 via ZKP & DAO
Zero-knowledge proofs, cryptographic primitives, and privacy. That's where the 100x benefits and the magical use cases come in. We are focusing on ZK innovations that are the most likely to reach millions of users in 2023. We are most interested in universal ZK constructs that are the building blocks for Web3. In particular, here are six ZK products that already have prototypes on mainnet. The first is compressing computations and states to succinct representations – namely, low-fee zkEVM rollups, trustless Flyclient bridges, and stateless Non-Interactive-PoPoW clients. The second is protecting privacy across multiple chains and Web2-to-Web3 actions. For example, cross-chain coin mixers like Tornado – which is a top use case with 35K users and $6M revenue; Ethereum Foundation's Semaphore Project now enables anonymous authentication and voting. Lastly, fairness is now guaranteed on blockchain. Verifiable Delay Functions (VDF) will be a key primitive for randomness in games and lotteries; anti-collusion for quadratic funding will be critical for anonymous and open grants.
Final Projects by ZKU Graduates 👩💻👨💻
ZKProof Games
ZKProof Progress
- Private key management is one of the key issues to be solved on the road to mass adoption of blockchains like Ethereum. Smart contract based wallets like the Gnosis Safe are laying the foundation to solve this problem by allowing different types of access control. The talk gives an overview of the different approaches developed to allow account recovery beyond seed backups and explains how to implement social recovery to ensure recoverability without compromising privacy.
- Semaphore is a generalised zero-knowledge signalling system which can be deployed to fulfil various privacy use cases, such as a mixer and anonymous whistleblowing. This hands-on workshop will guide participants through a high-level explanation of how Semaphore and zero-knowledge proofs work, and guide them through an anonymous chat app integrated with POAP tokens which can generate and verify said proofs.
- Since Ethereum transactions are fully visible on-chain, it is possible to trace value transfers and surveil users' financial activity. This state of affairs deprives users of privacy beyond mere pseudonymity. Some workarounds, like using a centralised exchange wallet or a custodial mixing service, however, introduce a high degree of counterparty risk. The Ethereum ecosystem needs a noncustodial mixer which works through strong cryptography, rather than blind trust. To solve this, we present a trustless mixer for Ether and ERC20 tokens. It builds upon Semaphore, a zero-knowledge signalling system by Barry WhiteHat and Kobi Gurkan. Additionally, it employs a burn relay registry which incentivises third parties to pay gas fees on behalf of mixer users. In this presentation, I will show a high-level architectural overview of the mixer, dive into its underlying zero-knowledge circuits, and discuss other applications of zero-knowledge signalling.
- RLN (Rate limiting nullifier) is a construct based on zero-knowledge proofs that enable spam prevention mechanisms for decentralized, anonymous environments.
- We'll present an overview of learnings from 3 years of building and running Dark Forest, the first fully decentralized MMORTS, including: why ZK is important for games, what a crypto-native game is and why we should care, designing for emergent player behavior, pushing the limits of Ethereum devex, and social consensus and legitimacy - why is Dark Forest more like chess than League of Legends? We'll also hint at 0xPARC's next crypto-gaming experiments.
- Since the inception of Quadratic Funding, the mechanism has mainly been used to fund open source software and public goods in a Web3-centric context. Recently, Gitcoin and others have experimented with QF in new ways to empower specific ecosystems, fund localized communities, and tackle real-world issues (climate change, health, policy). As adoption grows so do barriers and scalability challenges, but many promising advancements could be the key to breaking out of the blockchain bubble.
Demos & Prototypes
Social & Curation
Human Matching
Braintrust DAO: A Talent Network Governed by its Community
Languages & Compilers
We have applied the Axe Lifter and the Axe Prover for R1CS, described above in section 4.10, to verify a handcrafted R1CS gadget that represents the Blake2s hash function (the full version and also a smaller version limited to a single round). The one-round version is composed of 2,864 variables and 2,896 constraints. We establish that lifting it into logic takes under one second, and the proof (comparing it with an ACL2 specification of one-round of Blake2s) takes under a minute. The full version of Blake2s has 21,728 variables and 22,048 constraints. The proof (comparing it with our full specification of Blake2s) currently takes about 3,100 seconds. Future prover improvements may reduce that time. We are also working to craft robust sets of rewrite rules that suffice to automatically verify not just Blake2s but also a variety of other R1CS relations. For the Blake2s examples, we currently prove only the “forward” direction, that the R1CS implies the specification relation over inputs and outputs
Talent market
- Reductions in advertising spend contributed to a negative impact on LinkedIn as well as Search and news advertising revenue of over $(100) million
- LinkedIn revenue increased 26% (up 29% in constant currency)
- LinkedIn Revenue increased $5.7 billion or 12% driven by growth in Intelligent Cloud and Productivity and Business Processes.
- Operating expenses increased $1.8 billion or 14% driven by investments in cloud engineering, LinkedIn, and Nuance.
- LinkedIn revenue increased $768 million or 26% driven by our Talent Solutions and Marketing Solutions businesses.
- Gross margin increased $1.4 billion or 12% driven by growth in Office 365 Commercial and LinkedIn.
- Operating expenses increased $593 million or 12% driven by investments in LinkedIn and cloud engineering.
- Research and development expenses increased $1.2 billion or 20% driven by investments in cloud engineering and LinkedIn.
- Sales and marketing expenses increased $447 million or 8% driven by Nuance, which contributed 3 points of growth, and investments in LinkedIn.
Industry Leaders
Market analysis: platform scalability, game toolings, application trends, bridge security, Web3 theses.
- Games: Game7, Webaverse, Other Side
- Social: Lens, Farcaster, Ceramic, DeSo, Governor
- Incubation: 0xPARC, EthUni, Seed Club, Alliance, Kernel, Modular, Rabbit Hole
- NFT: Coopah, Magic Eden, Water & Music, NFTNerd -
- Tools: Protofire Safe, Infura, Etherscan
- DeFi: Circle USDC, Perpetual, Allbridge
- Bridges: Nomad, Axelar, Succinct
- Middlewares: Unstoppable, Arweave, Eigen Layer -
- Analytics: Dune, Token Terminal
- ZKProofs: 0xPARC, Dark Forest
- Exchanges: Coinbase, Kraken, Upbit, Bittrex, Bitfinex
- Gateways: Onramper, Wyre, Moonpay, Binance Connect
