Verify email authenticity on-chain with vlayer's ZK Email Proofs, ensuring private interactions
The main idea of the project is that it lets the users prove ownership of their email addresses onchain using Vlayer’s decentralized proof system. The process continues in the following steps, users enter their email and after shortly they will receive a message and Vlayer generates a cryptographic proof from the email's headers.This proof is submitted to a smart contract, allowing the user to verify their email in a trustless, decentralized way without revealing the actual content of the email. In this way it unlocks new possibilities in the Web3 identification field with secure email-gated experiences, verifiable credentials, and linking real-world communication to blockchain accounts. It’s fast, private, and secure—bridging Web2 and Web3 with just an inbox.
We built our project on Scaffold-ETH 2, giving us a clean full-stack environment for smart contract and frontend development. The frontend is written in React and Next.js, using RainbowKit, Wagmi, and Viem for easy management of wallet connections and contract interaction. Essentially, we added Vlayer, a protocol that generates cryptographic proofs from email metadata. Upon verification of an email address by a user, Vlayer creates a proof, and we share it onchain through our smart contract. We built the contract with Foundry by coding and testing it locally first, before deploying it. On the client side, we utilized custom React hooks to authenticate and submit the proof. There is a tiny interface to see the proof visually and debug it before submission. Vlayer's architecture enabled us to associate a user's email ownership with their wallet such that trustless, onchain identification became possible—all without revealing the actual email content.