Summary

Merge the Sismo Playground and Curated protocols into a single contract on the Polygon mainnet and add attributes to Curated ZK Badges.

Abstract

This proposal aims to merge the Sismo Playground and Curated protocols. One single set of smart contracts deployed on the Polygon mainnet (and each subsequent supported chains) will represent all Sismo ZK Badges. New ZK Badges will be deployed by default as ‘Not Curated’ and will be able to be curated through the governance process.

• https://app.sismo.io/ will become the single and only environment to mint badges on production chains.
• https://playground.sismo.io/ will become https://testnets.sismo.io and be dedicated to testnet badges.

Additionally, Curated ZK Badges will be required to provide a value assessment about 3 attributes (Privacy, Trustlessness, and Sybil Resistance) to transparently communicate their potential properties and trade-offs to minters and builders.

Motivation

Curated & Playground protocols merge

Current State

To foster the development of composable bricks on top of ZK badges and increase the builder community engagement, the permissionless Sismo Playground environment (frontend+backend+ contracts) allowed anyone to create and deploy their own ZK badges freely.

In addition, the Sismo Curated environment had been created to provide a more curated experience for users and applications looking for carefully selected ZK Badges that they can trust. The Sismo community was in charge of vetting which ZK Badge can be migrated to the Curated environment from the Playground environment.

This structure was effective but required redeploying any Playground ZK Badge that had been accepted through the curation process on the Curated protocol and thus, asking users to remint their ZK Badge on the Curated protocol to benefit from the ZK Badge properties. This put a lot of burden on users and required communication effort from the ZK Badges builders.

New State

All ZK Badges will be managed by the same contracts and will be considered as “Curated” or not depending on the presence or absence of the badge attributes described below. This will allow for a seamless migration process through curation. Once a badge has been deployed in a permissionless manner by a builder and minted by users, it will still be able to go through curation while all previous minters retain their ZK Badges.

This new structure reduces potential user confusion by regathering all the minting process into a single interface (app.sismo.io), eliminates wasteful reminting steps for users & migration processes for builders, and simplifies the overall architecture of the protocol.

Addition of new attributes for Curated ZK Badges

The motivation for the addition of new attributes is expanded upon in the ZK Badge Attributes Assessment Framework.

TL;DR: The Privacy, Trustlessness, and Sybil Resistance attributes, associated with the description and eligibility specification of a curated ZK badge, give users a quick and easily digestible way to evaluate the properties of a badge. It provides information to builders about which curated ZK Badge they should build upon if their use case requires perfect decentralization, total privacy, or strong resistance to Sybil attacks.

Implementation

The Sismo community formally petitions the Sismo Core team to:

• Merge the Curated and Playground protocols into a single set of contracts and a single app,
• Adopt new Privacy, Trustlessness, and Sybil Resistance attributes for Curated ZK Badges.