zkDAO - providing training & basic income for ZK developers

Governance DAO Proposals
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Proposal Overview

We propose to establish zkDAO, in order to support the longevity and expansion of zku.one (ZKU), which started in Dec 2021 as an informal study group for training web3 developers to build market-ready products using zero-knowledge proof technology (ZK). ZKU is not a legal entity. It charges no tuition fees and provides no binding, paid services. Instead, we have developed a learn-to-earn model by which students are incentivized with cash prizes to complete assignments on time, and to help each other learn. As of Feb 2021 we have successfully completed our first pilot cohort, with 9 ZK-products already launched by our students on mainnet or testnet (Final Projects by ZKU Genesis Graduates).

Here we seek funds to kickstart the DAO, to provide salary support for teaching assistants (TAs), and for building an organizational structure that can sustain the activities of ZKU in the long run; ZKU has the vision to eventually on-board as many as 10,000 developers to the ZK space. By 2024 we aim to launch 1,000 ZK-products on mainnet.

The immediate contributions of the DAO to the Harmony ecosystem are to increase the level of expertise in ZK within the community, to bring in talented developers, and importantly - to deliver timely zk-products through students’ final projects in ZKU.

Our longer-term vision is for the DAO to become financially independent by 2025. The growth of the DAO’s treasury will benefit from an investment plan that is informed by DAO members, who will have considerable expertise about ZK products and market trends. By delivering timely zk-products, DAO members will attract funds from Harmony’s Grant programs, and through fixed-income protocols we will in turn generate recurrent basic income for our members. This will at once showcase Harmony’s general commitment to the development of decentralized basic income (DBI) protocols, while also ensuring that our DAO members are engaged, and are incentivized to oversee the financial health of the DAO. Finally, we will promote ZKU and the DAO actively to the industry and beyond. We will accept external donations, as the successful training of developers from around the world, and onboarding them to the web3 and ZK space, should be considered a public good.

Mandates

  1. Education - The primary goal of zkDAO is to provide financial support to ZKU, to incentivize students to learn, and to pay salaries for the TAs. Members of the DAO will be former graduates from ZKU (see point 6 below, Deliverables), who will also contribute to providing advisory for the development of the teaching curriculum.

  2. Engagement - ZKU engages industry experts and researchers through the learning process, and in turn, we provide advisory and support for graduating students to launch their careers in the industry. As such, zkDAO can help by maintaining relationships with both Harmony.ONE as well as other potential employers within the ZK space. The DAO should showcase the scholarship and expertise within its community, to make it an attractive venue for knowledge exchange, recruitment, and different forms of voluntary financial contributions.

  3. Endowment - Although ZKU is not formally a university, to make a lasting impact we need to assure teaching staff of the financial longevity of zku.one, so that they can pursue teaching and product development at ZKU as a long term career aspiration, rather than a fleeting opportunity. All good universities need to raise funds, and to manage their own treasury. As we will explain in points 7 and 8 below (Deliverables), we will set up economic structures so that members of the DAO will have a stake in overseeing the healthy growth of our treasury. This will help the DAO to eventually become financially independent, by 2025.

‘Tweet-able’ version:
Education - support ZKU activities
Engagement - exchange ideas with industry experts
Endowment - grow our treasury through active investment within the ZK space

Deliverables

In the coming 3 months, we aim to provide support for ZKU, in order to:

  1. Onboard 150 new developers to the ZK space. Because each cohort takes about 2 months to graduate, by the end of the 3 month period we will only have 1 cohort graduated with their final product launches, with another cohort started but not yet finished by the end of the 3-month period.

  2. Launch 35 ZK-products by the end of the 3-month period, and hopefully over another 100 to be launched from the next cohort, during the next cycle.

