RISC Zero is the team behind the Bonsai proving service, a ZK proving service now live and available for experimentation at ETH Waterloo.

The Bonsai proving service allows dApps to use the RISC Zero zkVM as a coprocessor for off-chain computations -- without any custom circuit development. Bonsai lets developers focus on solving complex problems without worrying about computations' gas cost, portability, and scaling.

🚀 Best use of Bonsai 🚀

Resources

Bonsai access whitelist request available here: https://forms.gle/Ships93xqY4c8zA37

Meet with developers in person at our event Friday 13:30-17:30 EDT: https://lu.ma/07eyhz6m

Objectives

What dApps would you build if you could offload expensive or repetitive computations off chain? What if you could immediately trust the computations’ results without needing to wait for consensus? Use your imagination!

Prizes

The possibilities are broad — we’ll be around Friday night and on our Discord, so come chat with us if you want to brainstorm. There are several paths to winning RISC Zero hackathon projects: push some technical limits, get a clean demo for an interesting use case, or build a well-documented educational piece.

Here are the awards:

• One $2000 first prize
• Two $1000 second prizes

📊 Feedback bounty 📊

Resources

To make a submission for this bounty, fill out the feedback form (available on 6/24) at: https://bit.ly/3qXrrk2

Objectives

If you’ve had a chance to work thoroughly with a project for the first bounty, you’re eligible to submit for the second! We’re committed to learning from your experiences at these events, so as a thank you for the feedback you provide, we’ve added a bounty to reward the participants who provide us with the most thorough feedback. If you submit, here’s what you’re committing to:

• A form filled out after you’ve engaged meaningfully with a project at the hackathon
• A maximum of one hour talking to us on Telegram or Discord

Prizes

Heres what we’re giving away:

• Two $500 prizes

💻 How to participate in our hackathon bounties 💻

Bonsai development steps

To work with their technology at the hackathon, you’ll:

• Download a starter template that includes a fully self-contained development environment hosted on your local machine with the help of Foundry.
• Build an app contract in standard Solidity (with full access to Forge tests, also in Solidity).
• Write an off-chain provable computation in plain Rust with no custom circuits or complicated DSLs.

If you want to stop here, we’ll consider any working project that takes an interesting or educational approach to supplementing dApps with ZK-proven off-chain computations. We’re proud of our seamless transition from local proofs to Bonsai proving service so we’ll consider a standalone sufficient.

Bonsai deployment steps

If you’d like to play with the Bonsai proving service, we’ve designed the starting developer template to easily convert to a locally hosted contract that makes real calls to Bonsai through our ETH relay. If you’re eager to try out a new proving service, here’s what to do:

• Fill out the Bonsai whitelist access form for an API key and API URL: https://forms.gle/Ships93xqY4c8zA37
• Change 3 local environment variables and run your contract locally.

That’s it! Again, we’ll be around to support you as you form teams, develop projects, and prepare to submit, so please reach out if you have any questions or are curious about new projects.

We think these resources are a great place to start:

https://dev.bonsai.xyz

https://www.risczero.com

You can also jump straight into the README for this project:

https://github.com/risc0/bonsai-foundry-template

And for a writeup of a past hackathon that explains why we’ve awarded past winners, take a look at:

https://www.risczero.com/blog/zkhack