What is Changeth

Changeth is a petition paltform that combines zero-knowledge cryptography and sybil resistance mechanisms to allow people to voice their opinions freely.

Current petition websites, and even traditional paper-based petitions suffer from two major flaws: vulnerability to sybil attacks and lack of privacy.

Sybil attacks happen when a single user impersonates multiple identities, and in our case signs the petition using many names. This leads to wrong results, and loss of trust in the petition. Changeth prevents this by requiring every user to authenticate with their Gitcoin Passport, World ID or another proof-of-humanity system. This ensures that every signature belongs to a real human, making the petition more trustworthy.

Privacy is a human right, and is paramount especially when signing petitions which are deemed controversial. Currently, if an authority or independent auditor needs to verify a petition, the organizer must disclose the names or IDs of the signatories, leading to complete loss of privacy. With the help of zero-knowledge proofs, and the wonderful Semaphore protocol, we are able to prove that a certain number of people have signed a petition without disclosing who those people are.

Putting it all together: with Changeth, organizers can create petitions that can only be signed by real humans, while keeping their identities private.

Roadmap

We currently have proof-of-concept contracts and a simple frontend to verify the basic assumptions our project builds on. In our next steps, we are going to:

1. Finish the contracts and frontend to enable creating and managing petitions
2. Enable signing of petitions without requirements
3. Enable hard sybil-resistance by integrating World ID
4. Enable soft sybil-resistance by integrating Gitcoin Passport
5. Enable private donations to petitions by integrating zkBob, or a similar private stablecoin transfer protocol.