From ZK-Democracy to Privacy Everywhere Rarimo's Future Vision
When I first met Kitty Horlick, director of Rari Labs, the provider building Rarimo Protocol, at the Future State Berlin event, I was struck by the focus on democracy and blockchain's potential influence. It was refreshing to see a conversation that moved beyond meme tokens and AI, instead highlighting the next leapfrog in small communities and opposition groups. This is where Rarimo finds one of its purposes. Interviewed by Ray Svitla, here are Kitty Horlick's words:
Rarimo Rising
Rarimo is a ZK social protocol, with a mission to make social interactions both private and verifiable. I believe we are building something truly valuable, products that make a real difference in people's lives. While many Web3 projects tackle niche problems, we've set our sights on the macro issues facing society.
Tackling Macro Issues in Web3
We understood that for Web3 identities and social applications scale, we urgently need privacy and to build out ZK infrastructure - as obviously, no one wants all of their histories to be completely transparent.
The structure of Rarimo reflects our commitment to decentralization. The Rarimo Protocol itself has no employees; instead, we have contributors to the protocol including by Rari Labs, where I serve as a director. Our two flagship projects, Freedom Tool and the RariMe app, unlock the potential of zero-knowledge proofs of passports and other identity documents.
One of our greatest accomplishments was solving the online voting trilemma: ensuring voter eligibility, maintaining anonymity, and preventing double voting all at once. Freedom Tool successfully does this and is being rolled out around the world for surveillance-free protest and voting.
Freedom Tool In Action: Empowering Digital Democracy
The impact of Freedom Tool has already been felt in high-stakes scenarios. In Russia, opposition leader Mark Feygin used it to launch Russia2024, an app allowing citizens to anonymously voice dissent against Putin's re-election. Despite the fear surrounding the political regime and attempts to suppress the app, we saw 15,000 downloads in the first 24 hours. This provided a critical outlet for expressing dissent as all other channels are closed in Russia, with power centralized in the hands of a dictator.
The technology behind Freedom Tool is a significant step towards the cypherpunk ideal of defending privacy with cryptography. How it works:
Biometric Passport Scanning: Users scan their biometric passports using their phones. The app verifies the data on the NFC chip inside the passport. 2. Anonymous Voting Pass: After confirming the legitimacy of the passport data, the system issues an anonymous voting pass. 3. Zero-Knowledge Cryptography: This is the key to maintaining privacy. ZKPs are used to sever any link between the voting pass and the passport data, making it impossible to pair the two. This ensures that a citizen's identity cannot be connected to their vote. 4. Data Protection: The passport data never leaves the user's device. It's not stored or passed through any server, eliminating points where it could be intercepted. 5. Blockchain for Vote Integrity: All votes are published directly onto a blockchain, making them tamper-proof and publicly auditable.
This mission is deeply personal for our team. All of us come from or have lived in post-Soviet states. Our developer team is based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Lasha (co-founder) was born in Georgia, which has had about 20% of its territory annexed by Russia. We've seen firsthand the impact of authoritarian regimes and the vital importance of democracy and freedom. It wasn't our goal to specifically work on emerging states, but our background led to this really meaningful necessity.
Beyond the Vote: Privacy Everywhere
We're also exploring the potential for distributing humanitarian aid or universal basic income (UBI) through our technology, starting with a project to distribute stablecoins and Rarimo Airdrop to Ukrainian citizens in need. We're working with different charities to find people in regions that really need to be rebuilt.
Voting is obviously super important, but it's not the only aspect of our online behavior that needs to be protected for democracy and society to flourish. Part of the beauty of zero-knowledge proofs is that they let you attest to very granular characteristics, and create niche filters. I'm really interested in expanding this across our online experiences, so even everyday things like going on Twitter, or shopping for products is less diluted with spam or unwanted content.
As we look to the future, Rarimo is set to revolutionize digital identity much like Bitcoin changed finance. Our goal is to create applications that not only entertain users but also protect and empower them through user-controlled, decentralized, privacy-preserving infrastructure. In doing so, we're shaping a new paradigm for digital identity and privacy in the Web3 era, one that puts power back in the hands of individuals and communities.