On-boarding 10,000 Developers: Harmony’s Zero-Knowledge University

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Harmony

4 min readMay 23, 2022

At Harmony, we are building an ecosystem that enables researchers, practitioners, and developers to thrive exponentially. Sustaining the vision, we founded zkDAO, PrivacyDAO, and ResearchDAO. This initiative will support the research and publication of academic papers in the zero-knowledge proof technology (ZK), something we believe will drive the next-gen industry-changing projects of the future.

While research in ZK has increased substantially in the past few years, we believe it can be catalyzed to reach more developers and users swiftly. This is why we started the ‘Harmony Zero-Knowledge University,’ a learning initiative that brings in new talent in the Web3 space and helps them create market-ready ZK products.

This 7-week program is designed for students who are comfortable with programming and are willing to learn. Moving forward, Harmony aims to graduate 300 scholars by the end of 2022, 1,000 scholars by 2024 and 10,000 scholars by 2026, each proficient enough to launch their own market-ready ZK products.

Course Features

Harmony’s Zero-Knowledge University aims to help developers foray into the world of ZK proofs. Curated by an expert teaching and development facility, this 7-week course is entirely free for participants. Apart from following a zero-fee structure, the course incentivizes learning and provides grants to students for completing assignments and building ZK products.

Sponsored by Harmony, these grants help students earn while they learn more about the technology. Students are provided $200 in grants as submitted satisfactory assignments on time, with the total available grants for each scholar being $1,600. Every week, students who are voted to be most helpful towards helping other students will receive an additional $100 in prizes.

The ZKU Cohorts

The course runs for nearly 2-months with participants learning from various instructors, industry experts, and mentors. The ZKU has already completed two cohorts, with the third already underway. To graduate, the participants have to deploy their own usable ZK products on testnet. Our graduates have already created market-ready ZKU projects, spread across areas such as gaming, voting, NFTs, and authentication protocols.

In our inaugural pilot cohort (started in Dec 2021), we received over 200 applications for enrollment. The Twitter, YouTube, and Discord community of ZKU is also thriving. We have students from diverse backgrounds and locations, with the graduating students representing 5 different continents. To ensure that we can include as many scholars as possible, the next cohorts will include video seminars and discord discussions to accumulate different time zones.

The Team Behind ZKU

The course is organized by Dr. Hakwan Lau, with the support of multiple teaching assistants. Formerly a tenured professor at UCLA, Dr. Hakwan comes with over 14 years of rich experience in tertiary education. He has also published over 100 scientific papers. He has been working with Harmony on various projects, including Decentralized Basic Income.

Supporting Hakwan, is a diverse and highly experienced teaching staff, spread over borders while being connected through Harmony. The staff includes software developers, entrepreneurs, instructors, teachers, and other students who wish to impart their learnings to the ZKU participants.

Join Us To Learn

The next cohort of ZKU is scheduled for July-August, and applications are open! Join us, for high-quality learning sessions from the best minds in the ecosystem and start building market-ready products for the future with Zero-Knowledge technology.

Website | Twitter | Discord | Course Videos

About Harmony

Build on Harmony, Bridge to All Chains.

Harmony is an open and fast blockchain. Our mainnet runs Ethereum applications with 2-second transaction finality and 100 times lower fees.

Harmony is your open platform for assets, collectibles, identity, governance. Our secure bridges offer cross-chain asset transfers with Ethereum, Binance and 3 other chains.

We ❤️ Developers.

Zero-Knowledge University FAQs

Q: What is Harmony’s Zero-Knowledge University?

A: ZKU is a free for all learning initiative that aims to help developers build market-ready products using the ZK technology.

Q: Are there limited slots in ZKU?

A: We plan on enrolling a limited number of students for each cohort, with enrollment being on a first come, first served basis. Therefore, we advise all applicants to finish and submit the background assignment at the earliest.

Q: How long is the course? Do participants have to submit assignments?

A: The course is nearly 2-months long, with participants submitting various assignments every week, ending the course with a final project.

Q: What are the prizes and scholarships available for students?

A: Students have the opportunity to earn up to $3,000 in grants as they progress through the course. More information on prizes and grants can be found here.

Q: How can I stay updated with all ZKU updates?

A: You can follow ZKU on Twitter and Discord to get recent updates and more details about future cohorts.

Q: Is ZKU an accredited university that provides education board-approved certification courses?

A: ZKU is not an officially approved University that provides tertiary-level education, but is a learning initiative. The group is not a legally binding paid service, as no fees are charged from the participants. ZKU invites instructors who are mostly working pro bono, with sponsorship from Harmony. Harmony takes no legal responsibility for the quality of the content and learning.