Community zkApps Ideas (formerly snapps)

Do you have a great idea for Snapps, but don’t know how to implement it? Leave it here and get feedback from the Community on the feasibility (or not).

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I am personally very interested to see Mina Protocol and zero-knowledge proofs potential leveraged for some kind of proof-of-humanity that doesn’t require to disclose personal data.

I believe sybil-resistance could become an extremely important, though overlooked at the moment, feature for dApps/Snapps. And even though I am too narrow-minded and tech-limited to develop something tangible, I can’t wait to see sybil-resistant Snapps thanks to Mina :muscle:

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Do you have a loose idea how that ’ proof-of-humanity’ would work? Would it need to verify information from an external oracle? or do you think over time potentially Mina could also hold this key/information?

Many way of thinking that, the idea of an “external oracle” could be interesting as exposed in 10 Snapps Use Cases on Mina Protocol from Christopher Pryor with private ID. We could also leverage proof-of-personhood protocols (such as Idena which require a world wide synchronous Turing test, for instance). But obviously, we could imagine Snapps that would do the same, built directly on Mina.

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Yeah a proof of humanity style one would be awesome.

One possibility is the synchronous turing test could be bolstered with a proof of some other data, like social handles or phone number or private id to make it a higher barrier to entry to make a fake account or waste validators (juries I think in PoH world?) time on the platform

I could imagine us applying it to voting or discussions and stuff too in time, and probably a useful primitive in general for snapps as well

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A snapps connection to a crypto exchange would be v interesting!

There are lots of machine learning models that can be used to verify an identity. If these models could be used on-device (tinyML) then you could get a pretty good proof of something like your passport being valid without having to trust a 3rd party to hold or store your data. You could use the photo data to make sure it was unique. It wouldn’t be a fool-proof, proof of humanity, but it might be good enough for most purposes these days. You could also hash the photo and use it to prove uniqueness (to a degree). In general, I think there are alot of interesting use cases using on-device ML with snapps.

What about using snapps to give on the forum ranges based on tokens on our wallet?

No give wallet public id to the forum, neither the numbers of tokens, just a range (0, 1-50, 50-200, 200-500, 500-1000, 1000-3000, …)

Could be a nice example of snapps usage and also to enrich the forum.

I’d like to find an usage on smartphones and/or iot but no luck yet on ideas.

What do you mean?
Connect to Binance, FTX?
For what?

There are certainly some applications in provenance sector. Ex : to prove a diamond has not originated from a country which has conflict (see blood diamonds). I’ve worked on such a system before and one of the big issues was customers not wanting to share data across other competitors. I feel zk based solution like mina would be worth a shot.

I think ideas related to Personal Data processing (Decentralized Identities) would benefit from ZK privacy a lot.
Examples:

  • Proving that you are a real person (not a robot or a program) without revealing any personal data.
  • Proving that your gitub, facebook and twitter accounts are all created more than 3 years back and they are all have the same email, without revealing what is your email or what is your account links.
  • Proving that you are not a USA citizen without telling your citizenship :slight_smile:

Thanks for the comments Muhammad, I think your use case one is especially good. How do you see 2 and 3 being of benefit to someone in a real life situation? Would be really interested to hear some examples…

For the second example, it would be beneficial for some airdrops, for example, to know that this person is most likely a real person and not a newly created bot.
For the third example, usually, USA citizens are banned from any ICO participation because of the USA law. This is part of the KYC done for ICO participation or even some centralized exchange usage.

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I think it would be interesting to create a lending protocol, whereby users could prove they have a certain amount of $ or $ worth of assets to act as collateral for a loan but without having to actually put up that asset or $ as collateral. Essentially using snapps to enable uncollateralized lending. But I’m unsure exactly how this would work.

I am not sure if this could work (but then i do not have a background in finance). Without putting down a collateral , why would any one repay the loan? It is basically free money to anons.

At the same time , i am very ambivalent of pulling real world data to prove if you are eligible for a defi loan. It took a long time to remove trad-fi guard rails , introducing them back regardless of tech is taking a step back in progressive evolution of DeFi.

I think this has been discussed before and there would be some mechanism within the Snapp where if the loan wasn’t repaid in accordance with the terms then the loanees identify would become available to the loaner.

Today if Bob do a Bank transfer to Alice, Alice will not able to know how many dollars Bob has on his bank account, but If Bob do a transaction in crypto : Wallet Bob → Wallet Alice, Alice will be able to see how many token there is in the Bob’s wallet looking at his address in the blockchain…

Maybe there is something to do in the mina protocol to avoid this situation, to avoid Alice to know how many token Bob has ? (I don’t know if this question has to be post on this topic :)… )

Yes, I think this is something that could definitely be developed. One of the ideas today in the workshop was for ZKpass which could achieve this result.

Have a look here

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This is a jurisdictional nightmare in case some one in australia loans out money to some one in america , would there be a legal recourse?

This system certainly holds merits for microloans.

Thanks for the comments, tbh It’s not my area of expertise so I don’t know how this works in practice. I do know that there is a lot of de-fi lending going on currently, so maybe the eligibility for the loan would based on the particularly country you are in?