Silhouette: Noir ZK scaffolding for busy developers

[mverzilli]

Summary

Silhouette is an open-source toolset that radically simplifies the process of creating apps that rely on zero-knowledge workflows. How does it work?

1. Developers specify data-types in a high level schema language (TBD exactly which one, for example we could use Zod or io-ts), including whether each attribute is public or private, plus a set of rules to verify.
2. A simple CLI command gets them a scaffolded repository including:

• A ready to use and modify Noir project
• A web standards based UI where users will input their data and generate proofs (using NoirJS)
• A REST API server exposing the verifier to the client
• Docker compose setups for local dev and staging/production deployment
• Github Action workflows for CI (test, deployment, artifactory, etc)
• ...more (to discover!)

This is just the starting point, our vision is to iteratively streamline the adoption of Noir based ZK proofs as just another building block in the toolbox of the web2 developer, just as things like auth, monitoring, logging, SSR and other aspects were streamlined back in the day.

Motivation

While Noir makes writing ZK proving systems more approachable than ever, the effort to bootstrap complete apps with proof generation, verification, and UI remains high. There are many moving parts. Developers must:

• Manually scaffold projects
• Properly manage and version verifying keys
• Write boilerplate code to integrate provers and verifiers into a working product

In parallel to this, newcomers to Noir need to get used to a different programming paradigm (my code runs but it also proves but it also generates a verifier???).

This on one hand leads to duplicated effort and on the other hand delays adoption.

Many teams, particularly those whose background is fundamentally in web2, are interested in ZK-backed workflows (e.g. anonymous surveys, private voting, reputation systems).

However, they often get overwhelmed by the amount of new concepts they need to grasp before even considering how to take advantage of these new superpowers in the stacks they are used to and comfortable with.

For more seasoned Noir developers, we believe Silhouette's value proposition is to streamline all that is around Noir, so they can focus on coding circuits and shipping them as components of bigger products.

Silhouette aims at mitigating these issues. Our idea is informed by recurrent FUD we hear from potential customers whom we pitch ZK solutions to. We want to build Silhouette so we can help move the discussion forward.

Methodology

We will develop Silhouette in the open, welcoming the community to open issues and contribute PRs on Github from the beginning. We're used to fully open source community management in general and developer tooling in particular through more than a decade stewarding the Crystal Programming Language and over a hundred open source repositories used in the humanitarian space, among many other projects.

We have a target product we want to build leveraging Silhouette (more on that on Business Model section), so from day one we will be dog-fooding it.

We will use community channels (Discord, Noir Forum) to announce and request comments about features as we set out to work on them.

We will release new versions continuously, at least until Silhouette reaches v1.0.

In addition to thoroughly documenting the toolset, we will periodically share how it can be used through blogposts.

Business Model

We aim at achieving long-term sustainability for the project by using it at the core of a SaaS for app developers who want to provide privacy-preserving features to their users but don't want to manage the operational complexities themselves.

The toolset itself will remain open-source and permissively licensed forever.

Timeline and Deliverables

Very rough plan subject to adaptation as we identify or discard features:

• July 2025: Project starts, first few features prioritized, initial decisions on design/architecture
• August 2025: first installer of Silhouette available, with project scaffolding: run a command and get a dockerized environment with a trivial Noir project, client-side prover and server-side verifier ready to push. At this point Silhouette is little more than a static project bootstrapper.
• September 2025: Noir scaffolding: you can now define schemas for your circuits' inputs, generated Noir function signatures and TypeScript types (or TypeScript JSDoc annotated JavaScript)
• October 2025: UI scaffolding: Silhouette generates simple UI forms based on your schemas, and the boilerplate necessary to generate proofs based on user input
• November 2025: Noir function scaffolding: you can now specify simple relationships between elements in your schemas, Silhouette generates Noir function bodies reflecting that.
• December 2025: Documentation site including "From zero to zk-hero in 10 minutes" tutorial showing how you can use Silhouette to implement and deploy (for example) an anonymous, anti-sybil survey webapp

Team

Manas.Tech

• Product Manager and Developer: Martin Verzilli (mverzilli --at-- manas.tech), CTO @ Manas.Tech, Crystal Lang Core Team Member
• Developer: Ana Perez Ghiglia (aghiglia --at-- manas.tech), Principal Engineer @ Manas.Tech
• Other roles as needed: the rest of Manas.Tech

Relevant experience:

• Martin is a core team member of the Crystal Programming language, was in the original development team of OpenZeppelin Defender, and led the development of the Noir Debugger
• Ana is one of the developers of the Noir Debugger, and extensive experience in high scale, high-throughput microservices

Start Date
July 2025