I spent about nine months at the Ethereum Foundation exploring what you can actually build with zero-knowledge proofs beyond just scaling. The core question was: can ZK-SNARKs enable new kinds of applications where privacy is a feature, not a workaround?
The answer turned out to be yes, but the developer experience was rough. Circom circuits, trusted setup ceremonies, and Solidity verifiers all had to be wired together manually. Each project below was an experiment in pushing that stack into a working application — anonymous posting, private voting, encrypted data sales, and a developer tool for generating proofs in the browser.
Alongside the engineering work, I helped build out educational resources for people new to crypto and organized speaker series and learning sessions within the Foundation.