Mina Navigators
Growth Grant Proposal
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About Choz
Choz, a member of the Mina Navigators program, ranked 4th in the MINA Prize category at the ETHGlobal Istanbul Hackathon in November 2023. The team, comprising five experts, leveraged their skills to create a unique and versatile utility within the Mina ecosystem.
Choz’s Adventure 
The idea of Choz was inspired by the question: “Where would I like to see Blockchain technology in daily life?” Choz offers a quiz experience with reliable results using blockchain technology. By leveraging Zero-Knowledge technology through o1js and the MINA Protocol, Choz ensures quiz questions and answers remain private and secure.
Proposal Overview
Problem:
Current Web2 test applications lack the trust inherent in decentralized systems, while existing Web3 test platforms fail to provide the privacy users expect. They also face challenges like automatic reward distribution to quiz winners.
Furthermore, onboarding, test generation, and participation processes can be complex, hindering wider adoption.
Solution:
Choz leverages the Mina Protocol for privacy and verifiability in Web3. It uses zkPrograms and a Quiz Smart Contract to manage rewards, ensuring private, decentralized computation of winners and scores. zkCloudWorker integrates for cloud-based proving, offloading resource-intensive processes to a secure environment.
Creating a quiz on Choz is simple, requiring only a crypto wallet connection. This lowers barriers while maintaining security. For Web2 features like emailing results and generating statistics, Choz uses a Bun.js backend API. This hybrid architecture combines Web3 innovation with Web2 accessibility, making it ideal for educational, corporate, and community engagement.
Impact:
Users can seamlessly utilize Choz for various purposes, including engagement, competition, quizzes, examinations, or onboarding activities, all while maintaining their privacy through blockchain and Zero-Knowledge technology. With an enhanced user experience meticulously designed by Choz’s UX professionals, participants can enjoy an intuitive and secure interface. Upon successfully completing an activity and achieving the required number of correct answers, users are automatically rewarded via blockchain, ensuring a transparent and efficient process.
As Choz operates on the mainnet, it contributes significantly to the broader Web3 ecosystem by offering a functional and innovative test zkApp. Furthermore, the Mina ecosystem benefits from Choz as a benchmark project, providing a well-documented, comprehensible codebase that serves as a model for future blockchain-based applications.
Audience:
Choz is a versatile platform that transforms assessments across diverse audiences, from educational institutions to corporate teams, event organizers, and blockchain communities. By leveraging blockchain and zero-knowledge proofs, Choz ensures secure, verifiable, and engaging quizzes for modern education, employee training, and interactive events. Universities and online platforms can enhance academic integrity with private on-chain scores and gamified learning, while companies can use Choz for onboarding, team-building, and skill assessments. Event organizers and blockchain ecosystems benefit from its privacy-focused tools for hackathons and workshops, while HR teams can create engaging quizzes to foster culture and knowledge-sharing. With an intuitive design and applications in areas like recruitment, psychological diagnostics, and entertainment, Choz offers a user-friendly, decentralized solution for anyone looking to create impactful and reliable assessments followed by a reliable rewarding system.
Architecture & Design
The basic architecture of our project focuses on providing a fast and reliable quiz creation process.
Detailed Design & Architecture:
Choz’s architectural structure consists of 4 different layers:
1. Cloud (zkCloudWorker)
The zkCloudWorker is an innovative solution designed to address the limitations of traditional proving systems in blockchain applications. By offering ultra-fast proving capabilities in the cloud, it eliminates the need for extensive local resources like large proving keys and powerful processors, streamlining the development and execution of zkApps. Key features include robust process isolation, data encryption, and composability, ensuring privacy and efficiency.
→ Efficient Proving:
Traditional zkApps require users to download large proving keys and execute computations locally, which can be resource-intensive and time-consuming. By integrating zkCloudWorker, Choz offloads these computations to the cloud. Users can now generate zk proofs for quizzes and assessments with just an API call to zkCloudWorker, reducing proving times by 5-10x and memory requirements by up to 90%.
→ User Experience:
This integration enables easily deploying quiz contract and seamless participation in quizzes across both web and mobile platforms without requiring advanced hardware or extended setup times. It lowers the technical barriers for users, particularly in the education, entertainment and social networking sectors, ensuring a wider adoption of Choz.
