FratRat

FratRat is a dating app for college students, built as a native iOS app on top of zkRP, an encrypted peer-to-peer network that puts privacy first. Matching, messaging, and photos move over zkRP's encrypted transport and mailboxes rather than through a central server that can see everyone's data.

Why zkRP

Dating data is some of the most sensitive data a person has, so FratRat was built on zkRP specifically because zkRP is privacy-first by design:

• No central broker that sees everything. Peers talk over an encrypted P2P transport; relays route messages they cannot read.
• Anonymous enrollment. zkRP proves an account is eligible and issues a blind credential without storing an identity. The only thing persisted is a set of nullifiers ("has this address enrolled?"), never a mapping to a person.
• End-to-end-encrypted messaging. Direct messages and party updates are encrypted client-side; the network only routes ciphertext by mailbox id.
• Photos as encrypted blobs. Profile photos are stored in zkRP's blob store as opaque, client-encrypted blobs (the app holds the keys), not as public images on a server.
• Prove without revealing. zkRP's zero-knowledge primitives let the app validate bounded claims such as age or distance without exposing the underlying values.

A network per university

The goal is an isolated network per university: each school is its own network, so students discover and match within their own campus rather than in one global pool. This is both a privacy and a relevance decision, and it maps cleanly onto zkRP:

• Enrollment is tied to a university. A student's profile carries their college, and enrollment is gated by a university email, so membership in a campus network is verifiable without the network learning who the student is.
• Each campus is its own mesh. zkRP relays serve named gossipsub meshes, so a university's traffic can live on its own mesh, isolated from every other school.

The app runs on a FratRat mesh today; per-university meshes are the direction this isolation model is built toward.

How the app uses zkRP

FratRat embeds the zkRP client (via libghost) and speaks to the network directly from the phone:

• Relay discovery and connection. The mesh layer discovers zkRP relays over gRPC and connects, tracking connection state in the UI.
• Broadcast and discovery happen over the zkRP ghost protocol on a shared topic.
• Matches and chats use zkRP mailboxes for store-and-forward, so a message reaches someone whose phone is offline and is delivered on reconnect.
• Parties are shared mailboxes for an event: everyone at a party registers, and a party update reaches all of them at once.

Platform

Native iOS, built in SwiftUI. The app is organized into Discover, Matches, Chat, Party, Profile, and Settings, with the zkRP mesh integration in Mesh/ and the generated network stubs in Generated/.

Related

zkRP is the encrypted, privacy-first P2P network FratRat runs on.