yi

Digital private goods, analogous to real-world goods, there exist digitally native products and byproducts both consciously and unconsciously created on a daily basis. These include images, texts, audio and videos, and many more forms. However, the public nature of blockchain systems prevents the digitization of two key properties of tangible goods: rivalry and excludability. yi is created as a response to this void. By leveraging zero-knowledge technologies, yi enables on-chain creation, transaction, and exhibition of digital private goods. We name each version of the protocol with hexagrams from yi jing, an ancient Chinese divination text. Ch’ien ☰, the first prototype, features a collection of NFT patches with exclusive viewership: only the seller and the successful buyer have access to the original image off-chain, with only a thumbnail version available on-chain. The zk-SNARK verifier in the smart contracts guarantees that the public thumbnail is faithfully downsampled from the original work. Each patch auction remains secure from attempts of leakage from any third party, even previous token owners. During the initial release, the patches are distributed to each Pagoda member, available for application here. After receiving the individual pieces, owners may exclusively decrypt their on-chain image with the locally derived shared secret upon discretion. Or, they may also choose to reveal the underlying art to the world irreversibly by publishing a zero-knowledge proof that certifies the process of decryption to the blockchain, after which the patch reduces to a regular ERC-721 token publicly tradable and viewable on all platforms. The artwork is created by Will Wharton, which is a single piece split up into multiple components, each represented by an NFT. Pagoda is a community of builders, technologists, and artists interested in experimenting with our long-term visions in zero-knowledge technologies, digital private goods and more. Ownership of a piece of Will's work represents a stake in the Pagoda community, which hopes to leverage the yi protocol to expose talented artists to the non-fungible space. The yi team has faith in the community as an intangible archaeological site of the future that is beyond the protocol itself. With time, Pagoda’s additional purposes will organically emerge as it grows. yi is heavily influenced by Zora, ​​the open protocol to buy, sell and curate NFTs on Ethereum.