→ Privacy:
zkCloudWorker ensures the encryption of data at all stages, maintaining the confidentiality of user responses and quiz details. Private data will be processed securely on the web using hashing and Merkle Tree calculations, with preprocessed data sent to zkCloudWorker for proof generation.
→ On Cloud
zkCloudWorker explorer enables users to track their proofs and verify the computation on the cloud without needing to trust the backend server on score calculation and winner proving.
2. Backend API
Establishing a healthy connection between the user interface and blockchain via the backend server and onboarding web2 users.
It is a service that adopts a user-friendly hybrid model developed to seamlessly integrate Web2 users into the blockchain ecosystem and provides reliable connection with zkCloudWorker.
This model allows traditional web users to benefit from complex blockchain technology without needing to understand it. The advanced backend infrastructure establishes continuous and secure communication with the zkCloudWorker layer, making the users’ experience uninterrupted and reliable. The user-friendly interface allows users to interact easily while managing the complexities in the background.
The set of data generated as a result of user interactions coming from the frontend layer, such as “creating a quiz” and “answering questions”, is processed appropriately in the backend layer and is also sent to the zkCloudWorker for zero-knowledge proofs. In this way, data that does not require confidentiality but cannot be carried on the blockchain, such as quiz details, are stored in a safe and accessible manner, while highly confidential data such as user answers and user scores are sent securely to the zkCloudWorker layer for processing. At the same time, it is of critical importance in ensuring that the data coming from the zkCloudWorker is transmitted by the user interface and in a way that prioritizes confidentiality. In addition, the reward distribution process for rewarded quizzes is fully automated on the blockchain thanks to zkCloudWorker’s fast and secure service. In this way, users can be sure of a fair exam result with zero knowledge proofs and enjoy the safe distribution of the deserved rewards.
This hybrid model prioritizes user experience while encouraging web2 users to use blockchain-based applications. Thus, it appeals to a wide audience by offering both security and ease of use. It simplifies and accelerates the transition from the Web2 world to the blockchain universe, thus supporting the digital transformation process.
3. Mina L1 Quiz Smart Contract And ZkPrograms
Settlement for verifying the proof of winners from WinnerProver zkProgram.
From the quiz publish button we trigger a transaction to be signed by quiz creator to deploy the quiz contract and deposit the total reward pool from zkCloudWorker.
Score Calculator ZkProgram gets the user answers and calculates the scores. Proves the score with the result.
Winner Prover collects the winners from scores that are passing the threshold and pushes them into a chain of winners as an indexed merkle map.
Mina zkApp contract, which verifies the Winner Proofs from Winner Prover, proves the quiz results and makes it possible to distribute rewards.
This structure increases the reliability and confidentiality of quiz results and encourages users. This system offers an important innovation in the field of education, with both the effectiveness of the verification process and the rewards that users will receive.
4. Frontend
Client side interface with a professional design approach, using power of Next.js.
This interface has been developed with a modern and aesthetic design approach to maximize users’ experience. It provides a fast and smooth user experience by taking advantage of the performance and flexibility advantages of Next.js. o1js allows us to establish a reliable and efficient connection with Mina, managing complex operations in the background and making it possible for users to interact with just ease. This integration enables users to benefit from blockchain technologies by offering both security and ease of use.
Currently we are supporting Auro and Pallad Wallets to sign in and participate in quizzes.
Thanks to the Frontend interface, all kinds of user interactions, such as quiz information created by users and answers to quizzes, are prepared to be transmitted to the Backend API and Quiz Worker (zkCloudWorker) for quick processing. In this way, it becomes much easier for users to interact with the seemingly complex quiz creation and answering system within the Choz architecture.
Vision
“The difference between something good and something great is attention to detail.”
– Steve Jobs
Imagination is limitless, and with Choz, it all becomes possible...
At Choz, we not only perfect our technical infrastructure, but also pay great attention to detail at every stage of the user experience.
Even this proposal you are reading has been meticulously crafted; every word, every design detail, and even custom CSS and HTML are a reflection of this care. Because we believe that great results come from the combination of small but meaningful details. Together with our empowered team, we are determined to make a big difference in the Mina ecosystem.
