Zupass is powering a new generation of digital communities, network states, decentralized organizations, and more with zero-knowledge technology. Since its inception about 10 months ago at Zuzalu, nearly 10,000 people have used Zupass, collectively generating hundreds of thousands of ZKPs for identity management, community management, governance, and more.

Zupass takes the form of a simple wallet-like webapp, that can be accessed on a mobile phone or desktop browser. It can store various kinds of cryptographic data—tickets, passports, badgets, or receipts of participation. But it does more than store data—it also lets users make ZK proofs about that data, and share those proofs with a permissionless ecosystem of third-party developers.

Zupass and the PCD (proof-carrying data) framework act as a data layer for digital communities, on top of which tools for managing identity, membership, governance, and more can be built. Last year, third-party developers built tools for online and offline access control, polling, community forums, faucets, games, and more on top of the open Zupass protocols and data formats.

Zupass and the PCD framework is fully open-source and community-oriented, with particular attention towards empowering developers with workshops, educational resources, tutorials, and more. We envision a world where the world’s data ecosystems are maximally open and interoperable, where privacy is a default, and where users can own and control their own data thanks to the power of ZK cryptography. Ground zero for this vision is the Zuzalu community.

Zupass and Zu-Communities

Zupass was first used at Zuzalu, as a backbone for interoperability between community tools. It allowed residents and visitors to access venues, vote in polls, and to authenticate to websites including Zuzalu.City and Zucast. Since Zuzalu, community platforms including Fora and Lemonade have built integrations to issue tickets through Zupass.

At ZuConnect, Zupass was used to provide tickets, polls, and new features including gated Telegram chat and an anonymous chat bot. Hackathon projects were able to leverage Zupass for use-cases including zero-knowledge clinical trial participation, issuance of tickets for additional events, and even sharing of horoscopes.

Zupass was also used at Devconnect Istanbul, where FrogCrypto - a game based around collecting cryptographically-signed frogs - was launched. Hundreds of thousands of frogs were collected, and over 400 people received a Frog Hat for collecting more than 50 frogs. More importantly, the aim of showing--not just explaining--the potential of proof-carrying data was achieved. For many people, these were their first tangible experiences of zero-knowledge cryptography, showing how real-world use-cases can be addressed by ZK. Community hackathon teams were able to integrate Zupass features into their projects.

Zupass roadmap and impact

In 2023, we gave over 10,000 people an experience of ZK cryptography in real life, and issued over 100,000 PCDs. In 2024, we want to take Zupass and PCDs to the next level, building the foundation for the next billion PCDs.

To do this, we will:

• Empower communities to issue their own data as Proof-Carrying Data (PCD), whether tickets, badges, virtual world items, web of trust endorsements, or voting receipts. Issuance of PCDs will be point-and-click and self-service.
• Empower developers to create new social tools for communities by substantially expanding the suite of open source libraries, zero-knowledge circuits, API integrations, and developer tools available on top of or alongside ZK-compatible cryptographic data.

We want to grow the number of Zupass users, but also the number of PCD issuers, and massively diversify the kinds of PCDs that can be issued. 2024 will be all about helping communities to create PCDs as well as use them.

About the Team

Zupass is built and maintained by a very small team (three full-time developers, plus various part-time contributors and community members) who are funded by 0xPARC Foundation to work on Zupass/PCD as a fully open-source and community-oriented project. With support from this QF round, the team will be able to continue operating and delivering high-quality software for communities in a way that’s aligned to the vision and values of Zuzalu, Ethereum, and other similar movements.

Links and Further Reading

• Zupass (ProgCrypto 2023)
• Devconnect Zupass Starter Kit with Austin Griffith
• Zupass Internals and the PCD SDK (EthGlobal Istanbul 2023)