ZKEST: Provable Net Worth & Zero-Knowledge Financial Passport

Overview

ZKEST is a privacy-preserving financial identity platform that allows users to cryptographically prove their net worth across both Web3 and traditional finance without exposing their sensitive personal data. By unifying on-chain cryptocurrency wallets with off-chain bank accounts and centralized exchanges (CEXs), ZKEST empowers users to generate a verifiable "ZK Passport."

This passport mathematically proves financial status (e.g., "Net worth is greater than $100,000") to third parties like lenders, DAOs, or exclusive investment groups, while keeping the user's actual balances, wallet addresses, and banking credentials strictly confidential.

Core Problem

In the current financial landscape, proving your wealth requires sacrificing your privacy. Whether applying for a loan, joining an investment DAO, or meeting accredited investor requirements, users are forced to hand over bank statements, expose public wallet addresses, and reveal their entire transaction history. This creates massive data privacy risks and exposes users to potential security breaches.

The Solution

ZKEST bridges the gap between transparency and privacy using Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) and zkTLS technology. Instead of sharing raw data, users generate a cryptographic proof on their local device that verifies their assets.

Key Features

1. Onchain Asset Verification Users can connect their Web3 wallets to aggregate their decentralized crypto holdings. ZKEST reads the balances natively while ensuring the public addresses aren't permanently bound to the user's public identity in the final proof.

2. Offchain Asset Verification (via zkTLS) Using Reclaim Protocol (zkTLS), users can securely log into traditional financial institutions (like banks) or centralized exchanges (like Binance or Coinbase). ZKEST generates a cryptographic proof of the user's balance directly from the institution's web server. The app never sees or stores the user's login credentials, and the institution is unaware that a proof is being generated.

3. The ZK Passport Once on-chain and off-chain assets are aggregated, the user can set custom parameters (e.g., Prove my combined net worth is > $50,000). ZKEST compiles this into a "ZK Passport"—a highly secure, shareable cryptographic badge.

4. Trustless Verification Users can share their ZK Passport with third-party verifiers. The verifier receives a mathematically guaranteed VALID or INVALID result. They are assured that the underlying assets exist and belong to the user, but they cannot see the user's specific account numbers, wallet addresses, or exact balances.

Technical Architecture

• Frontend: Built with Next.js and React, featuring a sleek, dark-mode, minimalist user interface designed for a premium fintech experience.

• Data Oracles: Integrates the Reclaim Protocol to establish secure zkTLS sessions, allowing off-chain data (like bank balances) to be imported on-chain trustlessly.

• Cryptography: Utilizes Zero-Knowledge Proof circuits to hash and verify financial thresholds locally, ensuring raw data never leaves the user's client environment.

• Smart Contracts: Built to interact with Web3 protocols to register proofs and allow third-party dApps to query a user's verification status on-chain.

Target Use Cases

• DeFi Lending: Uncollateralized or under-collateralized loans based on verified off-chain liquidity.

• DAOs & Governance: Gated entry to investment DAOs that require members to hold a minimum net worth.

• Accredited Investor Verification: Seamlessly proving accredited status for compliant token sales or real-world asset (RWA) investments.

• OTC Trading: Proving liquidity to counterparties without doxing wallet addresses.

What we built during the hackathon:

1. Reclaim Protocol (zkTLS) Integration

• Successfully implemented Reclaim Protocol to securely fetch off-chain asset data (from centralized exchanges and bank accounts).

• Configured the Reclaim Developer credentials and successfully generated local zero-knowledge proofs of user balances without exposing login credentials.

2. Full-Stack Next.js Application

• Built the complete ZKEST web application from scratch using Next.js and React.

• Developed the Dashboard for users to connect and view their aggregated Onchain (Crypto) and Offchain (zkTLS) assets.

• Built the ZK Passport generation flow, allowing users to mint a cryptographic proof of their financial status.

• Created the Verify portal, allowing third parties to validate a user's ZK Passport without seeing their underlying private data.

3. Asset Aggregation & Proof Logic

• Wrote the logic to unify fragmented Web3 wallet balances and traditional Web2 financial balances into a single "Provable Net Worth" threshold.

4. UI/UX Design

• Designed a sleek, dark-mode, privacy-first interface optimized for a seamless user experience, making complex cryptographic actions (like generating a ZKP) feel as simple as clicking a button.

Status: Bootstrapped / Pre-Seed

ZKEST is currently fully bootstrapped and was developed organically for this hackathon. We have not taken any outside venture capital or institutional funding to date.

Looking Forward: As we transition from our hackathon MVP to a production-ready mainnet launch, we are actively exploring:

• Ecosystem Grants: To fund smart contract audits and cover initial infrastructure costs (zkTLS nodes/relayers).

• Pre-Seed / Seed Funding: We are open to conversations with strategic investors and accelerators who have deep expertise in Zero-Knowledge technology, Decentralized Identity (DID), and DeFi privacy to help us scale our engineering and business development efforts.