Github Links
Existing Work
We completed the zkProgram stack in close collaboration with zkCloudWorker (@DFST). Integrated zkCloudWorker to optimize quiz proof generation and verification.
Frontend Development:
Refactored the frontend code structure, improving maintainability and efficiency. Introduced a new UI Design System built using advanced Figma features like variables and tokens. Redesigned website nearing release, reflecting updated branding and user experience.
Backend Overhaul:
Fully refactored backend architecture using Bun.js and TypeScript. Optimized code using the Model-Service-Controller (MSC) pattern. Reduced server costs drastically from $200 to $20 monthly.
Blockchain Advancements:
Developed and deployed QuizWorker for decentralized processing and completed the Quiz Smart Contract with functionalities for score calculation, winner-proving, and payouts.
Implemented Lazy Quiz contract deployment ability that does not require users to compile anything on their device thanks to zkCloudWorker.
Added withdrawal functionality for unliquidated reward pools. Deployed Devnet workers and finalized unit tests.
Reward System:
Implemented automatic reward distribution via the new architecture. Designed new reward email templates featuring scores and reward details.
Branding & UX/UI Design:
Finalized a new logo and branding, reflecting a refreshed identity. Defined target audience segments and developed tailored messaging and marketing strategies. Created a comprehensive UI Kit and marketing materials to enhance consistency across platforms. Designed a new mail template. Addressed and resolved issues in the mail-sending process after implementing the new templates.
Marketing:
Developed our target audience segments and messaging strategies. Created marketing material in accordance with our target audience and branding style. Planned collaborations with other projects, prioritized engagement within the ecosystem increasing the digital presence of Choz.
→ Our website: Try here 💜
→ You can get more information from our previous proposal.
Production Timeline
Our project is on testnet at the moment. We will improve and add more features to it within the 3 months period and make it working on mainnet. We expect the provided milestones below to be finished within 3 months.
Budget & Milestones
Overview
Choz will develop and improve the existing platform in Mina Navigators Season 3. The key points in these three months are the Social Connection, user interface, experience improvements, and new features that will enable more options to users on creating the quiz in the way they want, provide more insights post-quizzes and make our platform more fun to use.
Deliverables
🚀 EPIC - 1: Social Verification (Allowlist)
Front End Back EndBlockchain
Social Platform Integration (X, Discord…)
If creator wants, participants can be verified based on the following conditions:
X (Formerly Twitter) Requirements
- Follows specified X (formerly Twitter) accounts.
- Account created before a specified date.
- Has a minimum number of followers.
2. Discord Requirements:
- Joined the creator’s Discord server by a specific date (requires connecting a Discord account).
- Is a member of the creator’s Discord server.
- Has a certain role in the server (requires the role ID from Discord).
Front End Back End UX/UI DesignBlockchain
Checking Users’ Mina Wallet Ownership
Verify wallet balances to ensure eligibility for specific quizzes. Has more than the required amount of $MINA balance specified by the quiz creator.
Front End Back End UX/UI DesignBlockchain
NFT Integration
Is a holder of a specific NFT collection (requires collaboration with the quiz creator).
Front End Back End UX/UI DesignBlockchain
Passcode Integration
1. Automatic: When creating private quizzes, user can provide an email list from the create quiz form. Choz will send a one-time and unique passcode to participants’ e-mails. Participants will only be able to enter the quiz with their passcode.
2. Manual: The quiz owner will define a special code for entering the quiz and will only allow those who know the code to enter the quiz.
🚀 EPIC - 2: Quiz Details Page
Front End Back EndUX/UI DesignBlockchain
Display Quiz Details
Detailed information including participation numbers, participated wallets with scores, winner list if it is rewarded, Leaderboard (Top List).
Front End Back End UX/UI Design
Adding New Prize Distribution Methods
With a new distribution type manual. The distribution will not start before the quiz creator approves the winner list from the quiz details page.There will be a start distributing button on the page to start it.
Front End Back End UX/UI DesignBlockchain
Withdraw Balance Button
A Withdrawal feature will be added to withdraw the remaining balance in the quiz contract to your own account after the reward distribution.
🚀 EPIC - 3: UX/UI Improvements
Front End Back EndUX/UI Design
Updating Email Templates
Renewing HTML of email templates sent after the quiz and correcting possible errors, thus making the user experience seamless.
