The problem CipherInbox solves

CipherInbox, with its emphasis on Web3 technology and privacy-focused features, is well-equipped to address several common challenges associated with traditional email services. The problems it solves:

• Privacy Concerns: Traditional email services often lack robust privacy features, leaving user data vulnerable to unauthorized access. CipherInbox, with its end-to-end encryption and zero-knowledge technology, provides a secure environment, ensuring that only authorized parties can access the content of messages.
• Centralized Storage Risks: Many email providers store user data on centralized servers, making them susceptible to large-scale breaches. CipherInbox's decentralized architecture minimizes the risk associated with centralized storage by distributing user data across the blockchain, reducing the impact of potential security breaches.
• Decentralized Communication: CipherInbox's decentralized architecture fosters a more resilient communication network. It reduces dependence on a single point of control, enhancing the availability and reliability of the service.

Challenges we ran into

At first, we thought it would be easy to send an email from Web3 email to Web2 email. But gradually, we realized that it was not that straightforward for a message that exists on the blockchain to make it to the Web2 ecosystem. There were many layers of abstraction that separate a Web3 email from arriving to Web2 email. This seems like a tough problem that we wanted to solve. Using our creativity, we came up with an ad-hoc solution that would make it work.

In the beginning, we built out the smart contracts in Hardhat. Towards the end of Saturday evening, we realized that it was not possible (may be due to our familiarity with Hardhat or other reason), but we were only able to verify 15% of the smart contracts. So we had to take a drastic change and switched to Foundry since we knew we could verify 90%+ of the smart contracts with Foundry. This set us back about 4-5 hours, but we managed to make it work successfully.

Originally, we also intended to use Waku as the "messenger" for what we wanted to do, but then after talking to the Waku team on Sat afternoon, we realized that it was futile since Waku didn't directly help with our objectives. We lost roughly half a day researching and trying to make Waku things work set us back about half a day. In the end, we just wrote a customized smart contract that allows sending and receiving messages. We also opted to use Light House for storage solution since it seems aligned with what we hope to build.