Overview

Our team, funded by the Ethereum Foundation's PSE team, is currently exploring the intersection of NFC chips and zero-knowledge cryptography. In the context of Zuzalu-type communities, we believe this technology can be used to build infrastructure for communities to make proofs of in-person attestations, interactions, and reputation. At its core, it uses ZK-friendly digital signatures to build a primitive akin to a lightweight NFT that doesn't require a wallet or any gas.

Here are some examples of different in-person attestations that our tech can enable:

• Proof of event membership (NFC card gates access to venue and other events)
• Proofs of meeting attendees or organizers
• Proofs of attending events or spaces
• Private community attestations (star contributor, discussion facilitator, super friendly person)
• In-person or online gating based on reputation

And many more! We'd love to hear what your community needs and figure out if we can build it for you :D

Technology

The main NFC tech we have been developing is what we term a signature chip, each of which costs about $4-10 depending on order size and how much custom development is necessary. We've mostly been experimenting with these chips inside of plastic cards, but these chips can be in many different form factors: bracelets, small tags, stickers, integrated into clothes, and many more!

The simplest usage is to give all attendees at an event one of these chips to serve as their entrance badge, with automatic connections to Zupass and other event infrastructure. These chips and the connected app experience can also be used to give out attestations to other community members and privately prove membership in the community for anon polls and speech.

The attestations are digital signatures, and are fully private and owned by the respective attendees. Everyone has the ability to make different ZK proofs about their collection for different in-person and online activations that may require certain amounts of reputation and involvement in the community. The signatures are very Ethereum-friendly and can easily be converted into on-chain reputation if there is a compelling use case.

Separate from the signature and ZK functionality, the chips are also fully functioning Ethereum wallets, meaning attendees can be smoothly onboarded into web3 even if they don't have any prior experience or knowledge. This can enable attendees to easily collect NFTs and ERC20s to be used during and after the event.

Previous activations

Our team has been working on this technology since the first Zuzalu, winning first place in the original hackathon! Previous projects we've done can be found here:

• ZuStamps, digitizing different Zuzalu community events, traditions, and reputation (https://pse-team.notion.site/Zupass-Stamps-v1-Retrospective-6bd7aa223f4d41cdb59b4ecf8aafb130)

• Sigmoji at FtC Residency, providing proof of meeting different residents and private speech (https://github.com/jubmoji/nfctap.xyz and https://nfctap.xyz)

• Jubmoji Spooky Scavenger Hunt at Zuconnect, incentivizing attendees to explore Istanbul together and bond with their teammates, using our tech to prove you visited different locations and to chat with your team (https://github.com/jubmoji/jubmoji.quest and https://jubmoji.quest)

• Jubmoji Event Gating, using proofs of meeting a subset of party organizers to gain access or details of different in-person events

• ETHDenver Sponsor Quests, providing a service to sponsors that proves attendee participation in different sponsored events to increase and incentivize real engagement (https://github.com/nfc-denver/nfc-denver)