Sikoba January 2020 — Update. This January, we have started the…
By: Sikoba Network
Tags: Blockchain, Sikoba, Isekai, Sharing Economy, Itugen

This January, we have started the process of renaming Sikoba to SikobaPay, have signed our first letters of intent and have been exploring new use cases for SikobaPay. We are also in the middle of a pre-MVP fundraising round.

Introducing SikobaPay

We have decided to start using “SikobaPay” rather than just “Sikoba” as the name of the mobile app. Including “pay” in the name will make the purpose of Sikoba more obvious.

Almost all the back-end features that were planned for the MVP have now been completed. In addition, Dragan found an elegant way to include multilingual support for both the web interface and the mobile app. The focus will now be on the mobile app, and on internal testing, so that we are ready for pilot testing in April.

pre-MVP fundraising

In order to have sufficient resources to continuee SikobaPay development, we are in the process of raising additional funds in a pre-MVP round — don’t hesitate to contact us if you are interested to participate. Then, once pilot testing of the MVP has started and we can demonstrate sufficient traction, we will aim to do a significantly larger post-MVP funding round, which is also likely to be at a much higher valuation.

SikobaPay letters of intent signed

In January, for the first time, we have signed letters of intent with potential partners and clients. One is for a co-branded version of SikobaPay for a local currency, another with an NGO that wants to start a basic income program in Haiti, and the third one with a partner in Guatemala. We are also in negotiations with another potential client in Latin America.

SikobaPay — Basic Income use case

As a results of conversations with new partners and contacts, we have been considering new ways that SikobaPay could be used. One of these use cases is a co-branded version of SikobaPay that can be used to distribute funds to basic income beneficiaries. This is done by giving beneficiaries a “credit” in SikobaPay, which they can use directly for purchases in participating local shops, or for withdrawing cash from these shops, or for sending to other SikobaPay users at minimal cost. Because cash withdrawals will be subject to a commission, there will be an incentive to use credits directly, thus reducing the amount of cash transactions. Both the basic income beneficiaries and the participating shops will be able to use other SikobaPay functionalities, and it is hoped that this will lead to an increase in local trade and small business activity.

isekai update

This month, the focus was on making isekai work with “real” C/C++ programs, such as hash functions and other cryptographic functions. This required some minor bug fixes and modifications. We have also implemented basic elliptic curve operations in a C++ header, so that doing elliptic curve multiplication for any curve can be now done easily and efficiently in isekai.

We have submitted a paper to the 3rd ZKProof Workshop, under the Systematization-of-Knowledge track. In this paper, entitled “Compiling programs for integration with multiple ZKP systems”, Guillaume explores the results of 12 months of work on generating zero-knowledge proofs of the execution of software programs. In addition to describing the issues we have faced, it also shows some optimizations we found along the way and demonstrates how we used isekai to benchmark several zero-knowledge proofs systems.

itugen @ ITASEC20

This month, we have stared to work on the itugen proof-of-concept code.

The itugen technical paper, which is available for download from the itugen web site, has been accepted for presentation by ITASEC20, the Italian Conference on CyberSecurity. ITASEC is the largest conference of its kind in Italy and this year’s edition takes place in Ancona between the 4th and 7th February. We received some encouraging feedback from the reviewers, for example:

“ The paper is well written and fairly well detailed in some sections. The central concepts such as properties, requirements and schemes are really well explained.”

There were also several suggestions for improvement, for example one reviewer asked us to clarify where and how we plan to use post-quantum secure primitives, and another asked to “add some performance evaluation and a validation of the proposed approach.” We will take all suggestions into account, as we do plan to publish a more detailed version of the paper soon, together with implementation details.

Vincenzo Iovino, who is an assistant Professor at the University of Salerno and also a core member of the itugen team, will present the paper in the morning of Friday, 7th February.