  3. Support 50 graduates, TAs, and DAO staff to travel to conferences and to meet with industry experts.

  4. Recruit 5 new TAs (currently we have 7), likely from the next graduating cohort.

  5. Begin accepting external financial donations, via e.g. giveth.io

  6. Grow DAO membership to 40. This may sound modest but zkDAO needs to be selective in accepting members, because the DAO functions like a board of trustees & faculty advisory for ZKU. Besides the founding governors, all full members will be past graduates who have distinguished themselves by successfully meeting the milestones of a launch grant, with their own zk-product. In doing so, their launched project will attract funding from the Harmony Foundation’s Grants program, to be paid to our treasury. This allows us to implement a key feature of zkDAO, which we’ll discuss next (point 7).

  7. Provide decentralized basic income (DBI) for entitled full members (i.e. members who launched zk-products that met the milestones of a Harmony Launch Grant). With support from the Harmony Foundation’s Grants program for each launched zk-product, we’ll inject endowment into our treasury to allow $15,000/year to be paid out in a sustainable, recurrent manner, to each recipient. This DBI will be payable so long as the recipient remains an active voting member of the DAO. Students who launch multiple successful projects will also attract, linearly, higher levels of basic income. So, for example, with 10 successful launches of different ZK-products, possibly achieved over a period of several years, it can lead to a total stable income of $150,000/year, comparable to the salary level of a tenured professor at a top-tier research university in the United States.

  8. Develop an investment plan to focus on projects within the ZK space. Because of our obligation to DBI, much of our treasury should rely on low-risk fixed-income protocols, such as anchorprotocol.com. However, for both engagement purposes and for the longer-term growth of the DAO, we will set aside a small part of our treasury for more active investment - the proportion will be determined in order to always conservatively set our DBI obligations as primary. For the investment plan we will take input from all DAO members, which will in turn incentivize them to engage and participate more in industry activities (e.g. conferences, discussion of market-product trends). Should the treasury grow beyond a certain level, the DAO can elect to pay dividends to the active full members, and/or to engage in new activities consistent with our mandates.

  9. Begin inviting experts to give seminars at zkDAO. This will be different from normal teaching or lectures at ZKU, where students are still learning the basics of ZK. We expect some industry experts will find it more stimulating to discuss their latest work with a highly selected group of developers who are already active in the zk space. These would be similar to graduate seminars at a university setting. We will develop mechanisms for DAO members to vote to choose the industry experts or researchers with whom they would most like to interact. The recorded sessions can then be used for regular ZKU teaching purposes.

Budget (Proposal Ask)

For the coming 3-month period, we request $1,000,000 for the following items:

  1. Studying incentives, $500,000 - Currently at ZKU we plan to pay students who successfully finish all assignments on time up to $5,000 for the entire course, over a 2-month period. Based on the pilot cohort, we feel that this is a feasible and effective way to retain the best students, at up to about up to over $1,000 per outstanding assignment, and for students who go out of their way to help others solve challenging problems. For normal, on time completion, this would be at $500 per assignment. Importantly, this prize money would only be payable for students who complete nearly all assignments and the final project on time, which facilitates the retainment process. So, for 100 students (first cohort within the 3-month period), this adds up to $500,000.

  2. Partial salary for TAs, $96,000 - At the recommended rate of at least $75/hour, at 20 hours/week, each TA costs about $8,000/month when taken into account potential bonuses. Because the current cohort has just started, we hope to continue to pay the current (7) TAs as contributors at Harmony. However, for ZKU to eventually become an independent entity, we will eventual start paying all TAs (12) through the DAO during the 3rd month of the current cycle, as the next cohort starts. This will lead to $8,000 x 12 TAs = $96,000.

  3. Salary for administrative staff, $72,000. At the recommended rate of at least $75/hour, at 20 hours/week, each staff member costs about $8,000/month when taken into account potential bonuses. For 3 months, this adds up to $8,000 x 3 staff members x 3 months = $72,000.

