ETHDenver 2024 Recap

The RISC Zero team was out in force for ETHDenver 2024. Read below for all the highlights from workshops, talks and hackathons, including the winners of over $20K in bounties.

Hackathon and Bounty Winners:

The ETHDenver hackathon had over 200+ submissions from the best builders in the ecosystem. We awarded 4 bounties totaling over $20K to teams using our zkVM technology and zkCoprocessor solution.

Crunch ($10k),  Verifies the Authenticity of Encrypted Conversations While Preserving Privacy.

Crunch generates Risc0 ZK proofs for Web2 API data delivered over HTTPS with TLS 1.3 by using a scalable MPC notarization ceremony. Our solution aims to address the challenge of verifying the authenticity of encrypted conversations (such as those over HTTPS) in a decentralized and privacy-preserving manner. It leverages Risc0 proofs to enable smart contracts to interact with Web3 actions based on potentially private Web2 data. A normal TLS client can have confidence in the security of its own connection, but because the encryption keys required to decrypt the communications are the same ones needed to forge it, this security cannot be proved to a third party.For instance, validation of a conversation with a cloud-based AI model like ChatGPT is possible only by checking the server certificate provided by a TLS connection with the OpenAI API, but this would require public disclosure of authentication tokens to be handled via a traditional oracle-based system. Our system employs Multi-Party Computation to establish trust without revealing content, allowing you to prove to the world that ChatGPT really did cast aspersions on your mother.In constrast to existing solutions, our approach acheives scalability by offloading most work from the MPC domain to a Risc0 proof generated by the client, is not limited to TLS 1.2 and below, and does not require the server to support deprecated ciphersuites to function

zkSnake ($7k), Prove Your Game Scores with ZK

Recently, Andrew and I were playing a competitive game of snake seeing who can reach the highest score. However, after seeing Andrew receive a score of 1000 in mere minutes, I started having suspicions on if the score he posted was legit.This project, zkSnake, solves this problem by using zk proofs to verify if a score is legit or not. Watch the video here.

zkTrust ($3K), Enhancing Trust with Transparent On-Chain Audits

When someone signs a smart contract, it's often hard to know if it's safe or if there are hidden security risks. This uncertainty can be a big problem, making it tough for users to trust the contracts they're dealing with.We're working on an open system that collects security audits and puts them on the blockchain. This way, users can easily see if there's anything they should be worried about before they sign a contract.ZTrust enhances Web3 trust by simplifying audit reports into clear, user-friendly open standard. It centralizes security audits in an intuitive dashboard, with by an AI chatbot, to improve transparency and informed decision-making in the blockchain ecosystem. Watch the video here.

BitBounty ($1k), Funding Platform for Open Source Project Contributors

BitBounty lets you distributed to all funded money to contributors in proportion to each member's effort using zero knowledge proofs. This platform enables to distributed funded money to each contributors. It's hard to solve with existing services due to lack of transparency and no automations. But this product enables it by smart contract and zero knowledge computations. This provides fair chances to earn money through open source contributions even for past contributions by zero knowledge identity with GitHub API. Watch the video here.

Talks and Workshops:

Our team was at over 20 events giving talks and workshops and meeting builders from across the world.

CEO and co-founder Brian Retford took the stage at Scale Summit for his talk “100x Scaling Victories, Challenges, and Opportunities in General Purpose ZK

Later that week, he also spoke on a panel entitled “ASICs and Cryptography — The Past, Present and Future | D/INFRA SUMMIT”

Iryna from the DevRel team gave multiple workshops over the week, with highlights being ETHDenver official as well as Jessy’s Hackerhouse.

We’ll be sharing more links to talks and workshops as they become available.

Till next year!