The problem zkTrace solves

Supply chain management has been difficult to manage over the couple of years, from small businesses down to the large corporations.

And within the last few years, so many companies having gotten knee deep into the blockchain space, have been skeptical about introducing their businesses to the blockchain, as it risks leaking sensitive data and requires some high level management, on any of the public blockchains available.

zkTrace combines the power of blockchain for trustlessness, and zero knowledge for privacy, to provide safe and confidential business processes, correctly order events and increase work flow at no cost (gasless).

zkTrace solves the major issue of traceability in supply chain stages as well as, privacy of business logic and details involved.

The idea and initial smart contract was gotten before the beginning of the hackathon, but all the work on the SDK was built for this hackathon and our demo shows how to initialize and use all the methods available.

Challenges we ran into

Building the project, one of the major challenge we ran into was creating the zero knowledge circuit and how to get truly secure ZK Proofs. Another was encrypting the IPLD blocks before pinning on IPFS for data privacy, as the users have the option to choose if the supply chain data would be public or private.

Lastly building the supply chain protocol to an SDK came with its own challenges. One of which was getting the protocol to be compatible with both server side (node Js) and client side (browser). I was able to work around this using bundles and polyfills to get my desired outcome.