NFT with ZK proofs solving real world problems

General
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I’m co-founding a non-profit educational project that focusses on learning students between 15 and 19 years old about blockchain and the problems it can solve. It’s a solution to many problems the world faces today, problems like lack of banking access in developing countries, identity fraud, voting fraud, fraud with intellectual property, and data breaches. Currently there are no schools that educate about blockchain tech. We will do a pilot on an international school that gives scholarships to students from all over the world, which means they have very different backgrounds and life experiences and are also subjected to the problems described.

The students live on campus for 2 years. We think this is the perfect time and environment to teach them about all the great things blockchain technology can offer them. For this we will build a private blockchain which will have at least the following possibilities:

• A currency which can be earned, traded and can be used to buy real world items
• An NFT market place for trading artworks students make (amongst other things)
• A lending platform
• Governance possibilities
• A reward system for contributing to the project, i.e. implementing new code (lessons will be available for learning code)

At the end of the ZK session about NFT and DAO’s Anna asked everyone to think about how ZKP’s could be used in NFTs. Onee of the ideas I got from the ZK sessions about NFT and DAO’s was the following:
Create an NFT that connects to someone without revealing their true identity (if that is desired) and they can use it to prove that they have a certain skill (also maybe by reputation points for that skill). The NFT could be used for working anonymously on projects that want to acquire someone with those skills, when the work finishes they can get more reputation points (or less), depending on the quality of their work. ZKP’s might make this possible.

Ultimately this could also be a solution for eliminating discrimination in job applications. Unfortunately people still get discriminated on colour, names, and gender amongst other things. If you could use an NFT that works in the way described above this can be ruled out.

Anna asked me to post this here so there can be some discussion on the topic. So let’s get started!

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In your example, this would be like hiding the identity of someone but providing proof of a skill. My hunch is that this would work best for small easily quantifiable tasks, maybe like on something like fiverr. If you need proof of a degree, certificate or a certain amount of successful jobs completed - these I imagine could be clearly provable.

With more complex team work, experience on the job and interpersonal skills are also really important, and seem a bit harder to easily prove with a zkp!

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