Overview

Our team, funded by EF PSE (https://pse.dev), is building open-source software, designs, and educational material to enable private POAPs built on ZK technology and NFC cards from ARX (https://arx.org). This work is based on an initial deployment at Zuzalu, where residents could add digital "stamps" from different events to their Zupass. A description of that experience is linked above.

We want more communities, events, and artists to use this technology, because it provides a private way to memorialize and digitize in-person interactions without needing a wallet or spending gas! However, it costs ~$8 to purchase an NFC card, which quickly becomes expensive at any large scale. We want to create an open pool of funds to buy cards for any folks who want to try using this technology on their own!

Initially, we are thinking people will submit a project proposal and a requested number of cards, and if our team thinks the project is interesting and will be executed well, we will send the necessary money from the pool (nfcstamp.eth) to the grantee. Eventually, if the pool grows large enough, we would hope to decentralize this process and allow more community say into who can access the pool.

All money that this Gitcoin grant receives will be redistributed to other folks!

Why is this technology useful?

One key promise of ZK technology is the ability to fully own your personal data, and reveal it selectively when online or offline. This is in stark contrast to our current data paradigm where Google/Meta owns all your data and does whatever they want with it.

However, to get to that world, we need an initial store of data to make proofs about. The minimum form of data we can make proofs about is signatures from some verified authority. If data doesn't have a signature from somewhere else, it might as well be meaningless. Anyone can falsify a piece of data, but no one can falsify a signature except for the authority that holds the corresponding private key. These NFC cards provide a way to start collecting signatures and storing them privately, which is a great starting ground for a paradigm of private data ownership.

Another framing is that these signatures provide many of the benefits and guarantees of NFTs, but don't require a wallet or gas or any understanding of blockchains. So we can start to onboard people into the web3 ecosystem without needing them to be fully sold already!

How does it work?

In short, each NFC card deployed at an event or given to a specific person has its own private/public key. Every time someone taps the card, it produces a unique signature, giving everyone their own memento of a physical, in-person interaction with the card/event/person.

Then, if you want to reveal you went to some set of events or met some people, you can use a ZK proof to reveal you have valid signatures from the relevant NFC cards without revealing the raw signatures themselves! These ZK proofs can then be used to mint NFTs, access certain rewards from an artist, gate community events, etc.

Example experiments we would love to fund

Broadly, we are excited for this technology to be used by communities, events, and artists. We are especially excited by use cases that involve meaningful & useful ZK proofs to be generated on top of NFC signatures.

As a specific example, we planning on funding an activation with acetcg.xyz , a card game based on web3 characters and stories! The plan is to make the most powerful card from each deck, the Ace, into an NFC card. Then players of the game can collect signatures from other folks they meet in person and play the game with, building a private social graph of players!