Privacy in Moonbeam Event Series Wrap Up
Context: As a mission-driven validator, ZKV’s mandate is to push for the adoption of privacy preserving technologies, specifically those powered by Zero Knowledge Proofs. ZKV joined the Moonbeam Collator set in Q1 2022. As an early supporter of the network, ZKV spotted a great opportunity to attract developers interested in building privacy solutions leveraging Moonbeam’s smart contract platform and Polkadot’s XCM.
In summer 2022, ZKV submitted the first Treasury Proposal to the Moonbeam Treasury to fund an event series that would showcase how Moonbeam could serve as a smart contract hub for developers aiming to launch privacy apps, leveraging Moonbeam’s cross-chain capabilities. On June 17th, 2022, we received 45K GLMR (~USD17,100 at today’s prices) from the Moonbeam Treasury.
This funding, as per the proposal, were to be use to carry out the following:
- A Twitter Spaces as an introduction to the event series
- An online event with a live session showing a use case
- An IRL hackshop with the goal of attracting ~30 hackers to it.
- A compilation of documentation/videos for developers.
On April 1st , we wrapped up this proposal at ZK Hack Lisbon, where we hosted our IRL hackshop/workshop within this weekend hackathon event. In this post, we will go over the results in each of the events as a transparency exercise to the Moonbeam Treasury and the community.
Results
Spaces: On December 1st, the Twitter Spaces was hosted on the ZKValidator account and it was joined by Derek Yoo, founder of Moonbeam, Alberto Viera, head of developer relations for Moonbeam, Kenny Li, co-founder of Manta Network and Anna Rose, co-founder of ZKV and host of the Zero Knowledge Podcast. During 35 minutes, the participants covered several topics including updates from the Moonbeam Network, possible privacy use cases and it also served as an invitation for the audience to join the online event. It was listened to by 280 people.
Online Event: The online event was held on the 14th of December 2022 and consisted of a live session with Alberto Viera, from Moonbeam, and Georgi Zlatarev from Manta Network. During this session, the speakers explored a use case where, thanks to XCM, builders on Moonbeam Network could use Manta’s ZKPs layer to privatize assets. With these examples, users can:
- Perform private native token transfers
- Perform private ERC-20 token transfers
- Private Moonbeam on-chain governance, through a combination of private native token transfers and remote transacts through XCM
- Private funding of smart contracts through private transfers in Manta and sending back tokens to Moonbeam. This can be expanded to multiple interactions with Moonbeam’s EVM
The event lasted 1 hour and 46 minutes. A total of 126 people signed up and 58 people attended the event. A day after, it was uploaded to the Zero Knowledge Podcast Youtube channel, a leading media outlet for the Zero Knowledge community, where it got, as of today, 365 views.
IRL Event: For the IRL event, we proposed the Moonbeam team to carry out in conjunction with the ZK Hack Lisbon as a way to optimize the budget, given the fact that market conditions had considerably lowered the price of the tokens we received from the Moonbeam Treasury. As part of the sponsor package, Moonbeam got a booth, logo presence across the venue and a spot on the stage to present. Alberto Viera hosted a hour-long workshop which was attended by 30 of the hackers on site. The larger event had 129 Zero Knowledge hackers in attendance who also would have seen the Moonbeam rollups, picked up some of the swag or had a chance to chat with Alberto.
Financials
For transparency, we’re sharing a detailed expense breakdown of the funds (45K GLMR) awarded to us by the Moonbeam Treasury.
| Expense | Cost in € |
|---|---|
| Project Management and Planning | 7500 |
| Marketing | 4000 |
| Hosting and Moderation | 3650 |
| Tools (Hopin) | 100 |
| Content Distribution (Blog, Youtube, etc) | 1750 |
| Total | 17000 |
We also have a breakdown of the components as described in the proposal here
On March 16, 2023, we requested the Moonbeam Treasury $5,000 to cover 2 bounties during the ZK Hack. Due to lack of submissions, we returned the full amount on April 11th.
Conclusion
The whole event series brought 832 people in total to the Moonbeam brand who learned or are aware of the possibilities there are for them to build applications leveraging Moonbeam smart contracts and using XCM to add privacy to those applications.
Although the Moonbeam bounty did not received any final submissions during the ZK Hack Lisbon, there were some interest from the audience. The presentation got ~30 attendees (~23% of total attendees), there were several people asking questions and a team tried to submit but unfortunately ran into technical difficulties primarily due to an issue on the Manta side.
Resources