Semaphore 2024 Roadmap

[andyguzmaneth]

We're eager to make Semaphore more open, in tune with what the ecosystem needs, and collaborative with everyone. To bring in more input from our open source community, we'd love to hear your thoughts on our 2024 product roadmap!

Semaphore Overview

See here for details on what Semaphore does.

Vision

• Make Semaphore the de-facto standard for anonymous messages and group membership proving.
• Semaphore will onboard many developers to leverage powerful zero-knowledge tools in the ecosystem.

Strategy

• Focus on developer experience, performance and education/community.
• Semaphore remains small, simple and a highly adaptable library.

Target Users

• New ZK developers: for them to learn ZK and build initial projects
• ZK teams that build other protocols: need to be performant

2023 year in review

Over the past year, we have accomplished the following:

Development

• Semaphore Protocol 29 Releases including Semaphore v3: v3.0.0-beta.4, v3.0.0-beta.5, v3.0.0-beta.6, v3.0.0.0-beta7, v3.0.0, v3.1.0, v3.2.0, v3.2.1, v3.2.2, v3.2.3, v3.3.0, v3.4.0, v3.5.0, v3.6.0, v3.7.0, v3.8.0, v3.9.0, v3.10.0, v3.10.1, v3.11.0, v3.11.1, v3.12.0, v3.12.1, v3.12.2, v3.12.3, v3.13.0, v3.14.0, v3.15.0,
• Semaphore v3 Audit
• Semaphore Boilerplate
• Semaphore CLI packages

Community, Education & Adoption:

• 10 Events Attended, including:
  • 30DaysWeb3: online talk
  • UNODC: Bootcamp del Coding4Integrity*: online talk*
  • EF Hack Exchange Numb 11: online talk
  • ETHDam: in person talk
  • Montenegro Zuzalu: in person workshop
  • ETHParis: in person workshop
  • ETHShanghai: online workshop
  • ETHRome: in person workshop and hackathon
  • zkMonth: online talks
  • Devconnect: in person workshop
• GitPOAPs program
• At least 6 new external contributors (first time)

Research

• Delivery of Semaphore v4 Research and started development of Semaphore v4.

Semaphore 2024 Project Plan

Our efforts can be divided into 3 main categories:

• 🤩 Developer Experience (make it easy aka Roadmap/Features): documentation, CLI, boilerplate, templates, SDK
• 🏍️Technical Improvements (make it better aka Research & Experimental): research, performance, new feature
• 🎓Adoption, Education & Community (make it used aka Ecosystem & Community): website, hackathons, talks, tutorials

2024 Q1 (Jan-Mar)

• 🤩 Complete the new Semaphore Website (Q4 23' - Q1 24')
• 🎓 Open source Semaphore designs + Semaphore 2023 Presentations
• 🏍️ Complete Semaphore v4 development
  • zk-kit Lean IMT - semaphore contracts, circuits, core libraries’
  • v4-alpha
  • v4-beta
  • 🤩 Updated Semaphore Documentation
  • 🤩 Updated Semaphore Templates & Boilerplate
• 🏍️ Semaphore v4 Audit
• 🏍️ Improvements on SnarkJS and CircomlibJS libraries
• 🤩 Supporting Semaphore Extensions: organizing community packages and applications
• 🎓 Build & publish a CEF (Community Engagement Framework) to have a solid foundation to support the community

This is going to be a great opportunity for community building.

• 🎓 Attend 1 hackathon
• 🎓 Deliver 2-3 presentations
• 🎓 Create a Twitter account

2024 Q2 (Apr-Jun)

• 🎓 Announcement Blogpost for v4
• 🏍️ 🎓 Semaphore v4 Trusted Setup
• 🤩 Semaphore Whitepaper: Semaphore v4 & lean IMT
• 🏍️ Start Integrating-updating RLN
• 🤩 New Documentation
  • Split & prioritize issues from Documentation view
• 🤩 Create CLI templates (voting / whistleblowing)
• 🤩 Create Foundry template
• 🏍️ Do a Identity landscape analysis
• 🏍️ Re-evaluate our stack
  • Create a list of requirements to compare different stack tools: i.e. usability, usage, compatibility, etc.
  • Evaluate Semaphore circuits in other DSLs: Noir, Halo2, Chiquito (not EVM compatible: Cairo, Leo, Sway)
  • Evaluate Semaphore contracts: Huff?, Fe?, Vyper?
  • Evaluate the Semaphore SDK in other languages: Rust (server), Zig (native phones), Python, Go
  • Consider adding implementation requests on PSE Acceleration Program
• 🏍️ 🎓 Build and publish Benchmarks
  • From the previous research, we can implement a couple of options and benchmark them
• 🏍️ Explore alternatives to Semaphore (other projects)
  • What other projects exist (substitutes for Semaphore) and how are they built
  • Other technical constructions (like ring signatures, group signatures, EdDSA, etc)
• 🏍️ W3 DID Standards
  • learn more about W3 and identity standards (going to be very important and Semaphore can play a key role there) → easiest path to reach large audiences imo
• 🤩 Docs translations
• 🎓 Attend 1 hackathon
• 🎓 Deliver 2-3 presentations
• 🎓 Integrate with 1 zk learning communities Learning Path

2024 Q3 (Jul-Sep)

• 🏍️ Semaphore v5: collaborate with Research Team to research and develop
  • We want to have a really concrete use case and benchmark so it can guide our v5 research direction.
  • Our main priority is to make on-chain insertions cheaper and zk aggregation.
  • Proof verification and generation are already fast, it’ll be hard to make them faster
  • Do research about new tools and data structures to integrate into Semaphore v5.
  • Some thoughts on Semaphore research:
    • Verkle trees
    • Vector commitment
    • Snarkpack
    • Caulk lookup
• 🎓 Attend 1 hackathon
• 🎓 Deliver 2-3 presentations
• 🎓 Integrate with 1 zk community Learning Path

2024 Q4 (Oct-Dec)

• 🏍️  Semaphore v5 Development
• 🎓 Run a community grant round for Semaphore DID layer
• 🎓 Attend 1 hackathon
• 🎓 Deliver 2-3 presentations