Project introduction
Name: Codename: “Cowboy”
Description: Decentralized zkTLs for proving statements about any web data, and composing it onchain.
Website: Introduction - Cowboy Docs
GitHub: Cowboy · GitHub
Cowboy is the first decentralized zkTLS on Cardano, and the first zkTLS to allow proving statements on authenticated web data.
Blockchain contracts in general are limited in that they cannot access data from the web like traditional applications can. Oracles provide this to a limited extent now, though zkTLs protocols extend this access to private web data, ensuring that contracts can access all of the web.
Proving web data is an entirely new capability, not only to blockchain, but even to web2. We hope to extend our platform to all, starting with the Cardano ecosystem, allowing for use cases such as:
- Collateralization: proving facts about ones income or bank holdings, to get loans onchain
- Identity: Users can privately prove their unique statehood onchain easily, for example. Provides sybil resistance to all dapps, or can be used specifically for things like DAO membership.
- An offchain application uses proofs of web data to properly reward creators on their site, according to work performed.
Cowboy is a platform that allows developers to build custom integrations with any web data, proving whatever facts they like about incoming web data, allowing them to preserve privacy on the underlying source material. These integrations are deployed to Cowboy’s partnerchain, which also serves to verify zk proofs of any incoming integration, and also decentralize the notary set for all of the web data, a crucial part of avoiding centralization for the zkTLS protocol. Doing this avoids massive collusory risks to the proofs of web data. Developers are afforded an interesting programming environment. While not a complete execution environment with smart contracts, this environment allows composing of zkTLS proofs, even of other developer’s integrations, but also “outputting” custom data of the result of their computation, for others to consume.
There’s a lot more to Cowboy, and I encourage folks to follow along(docs above), dive into the developer examples, and try to generate your own proofs to put onchain.