  4. Funds for auditing selected students’ project launches, $150,000. To allow outstanding students to meet the milestones for a launch grant, often their codes need to meet auditing requirements. This is especially so in the context of ZK, if their ZK-circuits require the setup of a unique trusted ceremony; if the circuit turns out to contain bugs the entire ceremony needs to be redone. Audits are expensive, at about $10,000 on the cheaper side. To allow at least 15 out of the 50 projects to benefit, we request a budget of $150,000.

  5. Travel and meeting expenses, $75,000. We plan to fund scholars for a minimum of $1,000 each. For international travelers, we may need to add further supplements. Also, we need to budget for group gatherings and dinners, at an additional 50%. So in total, we request: (50 scholars x $1,000) X (1+50%) = $75,000.

  6. Endowment ‘bootstrap’ funds for treasury development, $107,000. To allow item 7 above (Deliverables) to be a meaningful exercise, we wish to allocate some funds to set up an initial investment portfolio. Eventually this should be sustainable via capital gains and external donations.

So, in total, $500k+ $96k + $72k + $150k + $75k + $107k = $1M.

We understand that we are requesting a relatively large budget. To grow at the current rate (1,000 developers by 2024) in this highly competitive space, the funding support for student incentives and TA support is necessary. However, some of the funds and activities will also go towards making the DAO financially independent by 2025, by growing our own treasury through investments (see point 8 in Deliverables) and by accepting external donations. Importantly, we will set out strict criteria for the continued funding of the DAO, as we will describe next.

Metrics for Success

To a large extent, the above 9 Deliverables serve as metrics for success for the short term. However, one critical and recurrent milestone is that with every 1M DAO funding, we aim to train enough developers with final products launched that will attract 10M in grants from the Harmony Grants Program, which has independent metrics for success. This roughly corresponds to training 100 developers who will meet all the milestones of a launch grant, per 1M invested into the DAO. Or, in other words, we request a 10% operational cost (1M DAO funding) for generating zk-products that are worth 10M of grant money. This will be the guiding principle for the longer-term financial planning of the DAO.

Personnel

The proposed governance team will consist of mainly current TAs (5) who we consider to be the biggest stake-holders of ZKU. In addition, the instigator/main organizer of ZKU (Lau) will also join as an unpaid member (i.e. at zero salary from the DAO), together with another 2-3 paid administrative staff who will oversee the administrative operations of the DAO. Overall, the team reflects a geographically diverse background, based in 5 different continents. This reflects the needs for coordinating for the global demands of the student body of ZKU.

  1. Hakwan Lau, D.Phil has over 14 years of experience in tertiary education. He was formerly a tenured full professor at UCLA, and prior to that, an associate professor at Columbia University in the City of New York. His graduate training was conducted at Oxford University, funded by a Rhodes Scholarship. He has published over 100 academic papers, as well as a book on the neuroscience of consciousness. He oversees and advises on the operation of ZKU. He has also written an academic paper on DBI - [2107.14312] Decentralized Basic Income: Creating Wealth with On-Chain Staking and Fixed-Rate Protocols

  2. Cathie So, Ph.D. is a neuroscientist and a physicist by training, but has been working as a data scientist for multiple Fintech and EdTech Startups in the past five years. She is a public speaker and instructor on the topics of machine learning, blockchain, and web3 development in Hong Kong. She will contribute to the DAO with her expertise in learner engagement and management, as well as zk-product launches. She is also currently a TA at ZKU.

  3. Semar Augusto is a software engineer and current TA at ZKU. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.

  4. Aleksandar Hadžibabić is a master’s degree student and TA at the Faculty of Technical Sciences at Novi Sad, Serbia. Web3 enthusiast and Zero-Knowledge researcher and developer. He is also currently a TA at ZKU.

  5. Kousik Rajesh is a final year bachelor’s degree student in Computer Science at Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati from India. He is a cryptography and zero-knowledge enthusiast keen on pursuing a Master’s degree in the same. He is currently a TA at ZKU.

  6. Tosin Shada is a software engineer at a leading bank in Africa and currently a TA at ZKU with expertise and interest in Web3, Zero Knowledge and Blockchain technologies. He is also very interested in launching ZK focused products.

