Ethereum as part of a broader technological vision In 2014, Gavin Wood introduced Ethereum as one of a suite of tools that can be built, the other two being Whisper (decentralized messaging) and Swarm (decentralized storage). The former was heavily emphasized, but with the turn toward financialization around 2017 the latter were unfortunately given much less love and attention. That said, Whisper continues to exist as Waku, and is being actively used by projects like the decentralized messenger Status. Swarm continues to be developed, and now we also have IPFS, which is used to host and serve this blog.

In the last couple of years, with the rise of decentralized social media (Lens, Farcaster, etc), we have an opportunity to revisit some of these tools. In addition, we also have another very powerful new tool to add to the trifecta: zero knowledge proofs. These technologies are most widely adopted as ways of improving Ethereum's scalability, as ZK rollups, but they are also very useful for privacy. In particular, the programmability of zero knowlege proofs means that we can get past the false binary of "anonymous but risky" vs "KYC'd therefore safe", and get privacy and many kinds of authentication and verification at the same time.

An example of this in 2023 was Zupass. Zupass is a zero-knowledge-proof-based system that was incubated at Zuzalu, which was used both for in-person authentication to events, and for online authentication to the polling system Zupoll, the Twitter-lookalike Zucast and others. The key feature of Zupass was this: you can prove that you are a resident of Zuzalu, without revealing which member of Zuzalu you are. Furthermore, each Zuzalu resident could only have one randomlygenerated cryptographic identity for each application instance (eg. a poll) that they were signing into. Zupass was highly successful, and was applied later in the year to do ticketing at Devconnect. A zero-knowledge proof proving that I, as an Ethereum Foundation employee, have access to the Devconnect coworking space.

The most practical use of Zupass so far has probably been the polling. All kinds of polls have been made, some on politically controversial or highly personal topics where people feel a strong need to preserve their privacy, using Zupass as an anonymous voting platform.