Two Students from KU’s Blockchain Institute Represented at National Blockchain Conference in Denver, Earning Recognition from Sponsors

From Feb. 21 through March 2, KU Blockchain Institute sent two tributes to participate in The Eigen Games “hackathon” by EigenLayer at ETHDenver 2025. The event is the largest Ethereum conference in the world. Ethereum is a decentralized computing platform that uses blockchain technology to run applications. The conference is a community gathering for web3 and blockchain enthusiasts with networking opportunities, side events, adjacent “hackathons”, and learning summits.

This year, KU Blockchain Institute was fortunate to be sponsored by EigenLayer, also the top sponsor of the conference. Senior Micah Borghese and freshman Nischay Rawal spent roughly eight days building an EigenLayer Actively Validated Service (AVS), pitching their product to sponsors and investors at the conference. AVS is a piece of software that manages operators, restaking incentives, slashing and off-chain operations. With restaking, EigenLayer enables a new way of securing software on Ethereum’s consensus mechanism. Their project, dubbed VeriSure, is a decentralized web-based AVS designed for seamless medical insurance claim processing and validation, dramatically decreasing the time it takes for insurance claim validation from about two weeks to two minutes. The effort earned the duo first place on Gaia’s AVS + Zero-Knowledge Challenge and first place on Boundless ZKvm’s Zero-Knowledge Bounty.  

“When we settled on the idea of pursuing a healthcare related project, I immediately thought of privacy and compliance,” said Borghese. “From patient information to diagnosis codes, it doesn’t immediately seem like something that could benefit in an infrastructure like blockchain, where data is inherently public. I knew we had to use zero-knowledge proofs, but I didn’t know anything about them.”

Zero-knowledge proofs allow programmers to prove that a computation was performed a certain way, without revealing how it was performed or the underlying data behind it. “Considering the definition of zero-knowledge proofs, I figured we could construct a proof that validated a claim by parsing required fields to check for completion, check for logic field input, and passing that proof off to validators that will decentrally process our proof and make it on-chain, for reliable data tracking,” Borghese continued. “I learned so much from architecting this process!”

KU Blockchain Institute is a student-led technology initiative established under the Institute for Information Sciences.