In today’s roundup, we’re excited to feature four winners from a recent round of local grants in Japan! We view Ethereum as an ever-evolving, creative, and inclusive playground, and it is our responsibility to let everyone keep playing.
It is not easy to engage in public goods or new use cases without a quick financial return, and it is important to support dedicated teams working to solve interesting problems, improve public infrastructure and create creative blockchain use cases. In this round of local grants, the Ethereum Foundation is pleased to highlight a local community that is proactively working to demonstrate the potential of decentralized technology.
zkCREAM: Reliable, Confidential, and Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Anonymous Mixer
zkCREAM:Confidential Reliable Ethereum Anonymous Mixer is a set of protocols and dapps that enable more robust, accessible, secure, anonymous and verifiable voting for public elections in Japan. zkCREAM is developed as a pilot program. It consists of a set of smart contracts and a user-friendly interface application that allows the average general public to vote completely anonymously while preserving the integrity and verifiability of the final vote count. It also supports MACI making it more resistant to collusion, reliable and anonymous.
The team’s next development goal is to create easy-to-use mobile and desktop voting applications. It will showcase and leverage the use of zkCREAM in the Ethereum community. Additionally, the team will develop additional voting logic layers to support other common scenarios, such as quadratic voting, instant runoff voting, and ranked-choice voting.
Ryodan System SA: Building Layer 2 with zkRollups and zkCloud
The Ryodan team works on scalability, privacy, and code complexity issues. They take a multi-faceted approach that incorporates both R&D on protocols and the creation of tools to make zero-knowledge proofs more accessible to developers.
THE zkCloud The service aims to help developers use zero-knowledge proofs to more easily write smart contracts and programs. zkCloud currently supports Groth16 and PLONK proofs, with STARKs coming soon. The team is also developing an optimized zkSTARK Rust library, as well as other tools to enable a no-code approach to zero-knowledge applications.
The team is also developing a new zk-rollup, based on a design propose by CEO Leona Hioki. The approach offers potential privacy and efficiency improvements by not requiring transaction history data for contract execution.
Departure: Recording infrastructure for physical and digital works of art
Startrail is an Ethereum-based infrastructure for recording the provenance and exhibition history of physical and digital artworks. In addition to using the ERC721 to represent a work of art or its certificate, NFC chips can be attached to physical works of art and associated with the certificate on the blockchain.
CEO Taihei himself is a contemporary artist who was inspired to use blockchain technology to solve problems he encountered in the art industry. Since 2016, he has built a team of people from both art and technology backgrounds, inspired by the possibilities of distributed ledger technology to solve issues of provenance and compliance in ownership of works of art. They work with people in the art industry, such as artists, gallery owners, curators and online marketplaces, to ensure they meet their practical operating needs.
The team’s next goals include open sourcing their smart contracts and expanding their infrastructure to the global market. By advocating for the rights of all art industry stakeholders, including artists and collectors, they hope to bring all kinds of art industry participants into the Ethereum ecosystem.
w3a.io: Smart Lock authentication for physical devices
W3a.io uses Ethereum to verify usage rights for physical devices. The team first explored the concept in 2020 in a common experience with Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) in which they tested a blockchain-based automated car sharing system on the NAIST campus. A “virtual key” allowed an authorized user to lock and unlock a car with their smartphone, and users were incentivized to return cars to locations where they would be most in demand.
W3a.io builds on the concept and learnings from the NAIST pilot, using digital signatures to authenticate authorized operators of physical devices, even offline. The team hopes that it can be applied to many use cases to help bring Ethereum into the real world!
Family: Partnership certificates on Ethereum
Famiee is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping all types of families access the benefits available to legally married couples through a partnership certificate issuing platform on Ethereum. A network of participating companies offers services to couples holding Famiee certificates, giving them access to benefits that would otherwise only be available to legally married couples, such as employee family allowances, joint mortgage applications, family discounts, public assistance or life insurance.
Famiee began issuing certificates for same-sex partners in February 2021 and plans to expand the service to include other types of families and partnerships that are not legally recognized in some places, such as marriages where women choose to keep their original name or single mothers. live together to support each other. They are currently working on a mobile app to issue certificates that meet high standards of privacy, security and KYC.
The countless local Ethereum communities around the world are a big part of why Ethereum feels both global and personal to so many people. That’s why we’re continually experimenting with ways to support local communities around the world.
Once again, thanks to all the contributors promoting real-world adoption of Ethereum, and if you think you’re next, head over to our website. grants page to learn more about what we look for in the projects we fund.