  7. Brian Felsen helped launch the Blu3DAO at Harmony, establishing its infrastructure with a focus on fair governance and participation, as well as minting the DAO’s social tokens and premier NFT collection. His previous industry experiences include serving as President of CD Baby, the world’s largest online distributor of independent music; helming AdRev, the leading YouTube music administration service and Content ID Network Partner; founding the book distributor BookBaby; and running a web2 performance marketing agency.

  8. Kayuet Liu, D.Phil is currently a tenured associate professor at UCLA. She studies social networks, and has previously worked with Harmony on research about data marketplace and privacy. She will contribute to the DAO with her expertise in university-level administration and funding management. (Potential COI declaration: Hakwan Lau and Kayuet Liu are in a domestic relationship.)

  9. James Fang will represent KuCoin Ventures in zkDAO governance. KuCoin Ventures will provide grants and investment funding to selected ZKU projects, whenever terms are mutually agreeable. KuCoin Ventures has agreed to set up a 2 million ZK Co-Investment Funds for the projects coming out of zkDao. They will also help to co-market ZKU in the Chinese developer community in order to promote zkDAO and ZKU.

We will also invite several non-governing advisors to help with investment and financial planning.

External Links

On-boarding 10,000 Developers for ZK Products: https://www.notion.so/harmonyone/On-boarding-10-000-Developers-for-ZK-Products-9eeb5f83a097499289ca5e9fd113f2f5

Zero-Knowledge University main page: zku.one

Discord: zku.ONE (over 300 members, including over 100 verified students who completed the Background Assignment, as of Mar 3 2022)

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strong yes from me. zk is the direction for all blockchains and we should make a strong push to build the zk ecosystem using this grassroots approach. bring more zk builders and let 1,000 zk flowers bloom.

“On a long-enough timeline, all crypto will converge to zero-knowledge crypto.”

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This is a great proposal and initiative! Well planned for onboarding and retention. This will ensure we have the talent in the future to build.

I fully support this proposal and Hope to be part of the next cohort.

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we have set up our multisig - 0x7944ceFf43A8A222BD53675326439b850C923488

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@hakwan thank you for this excellent proposal. We are extremely excited about zkDAO and would like to go ahead and approve this proposal. Congrats!

Please feel free to use this page to post updates about your progress and we look forward to supporting zkDAO. :tada:

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zkDAO is one of harmony’s core initiative DAOs and it has now been funded: Harmony Blockchain Explorer

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Our DAO Constitution:

  1. This is the Constitution establishing the governance of zkDAO. Changes to this Constitution shall require approval by the membership body at large, where each individual member’s voting power will be weighted by their annual Decentralized Basic Income [DBI] amount.

  2. Membership of zkDAO is by design exclusive. This is in part because zkDAO provides funding support for zku.one (ZKU), as such the members together play an important role in facilitating the pedagogical duties of ZKU. Full members will be grantees who have launched a product involving the application of zero-knowledge proof technology (zk-product), with their grant proposal accepted by zkDAO (About the zkDAO category - #3 by hakwan). As such, we expect many to be previous ZKU graduates, where their final project may qualify them for the grant. These grants will allow them to receive DBI through the treasury of zkDAO, and accordingly, voting power.

  3. Acceptance of a zkDAO launch grant proposal, and thereby induction to the DAO, requires positive votes by 5 current governors posted publicly in the Harmony Forum. The governors must evaluate these in a timely manner, e.g. to respond to proposals approximately within a week.

  4. The same person, under the same online identity, can be awarded multiple grants, and thereby achieve a total DBI amount multiple times higher than some other member’s. However, the same person cannot apply for grants using different online identities. Should a single DAO member be found to have multiple membership accounts, all accounts concerned will be terminated and the person will be banned from the DAO.

  5. As per the rules of grant funding, some grantees described above in (2) may elect to receive a one-time payment instead of DBI. These grantees will be given non-voting memberships to zkDAO, also known as half membership. They can participate in zkDAO discussions, and access internal information available to other full voting members. But because of their lack of DBI, they will accordingly have zero voting power.

