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:
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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