Short description: ZKValidator (ZKV) will be producing an event & educational series focused on promoting the development of privacy tech within the Moonbeam ecosystem. Our series will include 1 online workshop, tailored blog content and a live "Hackshop", where teams will meet in person to build and submit privacy-focused solutions. It will be organized by ZKValidator and will be done in collaboration with other parachains such as Manta as well as researchers from the Web3Foundation.
- ZKValidator (ZKV) will be producing an event & educational series focused on promoting the development of privacy tech within the Moonbeam and Polkadot ecosystems.
- ZKValidator is asking for 45,454 GLMR from the Moonbeam Treasury to cover all the operational and promotional costs for that event series.
- The event series will consist of a virtual workshop, an IRL hackshop, a Twitter Spaces and a library of documents for developers and builders to bring privacy to Moonbeam and Polkadot.
- ZKValidator will collaborate with the Moonbeam team and other players from the Dotsama ecosystem, such as Manta and researchers from the Web3Foundation.
- The event series will take place from early Q3 2022 to Q1 2023.
This proposal is being submitted byZKValidator. We are a mission driven validator with the goal to promote privacy and ZKP adoption on networks we validate on. Our proposal is to spend 45,454 GLMR from the Moonbeam Treasury on a privacy focused event series for the Moonbeam and Polkadot community. Passing this proposal will transfer 45,454 GLMR from the treasury pool to the ZKV Public Address - 0x39C78316C6Bc601cf45f5Ef20296f80e9b0A7039 - which is controlled by ZKValidator.
The event series will be carried out over 6-9 months with a completion date of no later than March 31st 2023. The content of this series will include:
- A presentation of the program via Twitter Spaces
- A developer tutorial on how to bridge private assets from Manta to Moonbeam (or Calamari to Moonriver)
- An online workshop with presentations of practical uses for privacy of the Moonbeam EVM in combination with other projects from the Dotsama universe and different ecosystems.
- A compilation of educational material for participants to have access to those in preparation for the Hackshop
- A live Hackshop event where participants will be able to submit their products.
In addition to this, we will be actively marketing the program through our channels (Twitter, Newsletter, and blog), collaborating with other relevant communities, and working with the Moonbeam marketing team to build up momentum for our events.
Privacy is a critical blocker for mass adoption of blockchain technology. With our event series we want to raise awareness about the importance of privacy and attract new privacy projects to Moonbeam. We want to identify how Moonbeam's unique features can empower new approaches to blockchain privacy, share ideas, educate the ecosystem and provide a platform for networking.
The ZKValidator is a validator with a mission: we are currently securing Polkadot, Kusama, Moonbeam, Moonriver, Cosmos, Osmosis, Evmos, NEAR, Mina, and Celo and use a portion of the rewards generated by validation to invest in and support privacy and Zero Knowledge related initiatives.
The 'ZK' in ZKValidator stands for Zero Knowledge — an exciting and rapidly growing field of cryptography that has the potential to drastically change the way blockchain technology (as well as non-blockchain technology) is used. The aim of ZKValidator is to drive value to PoS networks through supporting Zero Knowledge research projects and privacy focused governance proposals and events, and enabling this technology to be utilised by blockchain developers.
ZKValidator consists of a team of blockchain & zk practitioners including Kobi Gurkan , Philipp Jovanovic , Anna Rose and Will Harborne.
Anna is the co-host of the Zero Knowledge Podcast, a weekly technical show primarily focused on Blockchain, OSS and Zero Knowledge cryptography. She also organises the zkSummit event series, hosts the zkStudyClub — a monthly research discussion group with top researchers in the space - and is a co-creator of ZK Hack - a zk education hub.
Will is the CEO of DeversiFi , a cryptocurrency exchange allowing customers to keep full control of their assets and therefore to have zero-counterparty risk. DeversiFi is one of the first applications to leverage ZK technology on Ethereum, working with StarkWare, in order to enable significantly higher trading throughputs at low-cost and high-speed.
Philipp is an Associate Professor in Information Security at University College London (UCL). Before joining UCL in 2020, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. He obtained his PhD from the University of Passau, Germany, in 2015. His research interests broadly include applied cryptography, decentralized systems, and privacy-enhancing technologies. Lately he has been working on scalability and interoperability aspects of distributed ledger platforms, public randomness generation, secure multi-party computation and consensus mechanisms.
Kobi is an applied cryptogapher specializing in SNARKs. Led cryptography at Celo , a mobile-first blockchain leveraging SNARKs for light-client scaling and consulted for the Ethereum Foundation, Aleo and multiple other ZKP projects. Puzzle curator at ZK Hack.
The team has worked with many of the stakeholders within the Dotsama ecosystem in previous years, and is well positioned to launch formative initiatives which will benefit the community.
Check out zkvalidator.com for more information.
Our mission as a validator is to bring community attention to privacy in the networks we work on. We believe that in order to achieve the decentralised web we desire, we need to find ways to protect individual's rights and privacy.
In order to highlight this topic, the ZKValidator has produced events and reports within the networks we work on. We also have connected zk teams to the builders, as well as introduced builders to the key topics.
In the general Polkadot ecosystem, we have a history of championing the topic. Here is the relevant high level points of how the ZKV has worked with Polkadot/Kusama:
- Privacy community building : Identify relevant teams that can build zk related substrate pallets.
- Events : We have held workshops with core Parity developers and researchers about the topic, as well as produced 2 Privacy on Polkadot events. You can see videos here.
- Governance : Participate on Kusama council and advocate for making privacy technology a priority.