  6. Other half members include past governors of the DAO, as well as people deemed by the current board of governance (in a 6 out of 9 vote) as important contributors to the DAO, such as playing the role of financial advisory. Termination of an individual’s half membership requires a majority vote by the membership body at large. Full membership associated with DBI cannot be terminated or suspended unless otherwise stated within this constitution document (e.g. sections 4, 18, & 19).

  7. The founding governors of the DAO are listed in the zkDAO proposal posted on Mar 1, 2022 (zkDAO - providing training & basic income for ZK developers).

  8. To prioritize our pedagogical duties at ZKU, a minimum of 5 out of the 9 governors shall currently be teaching at ZKU at any given time.

  9. The remaining governance positions shall consist of two paid governors and two unpaid governors.

  10. One of the two unpaid governors is currently the Director of ZKU, who oversees the running of ZKU. Should this position be changed into a paid governor position, this change would require approval by the membership body at large per Section 1.

  11. The paid governors, like the teaching governors, shall be paid at the rate of $75 per hour for 20 hours per week. Should a payee feel that her/his work does not add up to 20 hours for a particular week, one should claim for fewer hours than stipulated by the maximum cap. All time sheets and weekly reports should be posted in public.

  12. Potential bonuses for the two paid non-teaching governor positions should be determined by the rest of the governance board (7 members), on a weekly basis. As in bonuses for ZKU, these are occasional (i.e. not given by default), should normally be within the range of 0% -25%, up to 50% under exceptional circumstances. Potential bonuses for the teaching staff and teaching governors are to be determined by the Director of ZKU.

  13. To allow for logistical continuity, governor positions shall not be re-elected de novo every funding period (2-3 months). Instead:

– 1. Governors will vote in a secret ballot on each other. To stay, a governor must receive support from the 6 out of 9 governors, including the vote from oneself. If a governor receives less than 6 votes, they will be “voted out,” and the seat will be up for open election by the membership at large. The remaining board can express a non-binding endorsement of individual candidates.

– 2. The team of governors elected internally to stay will have to seek an approval vote, as a team, from the entire membership body. Should the majority of the members (weighted by their DBI amount) vote to disband the current governance board, a general election will take place. Individuals will compete for the different positions, while maintaining the overall structure of the governance teams: 5 teaching staff, 2 paid admin staff, and 2 unpaid admin staff (including the ZKU director).

  1. Non-governing teaching staff members are currently paid at 10 hours per week (maximum), at the hourly rate of $75 per hour. The number of total teaching staff, as well as their maximum payment cap, is to be determined by the board of governance, based on a simple-majority approval vote on the ZKU Director’s proposal. The decision must be made such that our operational costs are sustainable, while maintaining our pedagogical duties.

  2. Besides the primary mandate of funding ZKU activities, zkDAO also allocates a budget for activities to support the engagement within the ZK industry. Another important duty is to maintain the treasury for the continued long-term support of DBI to zkDAO members. Unless otherwise specified within this document (e.g. section 16), all relevant financial decisions require 6 out of 9 signatures from the governors, and the decisions shall be made to support the longevity of maintaining these 3 goals: education (ZKU), engagement (with the ZK industry and relevant researchers), endowment (to maintain the treasury such that DBI can be sustainable for the longest term possible).

  3. For the purpose of logistical efficiency, governors, in a 6 out of 9 vote, may elect to delegate an account which can access a limited amount of funds from the safe, for a specific time limit, without having to collect all signatures for the execution. The primary purpose of this clause is to allow for efficient disposal of ‘petty cash’, e.g. for the purpose of executing ZKU related payments of prizes to students. An investment account will also be created under this mechanism, to allow decisions to be made relatively quickly by a subset of the governors who will oversee the account. These accounts shall be small, relative to the funds reserved for DBI (see section 17).

