ETHCape Town and the NuCypher + ETHGlobal 2019 Hackathon Tour

The Ethereum Community exists in a variety of formations and groups. Online forums and chats are awesome to stay up to date and offer opinions however the in person gatherings and hackathons is where we've seen special magic come out. From our own experience with experimenting with different community events, the leading IRL Ethereum community is organized and maintained by ETHGlobal.

We first attended ETHWaterloo as a spectator, and the energy over the weekend made it clear we needed to get more involved. Last year’s ETHDenver 2018 was our first ETHGlobal event as a sponsor. This was followed by ETHIndia, ETHBerlin, ETHSan Francisco, and ETHSingapore, so we’re clearly smitten. We think hackathons are one of the best demonstrations of the quality and strength of our Ethereum community, which is why we’re always excited to sponsor (and sometimes participate).

What’s on deck for 2019?

NuCypher and ETHGlobal are partnering for seven events in 2019.

ETHDenver and ETHParis are complete and set the bar way up high (read about it here). We have 5 more events lined up with ETHCape Town happening this weekend! ETHGlobal has awesome help from Linum Labs in preparing for this upcoming event and we couldn't be more thankful for the work and had effort Linum Labs has put in. Don't take our word for it, check the entire preparation guide which has made ETHCape Town a super welcoming and organized event. Without these local partners, creating a truly global reach would be hard to achieve.

With the launch of our public testnet and (soon) mainnet, the timing couldn't be better for the NuCypher Hackathon Tour of 2019. At NuCypher, our favorite way to engage with the community is through hackathons. Seeing participants build creative and technically impressive projects gives us a sense of meaning and progress while providing us valuable feedback as we continue to #buidl NuCypher.

We envision a society in which every individual can assert their right to privacy. One which is fundamentally more free, robust, and equitable.

We believe that unconditional privacy is a fundamental human right, and NuCypher was founded to empower individuals to assert that right in the digital age.

We build the tools and infrastructure to protect this right by combining new advances in cryptography with decentralization.

If this is something you align with — then come join us on a journey of building the decentralized privacy apps and projects of today.

Suggestions for building DApps with NuCypher:

Here are some ideas we’d like to see built on top of NuCypher. But don’t limit yourselves to this list: we’d love to see what you come up with on your own!

• Games — Encrypted NFT, think sealed deck tournaments
• Decentralized, encrypted Dropbox
• Encrypted Social media DApp “Encrypted SnapChat”
• Enterprise mobile device management
• Proxy re-encryption dead man’s switch
• Decentralized password manager
• Decentralized “Spotify” music/audio streaming

Suggestions for building tooling for NuCypher:

• Browser extensions / MetaMask integrations
• Active Directory (AD/LDAP) integration
• Integration with other decentralized projects (e.g. Livepeer, IPFS, Swarm, Arweave, etc.)

Getting Started

In preparation, we’ve got a lot of great tools queued up for you on our GitHub at nucypher.dev:

hackathon — your home base and the best place to start. Logistical information, and URLs to these and other resources

Documentation — our documentation portal for NuCypher. Check here for installation instructions, code examples, and more.

nucypher — our keystone project, a layer 2 access control network that lets you manage private data in your DApp.

pyUmbral — the reference implementation of our threshold, proxy re-encryption scheme that powers the NuCypher network. It’s a low-level cryptographic library that’s great for prototyping stuff.

NuFHE — starting to get more futuristic, NuFHE is our GPU-accelerated fully homomorphic encryption library that lets you compute on encrypted data. We use it to #buidl fully homomorphic smart contracts and other cool proof of concepts.

You can also check out Justin Myles Holmes recent demo at ETHDenver to get a sense for the NuCypher network and our ethos as a project:

Previous Hacks

Here are some previous projects built with NuCypher we’ve seen from ETHGlobal events from 2018/19.

ETHDenver 2018/2019
CypherPress: A framework that lets you easily build decentralized databases. It provides a simple way to spin up and configure a white-labelled permissions UI. Since NuCypher is a developer tool, it requires some technical wrangling to understand/use and CypherPress is a promising attempt at making NuCypher easier and more accessible (think WordPress).

NuVault: A VueJS frontend that allows users to encrypt secrets they can share with other agents, without decrypting or exposing either parties’ private secret keys. Encrypted data views are stored in IPFS for later decrypted consumption.

Trustless.Health: A decentralized and transparent platform for machine analysis of medical data. They leveraged the NuFHE library to analyze encrypted DNA sequences without compromising user privacy.

Their technical achievement was massively impressive — the team built, a WebAssembly interpreter with support for fully homomorphic encryption. In the rust-example directory, they show how a DNA analysis model written in Rust is compiled to WASM and then executed on encrypted input data using fhe-wasm!

ETHSan Francisco 2018
Keep your privacy with you: Allows arbitrary EC arithmetic to be used on mobile devices with good speed and without a mess of C/C++ integrations.

py-fhe-evm: An experiment integrating the NuCypher FHE library as a type of EVM into the Py-EVM code base

ETHIndia 2018
Whistle: A dApp that empowers individuals and whistleblowers who live under the constant fear of death, to utilize the decentralized blockchain and store encrypted data using a unique combination of heartbeat transactions and the NuCypher network. This automates decryption of the data upon the death of the individual, acting as a dead man’s switch.

ETHBerlin 2018
Sputnik: Sputnik is an assembly language and interpreter for Fully Homomorphic Encryption. It was used to execute the first ever fully homomorphic smart contract at ETHBerlin on September 9, 2018.

In Closing:

We're looking forward to seeing familiar faces and meeting new community members through our 2019 tour. We suggest you checkout out nucypher.dev/hackathon and join our Discord server where our team works. If you can't find us at the events then use the Discord as the main forum for questions and to communicate directly with the NuCypher team. See you on tour!