Case Study: Curate magical real world cryptography experiences for Devcon. Part 2
This is the second in a two-part series reflecting on my collaboration with Team Cursive to create an end-to-end digital and physical experience for Devcon SEA 2024. In this post, I focus on the technical and design aspects of the project, including the Cursive Connection app, the museum’s full walkthrough, and the bespoke NFC-enabled merchandise that tied everything together.
If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, which highlights the cultural impact of the museum and its key exhibits, you can find it here.
Cursive Connection: Privacy Meets Connection
Cursive Connection is an experimental, privacy-preserving social app designed to tackle a pressing challenge:
how can people safely share personal information and form meaningful connections in an increasingly data-driven world?
By leveraging advanced cryptographic techniques like Multi-Party Computation (MPC), the app enabled users to discover shared interests without exposing sensitive data to everyone — only to those with matching data. This controlled visibility is the hallmark of MPC, ensuring that sensitive information is protected even as it facilitates meaningful interactions.
Privacy-preserving tools are critical in today’s landscape, where data misuse and breaches are rampant. Unlike traditional systems, which require sharing sensitive information to verify overlaps or commonalities, MPC allows encrypted data to be compared without ever decrypting it. This ensures that personal information remains secure while still enabling valuable connections. Tools like MPC represent a paradigm shift because it empower users with control, privacy, and trust in how their information is shared.
The Cursive Connection app debuted at Edge City Lanna, a month-long experimental popup city designed to cultivate collaboration, creativity, and connection. Every resident received an NFC-enabled bracelet linked to their Cursive Connection profile, making it effortless to connect with others in the community. Using their smartphones’ NFC readers, residents could tap another person’s bracelet to open a connection page, where their profiles could securely link. Once connected, the app enabled residents to run MPC computations on their shared data, uncovering overlapping interests while maintaining privacy.
Edge City Lanna provided the ideal setting to showcase the app’s innovative approach to social networking, combining privacy-preserving technology with seamless usability in a vibrant, collaborative environment.
The flower feature in the Cursive Connection app transforms cryptographic interactions into a visually engaging and emotionally resonant experience. With every connection, users plant a virtual flower that grows as they share encrypted data and discover shared interests. This simple, gamified metaphor demystifies cryptography by visualizing its abstract processes, turning complex computations into an intuitive and tangible outcome.
From a UX standpoint, the flower provides immediate feedback, solving the challenge of making privacy-preserving mechanisms visible. Users can see the impact of their encrypted data exchanges in real-time, fostering trust and encouraging continued engagement. The playful nature of the feature enhances learning, inviting users to explore cryptography in a way that feels enjoyable. By tying these interactions to growth, the flower fosters emotional engagement, making cryptography feel less like a technical barrier and more like a nurturing, human-centered process.
The Full Museum Experience
The Cryptographic Connection Museum bridged the gap between cryptography’s abstract concepts and its practical, human applications. By transforming complex ideas into interactive, engaging installations, the museum became a space where attendees could explore the systems underpinning privacy and security in deeply relevant ways.
Here’s a full walkthrough of the museum’s exhibits, showcasing how each piece tackled the challenge of making cryptographic principles accessible and impactful.
A Proof of Emotion
Attendees were first drawn to Gordon Berger’s Unveiling Emotions, a series of six original artworks paired with an interactive cryptographic element that encouraged reflection and connection. Visitors were invited to input their emotional response to the artwork and uncover whether they felt the same way the artist did when creating the piece.
By leveraging zero-knowledge proofs, the installation demonstrated how cryptographic tools can create proofs of emotion — an ephemeral, deeply personal experience immortalized in code. This experiment sparked lively discussions, showing how even abstract concepts like emotions could intersect with cryptographic principles.
A Journey Through Cryptographic History
Close by, Whispers of Privacy: MPC Through the Years, curated by Ais Connolly from TACEO and Andrew Lu from Cursive, offered a window into cryptography’s origins. The installation recreated a researcher’s desk, complete with original cryptographic research papers, textbooks, and historical context. Attendees were encouraged to pick up and read the documents, sparking impromptu conversations. There were many moving moments when cryptographers or researchers came by and discovered their own co-authored paper among the artifacts — a moment of unexpected recognition and connection.
Complementing this exhibit was the ZK Jargon Decoder by Nicolas Mohnblatt, a physical booklet containing quick-reference definitions of commonly used zero-knowledge terms. Nicolas’s work, originally published on GitHub, was brought to life as a printed booklet with a cover designed to resemble an Oxford Dictionary. The result was an unexpected hit: of the ten printed copies, eight were spirited away by attendees eager to hold onto this practical resource. Its popularity underscored a clear hunger for accessible, tangible representations of the knowledge, proving that even the nerdiest of content can shine when thoughtfully presented.
From Digital to Physical: Visualizing Connections
Moving deeper into the museum, participants encountered Glimpses of Connection by Micah Fitch and Rithikha Rajamohan. This installation visualized Cursive Connection’s social graph, showing how encrypted, anonymized data from the app translated into real-time connections. Through the visualization, visitors could see the network flourish as more people joined — a living demonstration of cryptography enabling safe and meaningful social interaction.
