Oblivious Message Retrieval

I approve this grant as a community member.

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Thank you for your support @dontbeevil!

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Congratulations ZCash Community. Something is going right if these are the grant applications we are receiving.

Good luck @thomaslzy!

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Thank you for your support @GGuy! Glad that you like our project and proposal. Happy holidays :smiley:

Hi @thomaslzy, I’m glad to inform you that the ZOMG is supportive of your grant application! Your work will contribute towards the goal of buttressing end-to-end privacy coverage across Zcash’s different clients/user journeys. @tromer of course is a welcome source of confidence and oversight.

Two things:

  1. Could you integrate OMR with Zecwallet Lite @adityapk00 and Zwallet @hanh, in addition to Nighthawk? These are important wallets to the Zcash community (Zecwallet having the longest history and a large userbase)
  2. It seems that your PhD admission details are not yet finalized. We’d like to express that the grant is covered/capped up to $98k. If the amount increases for any reason, you will have to resubmit to the next ZOMG panel (which starts some time in January)
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Hello @ml_sudo,
That’s great news! Thank you for your and ZOMG’s support.

To answer your questions:

  1. We are surely happy to also work with Zecwallet Lite @adityapk00 and Zwallet @hanh team to integrate the OMR library with these two wallets. Please also note that as indicated in the application, the full integration of the OMR library with any wallet is not part of this project, but rather we will support integrations done by the wallets’ primary developers (including trying to adapt our library to their needs).
  2. I surely understand that. Thank you for the reminder.

Thanks again for your and the community’s support!

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Congratulation on the grant Thomas! In the Zcash community, you get what you put in!
Myself and @NighthawkApps developers are excited to work with you to deliver the end-to-end support for private transaction retrieval for light clients. :raised_hands:

https://twitter.com/rcklss_abndn/status/1474953953309872129?t=Vl1oL_qbZ4sMOfGGpbz6SQ&s=19

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Thank you @aiyadt! Exited to work with you and @NighthawkApps team on private transaction retrieval as well :-).

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Hello all!

Regarding our project, here are some quick updates:

  1. We have found additional optimizations that make our server runtime 1.5-2x faster (based on hardware) and will update the new GCP runtime in our open-source directory.
  2. We have updated the write-up of our original paper and submitted it to a recent conference.
  3. We are also working on the group OMR project.
  4. We have had regular meetings with the Nighthawk team for APIs.
  5. Code development is ongoing.

Thank you!

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Hello all!

Regarding our project, here are some quick updates:

  1. Milestone 2 is finished. Code is publicly available at GitHub - ZeyuThomasLiu/ObliviousMessageRetrieval at lib
  2. We are making progress on Milestone 3 and 4 at the same time. We will send updates accordingly.
  3. We have also recently made OMR ~2.5x faster on the detector side (part of milestone 9). The code will be made publicly available soon.

Thank you!

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Hello, @ZcashGrants!

Regarding our project, we would like to propose a grant budget plan change for approval.
The total budget and the milestone accomplishing time will remain the same.

The reasons that we would like to propose such change are:
(1) We would like to include a new team member Yunhao Wang, currently an MS student at Columbia University, and previously a software engineer at Amazon for ~3.5 years.
She will mainly contribute to the group OMR part of the project, including but not limited to implementation, testing, and algorithm design. She will be compensated by part of the original grant. The specific number is determined by her time spent on the project.
We believe her software engineering skills and enthusiasm for cryptography research would greatly help the research project and make the library better implemented.
(2) The original proposal was to support one academic year of Zeyu’s Ph.D. study but did not specify the specific time frame. We would also like to specify which year the grant is supposed to support, per university policy.

We posted a more detailed budget plan in the discussion section of our proposal.

Please let us know if you have any questions or suggestions.

Thank you very much!

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Hello @thomaslzy. Sorry for the delay getting back to you. We are okay with the above changes you made related to the budget for your grant proposal. Thanks!

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Hello @aquietinvestor, that’s great! Thank you very much for your reply!

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Hello all!

Regarding our project, here are some quick updates:

We are working on milestones 3-7 at the same time and all of them have decent progress. We are aiming to release all the codes and the new paper for Group OMR and improvements over our original OMR scheme by October.
The code might be released earlier as the demos together with the tests are mostly done, but the code is not yet cleaned or organized. The improvements to our original OMR scheme are already implemented and tested. The improvements will be released at the same time.

Sorry for the delay with milestone 3. We were more focusing on milestones 4-7 during the last couple of months. We are aiming to release the code for milestone 3 earlier than 4-7 of course.

Thank you!

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@thomaslzy, ZCG has voted to terminate this grant due to the unforeseen circumstances that have arisen in regards to your grant. Your grant will be removed from the old grants platform immediately and you will need to submit any future ZCG grant requests via Submittable.

What happened here?

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Hi @daira. The unforeseen circumstances Dan mentioned above were due a payment restriction related to the grantee and their specific visa, which was unknown by all parties at the time the grant was awarded. Once the visa issue is resolved by the grantee, we expect them to reapply for another grant to continue this project.

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Thanks for clarifying, and good luck to @thomaslzy in resolving that issue. No borders, no nations. :black_flag:

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Does the black flag stand for Antifa?

A plain black flag represents anarchism in general. The black flag that is part of the modern “antifascist action” logo is an anarchist flag. The relevance of the black flag in my comment was that the reason it is black is to contrast with country flags, representing (in part) opposition to restrictions on free movement or association across countries, including visa restrictions. “No borders, no nations” is a common anarchist slogan also representing this viewpoint.

I explained this because I was directly asked, but note that further political discussion would be off-topic.

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