ETHWaterloo2 Hackathon - Season Finale!

What a busy few months it's been for us at NuCypher. After a stretch in Europe for ETHBerlin, Web3 Summit, and Berlin Blockchain Week, we parted ways before quickly reuniting in Japan for Devcon5, Osaka! On the eve of our IRL team reunification we announced the NuCypher official public testnet release and showcased a roadmap to mainnet. Since then we've seen over 170 nodes spin up and so much activity in our support channels. If you haven't done so, jump in, spin up a node! It's good practice before our next release of incentivised testnet! Just as the jet lag seems to have worn off from Japan, we took on SF Blockchain week, including a variety of meetups and ZKSummit - SF Edition.
Whats Next?
November 1st - 11th NuCypher is participating in the GitCoin hackathon, Web3 World. We've put up a $3000.00 USD bounty, so if you're wanting to earn a little extra income and build something with NuCypher, here is the link to check out the bounties. Online support will be given through our Discord channel, #hackathons.
November 6th we'll be at Project Spaces Camden Street hosting a meetup before ETHWaterloo weekend. We'll be alongside Coda, AVA Labs, and Qtum. If you're attending ETHWaterloo, this is a great opportunity to learn from some awesome projects that will build your skills ahead of the weekend hackathon. You can sign up here.
November 8th - 10th we'll be sponsoring and attending ETHWaterloo2, taking place at The Centre for International Governance Innovation, 76 Erb St. W, Waterloo, Canada. The organizers, ETHGlobal, are expecting this to be one of the biggest Hackathons of the year. We'll be announcing our bounties during the opening ceremonies so make sure to attend. We'll award based on most novel use case of NuCypher and best technical implementation. If you need help/suggestions, find us at our table or join our Discord for support. It's not too late to sign up to hack. Go here.
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:
- Active Directory (AD/LDAP) integration
- Integration with other decentralized projects (e.g. Livepeer, IPFS, Swarm, Arweave, etc.)
Getting Started
Resources
Proxy Re-encryption
Our development guide to start building with NuCypher: https://docs.nucypher.com
NuCypher Network - the proxy re-encryption network itself: https://nucypher.dev/nucypher
Fully Homomorphic Encryption
NuFHE - a GPU-accelerated fully homomorphic encryption library: https://nucypher.dev/nufhe
Discord and IRL Help
If you need support with your hack or simply want to jam on some ideas use Discord. Jump in #hackathons and start asking away: https://discord.gg/7rmXa3S
Connecting to the Testnet
Connect to the NuCypher Network on the Goerli testnet using: discover.nucypher.network:9151
NuCypher Forum
A forum where we post and discuss NuCypher technical issues and other ongoing updates and changes: https://forum.nucypher.com
Previous Hacks
Here are some previous projects built with NuCypher we’ve seen from ETHGlobal hackathons and other events from 2018/19.
ETHBoston 2019
Vitas Match - Vitas uses NuCypher's Proxy Re-encryption scheme to create a proof-of-concept of how someone could share their data with multiple different researchers in a secure way. This project was a winner of ETHBoston 2019.
CoinList + NuCypher Hackathon 2019
Snowden: Snowden is a google chrome extension which encodes your posts into smiles and grant access to all your friends. Nobody except your friends can read and understand what you want to share in your news feed.
thisfeedisalwaysforsale: Inspired by Simon de la Rouvieres This Artwork Is Always On Sale where he implements a Harberger Tax on the ownership of a digital artwork. In this app, instead of an Artwork, access to a feed of data is always for sale. NuCypher is used to encrypt the data and only the current Patron can decrypt (using NuCypher) to get access. Anyone can buy this access from the current Patron for the sale price set when they took ownership. Whilst they hold ownership they pay a 5% fee to the feed owner.
nuBox: Filesystem UI inspired by Google Drive. Upload files of any size. Secure IPFS file storage backed by NuCypher. Create, rename, drag/drop, delete files & folders. Share files with anyone until it expires. Revoke file access for anyone. You are in full control of your files.

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.
So that's quite a bit to get started. Remember if you need to contact someone from our team our Discord is likely the best place. See you at ETHWaterloo!
