The problem Flow Zips 🤐 - tokenized secrets, gift cards, etc solves

Managment of secrets in trustless manner

Giftcards, redeem codes, etc are usually on paper cards "hidden" behind tapes (which users scratch off) in the plain sight. How could trust be established for these secret codes?

Flow Zips 🤐 zip these secrets (without knowing them at all) with the power of threshod cryptography by the Lit protocol and the access control of Cadence smartcontract that Zips can be only unzipped by their owners and upon first unzip, it will be marked as unzipped forever.

Enabling trustless commerce for billions $$$ market of real world values

With Flow Zips 🤐, these billions $$$ of real world values can now be traded, transferred, escrowed, swapped on the open web. Otherwise, with lack of trust, these exchanges of values are limited in small social circles.

Now, these zipped real world values are ready to flood into Flow ecosystem and to integrate with other Flow DEFI legos. i.e: Evaluate for swapping, Flowty for renting/loaning.

Breaking down walled-gardens

Giftcards are centralized and their values can only be exchanged in limited ways (i.e: Starbucks has $1 billion sitting on its gift cards). With Flow Zips 🤐, these giftcards become a lot more free and fluid as they can be exchanged, traded, swapped securely whether or not the centralized issuers like it or not. Sooner than later, these values will be _flow_ing a lot more freely :)

Enabling new use cases with big potentials

Ticket resale market size is $2.6B in 2022. Now event organizers can assure secure transfer and trade of these tickets while also earning royalties from these trades. (Flow Zips are just NFTs)

Unbanked users giftcards are widely used by unbanked users as value storage and transfer to access to e-commerce. With Flow Zips 🤐 these users can now leapfrog into the bankless future.

Challenges I ran into

Cadence access control

It is powerful but confusing for us initially without much experience. We needed NFTs to be mutable (in a controlled flow) only by owners. Eventually, we figured by looking into Jacob's projects and Profiles contracts to define well what Owner vs Public do for Collection and NFT.

Lit protocol integration

It works great with EVM, Cosmos chains. It doesn't support Flow blockchain yet. And Lit is essential for this concept to ensure that there is no man-in-the-middle. We tried various ways and eventually almost gave up our submission. But we came up with an interesting work-around by proofing ownership by changing state on owner's NFT then verifying from Lit's Serano chain and Lit Action (smartcontract).