Registrations now own open for BSV Zero-Knowledge Hackathon

BSV Blockchcain Association, in partnership with sCrypt, is pleased to announce that applications are now open for the BSV Zero-Knowledge Hackathon.

Round 1 of the hackathon will run from October 26 to November 25 and is aimed at encouraging developers to build new applications using zero-knowledge key-statement proofs (ZKPs) while growing the BSV community.

When we think of Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer capabilities and properties it is most commonly associated with payments. However, Bitcoin also has powerful data integrity features, which enable anyone to verify and certify data, and the actions performed upon it.

A zero-knowledge proof lets one party (a prover) who claims to know a secret, convince another party (a verifier) that the claim is valid, whilst not revealing the secret.

Because of the hiding nature of ZKP, it can be used in many cases where privacy is desirable. More importantly, it can also be used as a building block to construct more sophisticated protocols.

Who is the hackathon open to?

The hackathon is open to all developers over the legal age of majority in all regions, excluding standard exceptions. We invite people meeting the following criteria to consider signing up:

• Developers who are already coding on the BSV blockchain;
• Developers who are coding on a different blockchain;
• Non-blockchain developers who have a keen interest in BSV.

However, the hackathon is best suited for people looking to challenge themselves and use their skills towards a new application with the potential to grow and become a business case.

The winning developer will be selected by a list of all-star judges, including:

• Dr Craig S. Wright – Chief Scientist, nChain & Founder of SVPool;
• Dr Jack Rogers – Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of Exeter;
• Jens Groth – Director of Research at DFINITY Honorary Professor at Department of Computer Science at UCL;
• Jad Wahab – Director of Engineering at BSV Blockchain Association;
• Xiaohui Liu – sCrypt Inc Founder and CEO.

You can find out more about registering and the full list of rules for the BSV Zero-Knowledge Hackathon here.

Why Zero-Knowledge Proof?

Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) is a powerful and foundational cryptographic technique in the blockchain space, due to its potential to address both privacy and scalability.

However, its esoteric nature, rooted in abstract and advanced maths, places a high barrier to entry for many developers, who are reluctant to learn it despite their interest.

To encourage the adoption of the ZKP, sCrypt recently launched zkBattleship, the world’s first and only interactive ZKP tutorial, aimed at developers who want to learn how to use it without diving into maths-heavy theory. It walks a user through the full process of building the classic guessing game Battleship on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Starting with no prior ZKP knowledge, a user can build a fully-fledged decentralised web game after completion of the tutorial, powered by zk-SNARKs. Afterwards, they can go on and apply the techniques learned to build all kinds of ZKP applications.

The hackathon is being sponsored by sCrypt – a high-level smart contract language for BSV. The BSV blockchain supports smart contracts with its Forth-like stack-based Script language, but writing smart contracts in native Script is cumbersome and error-prone. sCrypt aims to address this and is designed to facilitate writing complex smart contracts running on-chain.