ZK Email is a set of open source SDKs, libraries, and protocols (https://zk.email) that support making anonymous proofs of redacted existing emails on chain. It can be used for email based account recovery or login, proof of real world email receipts, one-click private soft KYC, and whistleblowing -- all of which have open source prototypes or production deployments now, without centralized attesters (see zk.email for links). Our code, roadmap, and ideas are fully open source at https://github.com/zkemail. This is useful for provenant proofs, by directly verifying SHA-RSA signatures from your emails within ZK.

We built a registry (https://registry.zk.email) of all of our templates and proofs for anyone to reuse in the future.

We finished auditing https://github.com/zkemail/ether-email-auth, which lets any developer specify how they want to parse emails in Solidity, and use that to build a new zk-email enabled app on-chain without writing any code.

We used this to build account recovery modules for wallets, which is live for Gnosis Safes at https://zk.email/recovery , which allows anyone to add an email address as a decentralized guardian for their wallets. We discussed this at ZK Summit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZTNzvLXB14 .

We also built 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. Finally, it lets anyone send any NFT directly to any email address.

We also built archive.zk.email, a public key archive of 1M+ DKIM public keys.

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, MPCs, trusted hardware, or attestations. 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.

Note that the primary developers on the project are funded by grants from Ethereum Foundation's Privacy and Scaling Explorations group, and initial development was funded by 0xPARC. Gitcoin 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, as these are not included in our primary grants. We spent a previous Gitcoin grant on infrastructure development for our relayer.

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: https://github.com/zkemail/zk-regex
• 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 created a set of blog posts (https://prove.email/blog), talks, and docs (https://prove.email/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.

We want to make useful ZK technology broadly accessible and easy to use.

Soft KYC is too difficult for people to do or too easy to fake. Nothing else can privately represent your 'history' well. Accounts get lost all the time in crypto, and we can help people recover those easily.

We built the research, scaffolding, and open source code needed to verify ZK Email proofs, as well as our registry, archive, OpenZeppelin standards, account recovery setup, and more to let anyone use our tech really easily.

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