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p2p markets for cryptographic assets

Private market was an applied research project which started with the idea of selling ecdsa keypairs. This was an idea that was floating around for quite some time. I had the chance to work on it for a few months.

There was an apparent contradiction to investigate: private keys compose the base cryptographic layer of blockchains like ethereum. Due to both social and security concerns, they are illiquid assets. So to what extent can one create a market around those?

I tried to explore this idea from as many angles as possible. It ended up taking this initial idea farther than what was originally thought. I realized that private market could be an experiment for inspecting how much the trustless p2p market scheme could work for different classes of cryptographic objects.

Thoughts

Eventually, I think the main breakthrough of this project was in making it possible to trustlessly sell groth16 proofs. In some sense, it shows a way for anyone to privately and trustlessly sell his access to any class of zk-gated dapps - such as zk-powered discussion groups or airdrops.

This applied research project illustrated well the main point that I wanted to get across: any result of a provable computation can in theory be sold on those markets. And if blockchains end up coordinating or developing - even a tiny - share of current or upcoming online interactions, then it makes sense to think that those markets could eventually proliferate.

(d)Apps should prepare for an era where objects with provable properties become liquid. This is one curious dimension of what user sovereignty looks like. Those markets will grant people with increased decision power over over what they can do with their online assets.

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