kipio
Permanent, private memory storage where users own their data.
Demo
About
Kipio is a digital sovereignty architecture that integrates Arbitrum Stylus (WASM) and Irys L1 Datachain to turn "cloud storage" into permanent, user-owned digital property. Photos are encrypted client-side before leaving the device, stored permanently through Irys, and indexed on-chain through a Rust-powered Stylus contract. The current MVP runs end-to-end on Arbitrum Sepolia with browser wallets. For ETHOnline 2026 I targeted the Ledger — Continuity track. Kipio already worked as a complete product, so the hackathon work was to extend it with hardware-backed signing without touching the smart contracts. The dApp now exposes two Ledger connectors through Wagmi v3, both routed through the Ledger Device Management Kit: one for physical devices over WebHID, and one for the Speculos emulator deployed on Oracle Cloud. Reviewers can experience the full signing flow — EIP-191, EIP-712, and on-chain transactions — without owning hardware, and users with a real Ledger get the same pipeline through a different transport.
How it's made
The frontend is Next.js + TypeScript. Image processing and AES-GCM-256 encryption run inside Web Workers before any data leaves the browser. Ciphertext is uploaded to Irys devnet, and the content hash plus the Irys transaction ID are registered in a Stylus contract written in Rust and compiled to WASM on Arbitrum Sepolia. For the Ledger integration I wrote a custom Wagmi v3 connector from scratch (src/lib/ledger/connector.ts) that wraps the Ledger Device Management Kit and exposes a Viem-compatible account. It is not a thin wrapper: it implements the full EIP-1193 surface — personal_sign, eth_signTypedData_v4, eth_sendTransaction, eth_signTransaction — and routes each method to the DMK SignerEth builder, while read-only RPC calls are proxied to a public client on the chain's HTTP transport. This is what allows ethers-based SDKs (like Irys) to sign through the Ledger without special-casing. The same connector is instantiated twice in wagmi.ts, sharing the DMK signer but using different transports: webHidTransportFactory for physical devices and speculosTransportFactory for the emulator. The Speculos transport accepts an ordered list of URLs and caches the first one that responds, so a single build targets both local Docker and a remote deployment via environment variables. The emulator backend ships a precompiled Ledger Ethereum app ELF and runs inside Docker on an Oracle Cloud Always Free ARM VM. The HTTP API (port 5000) is exposed through a Cloudflare Tunnel over HTTPS, which is what allows the Vercel-hosted dApp to talk to it without mixed-content blocks. A second tunnel exposes the VNC server (port 41000) through websockify, so the emulator screen can be embedded directly in the dashboard next to the upload pipeline. A few hacky details worth mentioning: the connector normalizes Viem's typed-data output before it reaches the device (Ledger rejects bigint chainIds and inline EIP712Domain entries), it maps DMK's {r,s,v} signatures into the 65-byte hex format Viem expects while normalizing v between 0/1 and 27/28, and it detects the active connector ID to surface the emulator URL only when the user is on the Ledger Simulator. Everything else — the contracts, the Stylus registry, the encryption layer — was left untouched, which was the entire point of the track.