Cryptographic Connections: Fall Retrospective

This year our team embarked on a journey exploring how cryptography can enable meaningful human connection while preserving privacy. This period encompassed three interconnected experiences: developing a novel cryptographic application, testing it during a pop-up city in Thailand, and showcasing our vision through a museum exhibition at Devcon SEA in Bangkok. Each phase revealed different aspects of the challenge and opportunity in building technology that puts humans first.

The Application: Building for Connection

At the heart of our work is Cursive Connections, a social application reimagining how people connect and share information in the digital age. When using traditional social media, we broadcast our interests publicly, creating a public, digital billboard of our lives. We took a fundamentally different approach: building a system where everything is private by default, yet designed specifically to surface meaningful connections.

Cursive Connections app interface showing privacy-preserving social connections

The technical foundation of Cursive Connections rests on three pillars to create natural, meaningful interactions using cryptography

• NFC accessories for onboarding + building private, verifiable social graphs,
• Privacy-preserving computations that discover meaningful connections without exposing personal data
• Features that strengthen community bonds while respecting individual privacy.

We are taking cryptography, a traditionally defensive technology, and reconsidering it as an offensive tool for connection. Rather than simply hiding information, we use it to reveal the most meaningful intersections between people – shared interests and availability, mutual connections, or intersecting perspectives – while keeping everything else private. This "selective reveal" creates serendipitous moments of connection that feel both natural and secure.

Privacy-preserving selective reveal interface

The Pop-Up City: Testing Ground for Connection

We tested Cursive Connections during Edge City's month-long builder residency in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Community members used the app to discover shared interests, contribute to community goals, and create deeper connections with people they met.

Each attendee wore an NFC-enabled wristband that served as their community identifier and entry point into the app. By tapping wristbands with phones, users could add each other to their private social graphs. When both parties consented, they could reveal specific intersections in private data they uploaded—like interests or perspectives—to spark meaningful conversations.

Edge City residents using NFC wristbands to connect

This data ownership model also created unexpected, dual benefits for members and organizers. By uploading their data to the app, members could anonymously contribute it to community wellness and productivity goals. Members gained a sense of belonging through these shared goals, while organizers could measure community success without tracking individual behavior. It was exciting to see the potential for a future where the celebration of collective achievements is enabled by giving users a choice to share their data and to do it anonymously.

Community dashboard showing anonymous data contributions

Yet this real-world laboratory also exposed crucial challenges. Some features required both parties to have their app out simultaneously, which limited organic discovery. Cryptographic computation speeds needed optimization for seamless interaction, and providing granular privacy controls needed to be balanced with quick, easy interactions. Most importantly, we learned that users needed education about the value of owning their social graph – a concept that becomes tangible only through experience.

Privacy-preservation is often perceived as defensive; hide your keys, hide your passwords, don't let anyone learn who you are. We have a hypothesis that there are offensive affordances of privacy which can connect people by only revealing the most meaningful intersections in their private data. By partnering with Edge City, we were able to test this hypothesis and we learned that when embedded in a community context, privacy-preserving technology can enhance rather than inhibit connection.

The Exhibition: Highlighting cryptography’s role in human connection

Edge City's pop-up community enabled our remote team to prepare in person for our exhibition at Devcon SEA in Bangkok. The exhibition transformed our technical work into something tangible and emotionally resonant by bringing together artists, technologists and researchers to showcase how cryptography has intrigued and inspired them. Upon entering the exhibition space there were interactive demonstrations alongside artistic interpretations that made various complex cryptographic concepts accessible.

Profiles include a vault for each user's private data

The journey from application development through community testing to public exhibition has shown that when we prioritize both privacy and human connection, we can create technology that enriches consensual human relationships. As we move forward, maintaining this balance while solving technical and social challenges will be key to realizing the full potential of privacy-preserving social technology.

Ready to help shape this future? Connect with us to explore how to bring privacy-preserving social technology to your community. Whether you're a builder, artist, researcher, or community organizer, there's a role for you in making these tools more accessible and meaningful.