The problem OmniTrust solves

OmniTrust is privacy-first identity verification infrastructure using zk-SNARKs which allows users to prove statements of facts around identity to vendors, without users disclosing their private data to that vendor.

Sample real-world use cases might be:

1. A nightclub gets proof you are over 18 without seeing your full name or birthdate
2. An employer verifies your work eligibility without accessing your passport.
3. An employer verifies your fitness to work without requiring you to disclose your medical records.

Some crypto native applications might be:

1. A decentralised exchange verifies that you're not a US citizen, without accessing your passport.

The current scope of our project includes:

1. Developing generic ZK proofs for vendors, e.g. prove that you're over 18, prove that you have Australian work eligibility.
2. Onboarding of attestation authorities, e.g. trusted third-parties who will have access to a user's ID once and can attest that the ID is valid.
3. Infrastructure for attestation authorities to store these attestations on chain without leakage of private information.
4. User friendly UI for end users to generate proofs
5. Tooling for vendors to prove statements of facts.

Challenges we ran into

ZK proofs are a relatively new technology, and tooling around generating ZK proofs is limited. This tooling is however required as the languages used to generate ZK proofs have limited features, e.g. the only allowed primitives are unsigned ints and primes.

Although in theory ZK proofs can be used to prove anything, in practice with complicated proofs the zk circuits get really really big.

Attestation authorities are a central point of failure in the system. Users need to trust that attestation authorities will not leak personal information, and vendors need to trust that attestation authorities will correctly attest the data. Our initial solution is getting trusted institutions e.g. government agencies to perform attestations. However an issue we've identified is how do we convince these agencies to become attestation authorities, trust the technology and be willing to adopt it.