From GitHub Stars to Secure Identity: A Guide to zkTLS

At zkVerify, we're constantly exploring new ways to bridge the gap between the vast data of the existing internet and the world of Web3. This journey recently led me to an exciting application for Zero-Knowledge Transport Layer Security (zkTLS). I set out to solve a simple problem for our incentivized testnet: how can we reward users for a social task, like starring our GitHub repo, without forcing them to reveal their personal information?

Fairness Is Hard to Prove

My (loose) goal was to incorporate a simple social quest into our programs to bring more attention to our GitHub repo. An incentivized testnet is currently running at points.zkverify.io. A straightforward approach would be to ask users to submit their GitHub usernames so we could manually verify they had starred the repository. However, this method has a significant privacy flaw: it would expose users' GitHub identities and link them to their EVM addresses.