ZK Email is a set of open source SDKs, libraries, and protocols (https://prove.email) that support making anonymous proofs of the contents of your email on chain. This is useful for provenant proofs of identity like proof of twitter account, github contribution, and anonymous KYC -- all of which have open source prototypes now, without centralized attesters (see prove.email for links). Our code, roadmap, and ideas are fully open source at https://github.com/zkemail.

We are also building the Email Wallet (demo: https://emailwallet.org, docs: http://docs.emailwallet.org) as an open standard and protocol that anyone can plug into -- it allows you to use your email as a wallet signer, allowing much easier onboarding onto Ethereum. In addition, plaintext emails serve as a one-click replacement for wallets for signing and sending transactions.

We rely only on pre-existing cryptography and our bespoke, highly optimized ZK proofs to verify your mailserver's signatures -- there is no centralized computation. No MPC assumptions. No trusted hardware. No trusted attestation servers. Only trust smart contracts, email, and DNS infrastructure.

We think this is the future of provenant identity proofs on Ethereum, as well as the future of simple wallet interfaces to onboard new people to crypto.

Money will go towards hiring developers to contribute, travel expenses for folks working on the project, and funding hackathon prizes to encourage folks to build atop the protocol.

The work is entirely open source. Previous work has led to a number of impactful open source contributions in the zk space including:

• The first RSA-SHA256 circuit in halo2
• The first ZK Regex circuits and libraries, in circom and halo2
• Halo2 Benchmarking: We have open sourced a halo2 wasm benchmarking repo that runs any halo2 wasm code in the browser on 100 instances in parallel for any browser on any operating system (mobile or desktop), and spits out the mean running time and variance -- we intend to publish this as an easy to use Cargo and NPM package soon for others to use.
• Halo2 Optimizations: We have various halo2 circuits to split verifiers, divide circuits for faster parallel client side proving, and many others. We have in addition contributed back to various open source libraries in the ecosystem.
• Educational content: We have curated a set of blog posts, talks, and docs around our experiences, including generic ZK breakdowns and explainers such as https://prove.email/blog/zk.
• Circom Hash to Curve on the Grumpkin Curve: Our circuits enable proving the private set intersection (PSI) protocol in ZK, which we use for decentralized relayer communication, so that relayers cannot censor unfavorable queries.