Public blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum introduced a decentralized, transparent, and anonymous alternative to the traditional financial system, giving birth to Decentralized Finance (DeFi). Decentralized platforms such as BlockFi and Next issue loans secured by virtual currency. However, there is no federal regulation for DeFi institutions and their open design has enabled criminals to steal funds from unsuspecting customers.

We introduce Sancus, a system that provides trust and accountability to its users through zero knowledge proofs, providing formal privacy guarantees.

I am familiar with the Ethereum blockchain, smart contracts, EVM, Vyper, Ganache, Remix, Solidity and cryptographical constructs. I am interested in this project because I have seen vulnerable smart contracts on the Ethereum main-net and have studied various attacks on them. In fact, I was surprised to find out that a lot of the current cryptocurrency exchanges routinely fall prey to hacking attacks but manage to hide that information away from end users. Personally, I would also like to find (and warn creators about) vulnerabilities in the systems that have already been deployed on the blockchain.