Nearby, Steal the Flag!! by Rémi, Nico, Florent, and Febryan from OpenPassport invited attendees into a playful yet thought-provoking social experiment. Attendees scanned their passports, and in seconds, their country’s flag appeared on the screen — while zero-knowledge proofs worked invisibly in the background, displaying only the flag and nothing more. Each second a flag stayed on screen, it earned a point, sparking a global “flag dance” powered by pride — one of the humans’ motivator. By the end of Devcon, the flag with the most points would reign supreme. Steal the Flag!! brilliantly showcased how cryptographic systems can enable playful competition without compromising trust or personal data.
Not so far off, Hands-on zkTLS by Sachin and Richard from zkp2p transformed ideas about data privacy into a tactile demonstration. The exhibit featured two boxes: one held loose sheets of paper, symbolizing user data exposed under traditional systems. Participants moved these sheets into envelopes, sealed them with stamps, and generated a cryptographic “proof” of their data — secure and verifiable, but private.
This process illustrated how zkTLS works: using tools like TLS (a standard for secure web communication), OAuth permissions, and zk-SNARK proofs, it allows users to verify the authenticity of their data without revealing its contents. By physically engaging with the steps — participants intuitively grasped how cryptographic proofs can protect sensitive information while maintaining trust and usability.
The Art of Secure Communication
Aayush Gupta’s End-to-End Encryption captivated audiences with its blend of science and art. Using polarized glasses, visitors uncovered hidden messages on a seemingly blank screen, mirroring the function of encryption keys in digital systems. This interactive demo turned abstract technical concepts into a sensory experience, bridging the gap between physics and cryptography.
Right next to it, Flashbots X’s OH at Devcon invited visitors to explore the secure and practical applications of cryptography through an interactive experience. Each attendee received a token that granted them the ability to post a single tweet via the “OH at Devcon” account. The system relied on Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) and certificate transparency to ensure the integrity of each post, preventing tampering or unauthorized access. This demonstration showcased TEE’s capability to execute code in isolated, secure environments, protecting sensitive operations even in untrusted systems. By illustrating how TEE can safeguard data and processes, OH at Devcon offered a glimpse into its transformative potential for real-world use cases, from secure messaging to financial systems and beyond.
Cryptography as Art and Protest
On the other side of the museum, This Shirt is a Weapon by Dr. Adam Back stood as a historical artifact and a statement on the intersection of cryptography and free speech. The T-shirt, printed with RSA encryption code, once fell under U.S. export restrictions, classified as a “munition.” This piece reminded visitors of the power of cryptography not just as a tool for security but as a means of challenging authority.
Not so far off, Justin Melillo and Scuube from MONA presented Ethereum Artifact, a series of five AR-based digital sculptures exploring Ethereum’s foundational concepts. Designed for spatial computing and tokenized as NFTs, these pieces brought Ethereum’s core ideas — like smart contracts and network of nodes — into an immersive, visual realm, connecting the physical and digital in a strikingly artistic way.
The Sacred Thread of Privacy
Finally, at the heart of the museum stood Infinity Loom by IOQ and Tessa Maneewong, a piece inspired by Japanese wishing shrines. Visitors reflected on the question, How may cryptography support dreams of human flourishing? before writing private messages on ribbons and tying them to the shrine. It offers attendees a moment to experience privacy as a form of safety and self-expression. This piece served as a powerful conclusion to the museum journey, reminding participants of cryptography’s profound ability to protect and nurture human connections.
The Merch Experience
For the merch collection, we collaborated with local Chiang Mai vendors, sewers, and jewelry makers to create bespoke NFC-enabled pieces that combined craftsmanship with technology. This partnership reflected Ethereum’s ethos of community and decentralized collaboration, driving inclusivity and shared purpose. By engaging local artisans, we infused every design with a collective spirit, aligning the process with Ethereum’s commitment to fostering thriving, interconnected ecosystems.
The designs were crafted with two key audiences in mind: niche cryptography enthusiasts and the broader community. For the cypherpunk subculture — rooted in privacy, security, and the elegance of code — we created the RSA Dolphin T-shirt. Inspired by a historical artifact featured in the museum, this design celebrated the intricate precision of cryptography at Ethereum’s core, serving as both a nod to technical expertise and a symbol of its cultural significance.
By catering to both audiences through intentional design, the merch transcended traditional conference giveaways, adding layers of personality and becoming a meaningful representation of Ethereum’s infinite garden — a flourishing ecosystem where diverse ideas, subcultures, and identities thrive in harmony.
Takeaways
Through technical precision and creative design, the Cryptographic Connection Museum demonstrated how cryptography can solve real-world problems while inspiring collaboration and innovation. The Cursive Connection app showed how privacy-preserving tools can foster meaningful relationships, while the museum’s exhibits brought cryptography’s potential to life in ways that inspired curiosity and engagement. Together, these elements underscored Ethereum’s vision of an infinite garden, cultivating a thriving, interconnected community built on trust and innovation.
With projects like these, we continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible, demonstrating that cryptography isn’t just about securing systems — it’s about creating a future where technology and humanity grow in harmony.