Front End UX/UI Design
User Guidance
Guiding users with short explanations during the quiz creation and participation processes on the Choz website.
Front End Back End UX/UI Design
Draft Quiz Management
Adding actions that allow quizzes to be saved, edited and published as drafts.
Checking and Fixing Potential Bugs
Conducting Q&A Tests and detecting and correcting potential bugs.
Design of All Newly Added Milestones
Creating aesthetic designs that suit user experience and developing UI designs.
🚀 EPIC - 4: Marketing
Newsletter Setup (with MailerLite)
Adding newsletter subscription area on landing page.
Technical Blog Posts & Newsletter Updates
Publishing technical blog posts about new features and branding. Sharing our bi-weekly newsletter, updates regarding Choz and the overall Mina Ecosystem.
Organizing Collaborations and Prized Quizzes
Collaborate with other projects in Mina ecosystem and Zero Knowledge communities outside of the ecosystem. By using NFT Integration, publish rewarded quizzes special to only NFT holders of specific collections in Mina ecosystem.
Podcast Series
Launching ‘Choz podcast’ series covering project updates and collaborations with ecosystem.
AMA and Space Events
Planning regular AMA and Twitter Space events with ecosystem collaborations.
B2B Marketing Campaigns
Planning B2B marketing campaigns to reach organizations, event managers, blockchain communities, educational institutions and more.
🚀 EPIC - 5: Quiz Experience Improvements
### New Question Types
Audio: Enable adding audio to questions.
Visual-based: Enable video to be added to questions, allowing users to ask questions from visuals, for example, an English language education institution asking the user to write down what the person in the video said.
Limited Time per Question and no Going Back
Adding a time limit for each question and displaying the questions to participants in different orders.
Randomized Question Order Per Participant (Prevent Cheating)
Questions are presented to quiz participants in different orders, so that even people taking the quiz next to each other can solve the question in different orders at the same time.
Gamification while Preserving Privacy
Giving each participant the opportunity to choose a nickname with a gamified dice animation and displaying these names on the Leaderboard.
🚀 EPIC - 6: New Quiz Types
Resharable Quizzes (for real-time quizzes)
Quizzes can be reshared with the ‘Republish’ button after they are finished.
Usage scenarios: A quiz is created, then quiz is finished, a leaderboard is created. The quiz owner can then start a challenge of ‘Can you get higher than the 1st?’ to attract new participants. Or the quiz owner re-runs the same quiz and analyzes the development of the participants based on their previous successes. Or, a quiz was made and a person could not participate in the quiz due to a legitimate excuse. The quiz owner republishes it with new start and end date. And allows the user to re-enter. The usage scenarios of this feature can be adapted to many conditions.
Real-Time Quizzes (standard version)
Real-Time quizzes, limited only to set start and end dates, like traditional exams the quiz entrance opens at start date and it ends when the time is up. Participants need to finish before it ends.
Usage: Allows participants to compete at the same time. Each participant has a single right to participate and time, just like a traditional exam. They cannot enter the quiz outside of the specified hours.
Passive-Active Quizzes (Flexible Status Quizzes)
The quiz owner can make the quiz active or passive whenever they want. When it is active, participants can participate and when they do the quiz they are solving will have a duration that starts counting. It provides a more flexible use; it is especially suitable for quizzes that need to be open for a long time or quizzes with unpredictable timing but with a specified duration.
Usage: 1. You are a speaker at a live event and you cannot predict exactly how long the event will last but you have a quiz that needs to be solved under a specified duration, not infinite. In this case you can create your quiz, make it active or deactive anytime. The participants that are still solving the quiz would not be affected from deactivation. 2. You are a recruiter and you will present and measure the same quiz to multiple candidates at different times in a job interview. You can reuse the same quiz in different situations to see the statistics of the participants.
Question Difficulty
Enabling selection of the question difficulty.
(Very Hard - Hard - Normal - Easy - Very Easy)
🚀 EPIC - 7: New Scoring System (Dynamic Score)
Question-Based Weighted Scoring
Questions will have different point amounts depending on their difficulty level. This ensures that questions with varying difficulty levels are evaluated more fairly and accurately.