- Funding : Support teams in getting grants or other funding, for example we have co-created the ZK Tech Gitcoin side round which has raised, in its three editions, over $550,000 for Zero Knowledge projects, taking on the role of privacy curator.
Our event is aiming to explore and communicate new privacy use-cases, elevate the importance of privacy on Moonbeam and attract engineers who can build privacy solutions on it. A public and open discussion will help to highlight how unique properties of the protocols & XCM can give rise to privacy projects which are potentially not possible on other chains. Furthermore the events will provide education and a platform for researchers and developers to network and share ideas.
Mainly engineers and builders who are knowledgeable of Solidity and Zero-Knowledge Proofs, who want to build privacy solutions for the Moonbeam and the Dotsama ecosystem.
70,000 EUR worth of GLMRs. Payment conditions are detailed below.
From July 2022 ending not later than March 31, 2023.
- A presentation of the program via Twitter Spaces,
- A developer tutorial on how to bridge private assets from Manta to Moonbeam (Calamari to Moonriver),
- An online workshop with presentations of practical uses for privacy of the Moonbeam EVM in combination with other projects from the Dotsama universe and different ecosystems,
- A compilation of educational material for participants to have access to those in preparation for the Hackshop,
- A live Hackshop where participants will be able to submit their products.
Funds will be used to pay operational expenses, project management costs, social media marketing costs partially and to cover the time dedicated to the deliverables outlined.
The main milestones and outputs from the grant will be an online event, a live event and a library of online content for builders of privacy tech on Moonbeam.
A breakdown of the events milestones and funding can be broken down here
For an event series such as the one we are proposing, including a live event, based on our experiences with other networks the budget should be 70,000 EUR. For event coordination, ZKValidator will run all operational aspects for the event. Our events lead, Agnieszka De Neve, has produced in-person events for the Cosmos ecosystem and our online event ZK Hack. She will also be supported by Hector Perez, our marketing lead for marketing and communication of this event. Zero Knowledge Podcast is confirmed as the media partner for this event. Our main point of contact will be [email protected].
If we find out our costs to go beyond the above estimate, then we will either cover the amount ourselves, or potentially reach out to other sponsors to help us cover it.
Twitter Spaces (30m) - Q3 2022
Online Event Privacy in Moonbeam (2h) - Q4 2022
Developer tutorial document - Q4 2022
Online Content Library - Q4 2022
IRL Hackshop - Q4 2022 / Q1 2023
We are live on Polkadot, Kusama as validators and Moonriver and Moonbeam as collators. However, as a chain-agnostic validator, we do work on multiple networks - some are competitors to Polkadot. More info on this can be found here https://zkvalidator.com/
The events will be marketed via the common community channels such as twitter, telegram, discord and element. Here are some details for our deliverables:
- The kick-off Spaces event will be held on Twitter and we expect it to last 30-45 mins. We will be inviting members from the Moonbeam team as well as other partners on the series to join us as we announce the series and gather our first participants interested in this initiative.
- The online event will likely take place online using Hopin. Hopin is a virtual events platform that enables speakers to present, panellists to join sessions for round table discussions and allows the audience to interact via a chat function where they can ask questions. After the event, videos of the speakers' talks and discussion will be available on the Zero Knowledge Podcast youtube channel and the blogpost will be published on medium.
- We will develop a library of tutorials from the workshops as well as other sources such as interviews and cross-collaboration with the Moonbeam team.
- We will promote Moonbeam and our event via social media to raise awareness about both and attract new talent.
- Our in-person Hackshop will take place in a venue capable of hosting 20-30 people. The end goal of the hackshop will be for teams to submit/build privacy tools based on the knowledge acquired throughout the series. We expect this event to last around 4-6 hours with a short break and meal half-way through. The location of this event is still to be defined, but we are currently tracking blockchain weeks or zk focused events coming up in Q4 2022/Q1 2023 and will likely choose a date which allows us to piggyback on another event.
The success of an event can be determined by the number of participants, the quality of the discussion or the takeaways and feedback from event attendees. In our case, we want to focus on the submissions delivered by participants on the Hackshop at the end of the event series. Members of our team have produced a number of successful events: zkSummit, zkSessions, Privacy on Polkadot online workshop as well as the recent Privacy in Cosmos. Live in Amsterdam event. We will publish metrics about attendance, engagement and any community feedback in the blogpost after this event. An overview of the performance metrics to be observed are described in the table below. The targets are based on the figures from the previous similar event we hosted: Privacy on Polkadot.
A table with the main KPIs for the event series can be found here.
Our mandate is to push for more zk and privacy tech on the greater Polkadot ecosystem. With this funding, we will have a runway to better craft and curate the relationships with key stakeholders. We also believe that these events will help to put ZKV on the map within the Moonbeam community and beyond.
Risks associated are low attendance, poor reception and a lack of interest in the topic of zk and privacy. However, we strongly believe that our event will be a success as previous events of a similar nature we have hosted have been well received.
Not significant. While we do validate on other PoS networks such as Cosmos and Near, we see our efforts there as distinct from our Polkadot initiatives.
GLMR Rate: The GLMR -EUR rate to be used is the exponential moving average rate (EMA30) on the day of submission as displayed here. USD-EUR conversion is done using Morningstar data.
Total allocation of 45,454 GLMR using a EMA30 average of 1.66 USD and conversion of 0.93 Euro / 1 USD, so 1 GLMR = 1.54 EUR
Payment: Total amount to be paid before the development of the events to fund operations.
Report: A full report will be delivered to the Council, analysing success metrics, including all materials developed for and during the event: videos, blogs, a list of social media promotion, etc.