ZeroTrace

Problem

Public-goods funding rounds were vulnerable to identity exposure, whale-dominated outcomes, and low confidence in vote integrity. Existing systems lacked both privacy guarantees and credible anti-sybil controls.

Why it matters

Without privacy and fairness guarantees, funding platforms lose legitimacy and community participation. Solving this creates a stronger civic funding primitive for open ecosystems.

Approach

We designed the product around anonymous participation first, then layered quadratic funding mechanics and identity-bound sybil resistance as protocol constraints rather than optional features.

Architecture

Smart contracts handled allocation logic, proof verifiers validated anonymous vote commitments, and decentralized storage preserved proposal metadata. The frontend orchestrated proof generation, wallet flows, and round transparency dashboards.

System flow

Identity Attestation -> Anonymous Vote Commit -> Proof Verification -> Quadratic Matching -> On-chain Payout

Tradeoffs

Privacy and proof verification introduced additional user complexity and compute overhead. We accepted this to guarantee stronger fairness properties and reduce manipulation risk at scale.

Learnings

Trust in funding systems is an architectural outcome, not a marketing claim. Incentive design, cryptographic guarantees, and UX clarity must be engineered together.