  4. Without an explicit approval vote by the membership at large, the governance board must under no circumstances allow for the principal funds for DBI (attracted through project launch grants described in [2] and [3]) be deployed for any purpose other than paying DBI to full members, or for generating passive income (e.g. low risk, fixed-rate interest) to grow the treasury for DBI.

  5. Barring exceptional circumstances, such as financial emergencies, voting events shall not be held more frequently than once per week and the duration for each event shouldn’t be more than 72 hours. The governance board shall, where feasible, hold voting for different proposals at the same time within that week.

  6. Voting is mandatory for all members who are entitled to DBI. Failure to vote in 2 out of the past 5 events will lead to suspension of DBI for up to a month, unless there are documented health emergencies (the authenticity of which will be decided by a simple majority vote by the governance team). Failure to vote in 4 or more or the past 5 events will lead to indefinite suspension of DBI until the voting record of the member improves.

  7. DBI and voting power are neither transferable nor inheritable. If a member passes away, membership ends. This is to respect the principle behind section 2.

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Hey ZK DAO, I’m on the Harmony DAO Operations team and my role is DAO relations. I’ve set up the 1DAO Alliance Discord where all DAO communications will be conducted. Meeting announcements, DAO tooling, etc. Please have your DAO members join this Discord and upon joining comment in the general chat subchannel describing what DAO you are from. Thanks!

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Proposal Overview

Thanks to previously approved funding, zkDAO has been operating as a Harmony core initiative, primarily to support activities at zku.ONE for onboarding experienced web3 developers to build their first zk product (i.e. an application utilizing zero-knowledge proof technology). As our first quarter is coming to an end, we hereby report progress, and request funding for Q3 2022 in order to continue our activities.

As per the Harmony roadmap for 2026, ZK is a central focus for the technical developments for our ecosystem. Besides training zk developers, zkDAO also organizes activities and incentive structures to retain the loyal contributions of active zk experts coming out from our training programme.

Through the last funding period, one of our governors has joined Harmony as a core team member (Brian Felsen), and another two has joined as Fellows (Cathie So and Semar Augusto) to build core zk infrastructure for Harmony. Moving forward we hope to be able to continue to serve as a channel for bringing talent to support the Harmony ecosystem, and to help incubate projects related to ZK.

Mandates

Our mandate has remained unchanged.

Education - support zku.ONE developer training activities

Engagement - exchange ideas with industry experts

Endowment - grow our own treasury for long term financial self-sustenance, and for retaining talents

Deliverables

Although recent market conditions have led to considerable setbacks to our various activities, by and large we have met our promised deliverables. Specifically, our students have already completed 36 final projects (each representing a usable zk product on testnet), exceeding the original target. Of these projects, 14 of them are already approved for a zk launch grant. We expect this number will double (2x) as the current cohort of students graduate by the end of June.

In total, we have so far attracted over 700 students, who completed over 900 assignments (developed and graded by our teaching staff).

Going into Q3 2022, we aim to deliver at least another 50 final projects. Following our roadmap, we aim to bring our DAO membership to close to 100, where each full voting member would be a zkDAO launch grant awardee.

Budget (Proposal Ask)

Given current market conditions, we propose to volunteer to scale back our budget by 35%. For the last quarter we have received $1M for our operations. We hereby propose to request $650k for Q3 2022.

The budget breaks down into 3 major categories:

  • Staff cost ($100k x 3 months): zku is supported by 12 teaching staff, and zkDAO also requires administrative support. In Q3 we will also begin to setup coordinape-powered mechanisms for DAO members to continue to mentorship and other industry engagement activities on a spontaneous basis, to be rewarded post hoc through peer recommendations.
  • Student incentives ($200k): zku operates by a learn2earn model, where successful students are rewarded for their outstanding contribution. Over time, we have reduced the size of these incentives. But to maintain interest, we will continue to pay up to $3k per successful graduate.
  • Misc. operational costs ($150k): these are for supporting audits for final projects involving novel circuits ($100k to support 20 projects), as well as for supporting DAO members to travel to conferences in order to compete in hackathons ($30k to support about 20 person-attendances), and for promoting the course ($10k, with another $10 remaining for miscellaneous stationary costs).

