The problem zkt.app solves

Zakat is a core Islamic obligation, yet in practice it is often opaque, inefficient, and difficult to verify. Donors rarely know whether their zakat is calculated correctly, distributed to eligible recipients, or reaches them in a timely manner. On the other side, zakat organizations struggle with trust, reporting, and cross-border transparency, especially when serving a digital-native Muslim community.

zkt.app addresses this by bringing zakat workflows on-chain while preserving privacy and Sharia compliance.

With zkt.app, users can:

• Calculate zakat transparently based on clear rules

• Pay zakat digitally using blockchain wallets

• Verify that funds are allocated and distributed as intended

• Maintain privacy using zero-knowledge techniques, without exposing sensitive financial data

By combining smart contracts and verifiable logic, zkt.app makes zakat more transparent, auditable, and trustworthy, while reducing reliance on manual reporting and centralized intermediaries.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges was balancing transparency with user privacy. Zakat requires accountability and auditability, but users should not be forced to expose their full financial details on a public blockchain.

To address this, the system was designed so that:

• Smart contracts handle verification and allocation logic on-chain

• Sensitive user inputs are kept off-chain and never published directly

• Only proofs and verification states are stored on-chain instead of raw financial data

Another challenge was modeling zakat flows in a way that is both Sharia-aware and developer-friendly. Translating religious rules into deterministic smart contract logic required multiple iterations and careful simplification to avoid incorrect assumptions or rigid interpretations.

Additionally, creating a Sharia council verification circuit introduced a new hurdle. The system needed a way for scholars or trusted reviewers to validate compliance without exposing deliberation details or becoming a centralized bottleneck.

This was addressed by designing the Sharia compliance logic to run inside a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). The TEE allows verification rules approved by the Sharia council to be executed securely, producing attestations that can be verified on-chain without revealing internal data or decision processes.

I overcame these challenges by keeping the MVP focused on core zakat flows, validating assumptions early, and designing the contracts and verification layers to be modular so future rules, councils, and edge cases can be added safely without breaking the system.