Completion Time-Based Ranking
For participants with the same score, completion time is used as a ranking criterion. Participants who complete faster stand out, which increases competition.
New ZkProgram Integration
Question-based point weights and participant completion time calculation will be added to ZkProgram. Completion time of quiz will depend on the proof generation time of User Answer ZkProgram. It will use the time from zkCloudWorker at the time of proof creation on the cloud to make it secure and dependable.
🚀 EPIC - 8: Rewarded Quizzes improvements
Maximum Number of Winners (Top N Winner)
In this epic we are going to remove total reward pool. Quiz creator will determine the maximum number of winners and reward per winner. We will show how much the total reward pool will be from UI by calculating it.
### Different Prize Amounts
Enable users to be able to determine different prize amounts according to the winners’ rankings (Ex: 1st 100, 2nd 90, 3rd and 4th 80 MINA).
Front End Back End UX/UI DesignBlockchain
New Token Types
Enabling the distribution of different prizes such as NFTs and Fungible Tokens other than MINA Tokens (Requires Collaboration with Choz and the creator for Social Verification and security).
🚀 EPIC - 9: Migration to Mainnet
### Winner Wallet Validation
We already verify winner wallets’ receive permissions on the blockchain. That ignores the wallets with wrong permissions to negate the negative side effects. Upon migration to Mainnet, the fundNewAccount method used in Devnet will be removed to prevent activating inactive winner accounts to not pay 1 Mina extra for not activated wallets. Optionally, we can give creators to give enough extra funds to be able to activate the maximum winners number. Then creator is able to withdraw the left balance after distribution. Additionally when preconditions will be available, We are going to integrate preconditions to make exclusion of winners on-chain.
Blockchain
Transaction Fee Adjustment
Extra fees will be charged during quiz contract creation to cover:
Reward distribution costs.
zkCloud transaction fees.
This ensures seamless and automated reward processing on Mainnet while maintaining the sustainability of the system.
Midterm Milestones (1.5 months)
EPIC - 1: Social Verification (Requirements)
EPIC - 2: Quiz Details Page
EPIC - 3: UX/UI Improvements
EPIC - 4: Marketing
EPIC - 9: Migration to Mainnet
Project Timeline:
3 Months
Budget Requested:
65,000 MINA
Budget Breakdown:
Developer Salaries: %80
Marketing Costs: %10
Tools and DevOps Costs: %10
Wallet Address:
B62qkHLjhJyDwaaq9AoKU7y7sK9ieAZFjD5Tx2YuLBFJB3CfgtXuNaR (NEW)
Proposer Github
Proposer Experience
We, as a team, have been working together for 1 year now. Our first project was Bossless DAO. It was an automated DAO which is executing the approved option in a proposal instantly via using Chainlink Automation. From there we joined ETHGlobal and won the Mina Prize as 4th place. Then our project was selected for Mina Navigators Season 1. We successfully claimed the monthly milestones and Learn to Earn challenges. We had big improvements with the new team members starting from September.The work We had done in 3 months was even more than total of previous 9 months of work.
Team Members
For team members information visit Mina Navigators - HackMD
Achievements
ETHGlobal Istanbul Hackathon 2023 - MINA Prize Category 4th
Risks & Mitigations
1. Potential Issues on Twitter API Health
Risk:
Twitter API has many reports saying that the API has stability issues and there are downtimes.
Mitigation:
Postpone the quizzes: Postpone and make the quizzes that require twitter integration passive and require the quiz creator to set a new date or make it active again.
2. Smart Contract Security Issues
Risk:
Quiz smart contract can have security issues that could disrupt the distribution process.
Mitigation:
Detailed Testing Process: Perform extensive E2E and Unit testing with edge cases before the mainnet release, ensuring repeated tests on the latest versions.
Stable Tag: Ensure to have a stable tagged version.
Audit: Ask for audit and feedback from experienced developers in the community and from Mina.
3. Backend API Downtime
Risk:
Our backend API hosted in AWS can have downtimes due to high traffic and high memory usages.
Mitigation:
AWS Auto Scale: Using auto scale option can cost more and would still need to put a budget limit but that would ensure the run time of the server to be stable enough.
These strategies will help mitigate potential risks, ensuring a more efficient and secure project development process.
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