The problem EduFi solves

Access to quality education is a significant challenge, especially for students in underdeveloped and developing countries. Traditional student loans are often inaccessible, requiring high credit scores, collateral, and extensive paperwork. Additionally, these systems expose sensitive financial data, leading to privacy risks.

EduFi solves this by providing privacy-preserving micro-financing for education using zero-knowledge proofs (ZK-Proofs). Students can secure education loans without revealing their income details while ensuring responsible repayment through an on-chain reputation system.

EduFi enables students to:

• Secure education loans easily without complex paperwork or collateral.
• Receive AI-driven course recommendations based on their goals and market demand.
• Store certifications securely on IPFS and build an on-chain education reputation score.
• Repay loans using natural language commands, thanks to the onchain AI agent.

Challenges I ran into

Had to learn circom for ZK-proofs, integration for ZKVerify (calling events) was quite easy, but the main challenge was developing my own smart contract which verifies the attestation proof by calling the zkVerify contract using groth16, asked the zkverify team and was able to solve it.Learned about the different paramaters, how zkVerify’s verifier pallets uses big endian encoding but EVM uses little endian encoding (only for groth16 which I used), so we need a helper function to convert it. Helped few peers as well in the discord channel.
An idea of proper project which fits theme of EduChain and an impactful project which integrates AI was difficult to come up with. Overall, lots of challenegs faced, but a lot more learnings I'm taking with me through this hackathon.
Cheers!