As sponsors of ZK Hack Berlin last week, Self offered bounties to developers building zero-knowledge solutions with the “Best Onchain Self SDK Integration” and “Best Offchain SDK Integration.” Lena Hierzi, from the Celo Foundation’s Developer Relations team and Self advisor, spent the weekend mentoring and judging submissions, ultimately awarding the Best Offchain SDK Integration bounty to goblowit, a solution to protect against scammers and bots on Telegram, built by Manuel Frosi.

What inspired you to build Goblowit?

After graduating with a computer science degree and having worked in database architecture and information security, Manuel developed a strong passion for Web3 technology with a specific interest in decentralized identity, zero-knowledge technology, privacy, and transparency. This led to him participating in hackathons around the world, enhancing his skills and finding ways to apply zk-technology to recurring issues faced by the Web3 community and beyond.

In Berlin, Manuel set out to create a solution for the rampant scams taking place on Telegram via bots and bad actors. While many report and submit screenshots as proof, those can be easily replicated or falsified. Manuel and Leo found that onchain attestations more clearly and irrefutably prove the negative behavior that is being addressed, and therefore built goblowit. By adding Self’s identity solutions, an added layer of verification is provided without the whistleblower ever needing to share private information. 

Why did you choose Self for the identity layer?

“I think Self is the best solution for an application’s identity layer,” Frosi shared. “It also provides further value by helping to confirm users’ proof of humanity. I’d been wanting build with Self for a long time, and now that I’ve seen how easily it could integrate into goblowit, I’m excited to explore adding it to my project enigmaVote, for sybil resistance!”

Following his award at ZK Hack Berlin, Manuel shared insights on his inspiration for goblowit and the future roadmap. “I would really like to keep growing goblowit to reach and support more users worldwide as they combat fraud and bad activity on Telegram…I’m also thinking of other ways to increase Self’s prominence as a core functionality of goblowit, like adding age or country of residence-specific restrictions.” 

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