Metrics for Success

Our proposed metric for success remains unchanged. We request a 10% operational cost (e.g. 1M DAO funding) for the launch grant money (e.g. 10M) attractable by the projects coming out of the relevant ZKU training activities. This has been the guiding principle for the long-term financial planning of zkDAO, as proposed in the initial setup.

Therefore, at $650k we expect to be able to train 65 students capable of finishing a launch-grant ready project. This will fall short of our ambitious goal of training 1,000 students by 2024. But as market conditions improve, we hope to be able to scale up again in the near future to catch up.

Personnel

Our personnel has so far remained unchanged since the launch of zkDAO in Mar 2022. Once this round of funding is approved, we will hold a general election to determine governance for Q3 2022.

External Links

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I think the work zkDAO is doing is incredibly important to bring web3 or even web2 developers onboard the ZK journey. ZK is gonna be the next big thing in crypto and at ZKU we aim to make it easy to learn for any devs.

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As a developer, I feel that zkDAO’s mission has great worth as zero-knowledge proof is not easy to learn technology alone. Zero-knowledge proof is receiving a lot of attraction from people who care about privacy and it is quite important for us to keep that momentum from our course.

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zkDAO was doing a good work in the last half year. From the first cohort in January 2022, zku course scaled at a strong pace. ZkDAO consists of hard working and ambitious people from web3 space, which aim to improve the zkp technology and the whole industry. Besides TAs who are trying to point students to the right direction, other non-teaching dao members are putting in hard work in course promotion and administrative tasks. We got many positive feedbacks from students, and this is indeed unique learn-to-earn opportunity in the web3. I think we should continue with this great initiative, onboard more people and move the boundaries of zk together.

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As a TA at ZKU, I feel we have influenced a lot of developers by onboarding them onto the zk and harmony ecosystem. We have received a lot of positive feedback on our well planned and comprehensive course material that enabled students to quickly become proficient in the topic and zkDAO will continue with this initiative in the future.

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What I have noticed from speaking to folks at conferences such as ETHDenver, ETHAmsterdam and Consensus is that no other platform is offering such a unique opportunity for devs as zkDAO. Not only is the community that it is building technically strong, but it will become very sought after within the dev community, since the space is so socially experimental. I remember recently speaking to a chap who had spent 10 years living in a buddhist monastery, and now he is spending his time preparing to build enough skill to apply for zku.one. Just one (cool) example. Watch this space, IMO.

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zkDAO has established itself in the zk community as the fastest growing community of developers focused majorly on Zero-Knowledge technology. The syllabus has been fine-tuned based on the feedback of previous cohorts to ensure that graduates are well versed in zk and ready to contribute meaningfully to the Harmony Ecosystem. Being a member of the first cohort, I can attest personally to the level of growth I have achieved in such a short period of time and I’m very positive that this program will make Harmony the go-to ecosystem for zk-developers in the medium term.

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I think the course has done great in training devs on zero-knowledge, and in the process has found some amazing devs (some who have onboarded as mentors). I believe that having a strong tech community would eventually benefit Harmony as a whole, since Harmony’s focus is now on tech. Overall, a great initiative that is a win-win for all.

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You guys might want to change this from the proposal

Screenshot 2022-06-13 at 15.26.04

Is it also possibile to try/check some of the dapps created by your students?

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yeah that was the proposal from several months ago. the new proposal doesn’t mention anchor, of course, and within the DAO we have been devising other plans to be voted on soon, for low risk investments. our constitution is also being updated right now.

for students’ projects please see - Final Projects by ZKU Graduates 👩‍💻👨‍💻

thank you!

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I think zkDAO is a great option for developers to get into the zk space. The zku course is well-organized, and mentors are always willing to help.

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