The Integration of Web3 and Web2: Breakthrough Applications of zkTLS Technology

The cryptocurrency sector has made significant progress, with Layer 2 scaling solutions launched, zkVMs emerging, and ETFs being approved. However, most people still regard blockchain as a distant field, remaining at the stage of textual understanding and lacking practical usage experience.

The reason for this situation is not the technology itself, but rather the disconnection from our daily digital lives. Although Web3 has built powerful tools and infrastructure, ordinary internet users still primarily engage in the Web2 environment, browsing, trading, and socializing on centralized platforms that control user data. To achieve mainstream adoption, the key is to connect these two worlds in a trustless and privacy-preserving manner.

Reasons Why Web3 Has Not Been Able to Break Through

Our daily online interactions mainly take place in tightly controlled ecosystems, such as banks, social media, streaming platforms, and government portals. This leads to two fundamental issues:

1. Data Silos: Users' online identities are scattered across various platforms, each with its own independent rules and permissions.
2. Ownership Lack: Users do not truly own their data; they only have access rights at most, and this permission can be revoked, restricted, or monetized at any time.

These issues manifest in many frictions of daily life, such as needing to provide complete bank statements to prove income or uploading the entire utility bill to verify an address. The existing system assumes that complete transparency is the only way to build trust, due to the lack of infrastructure for selective and verifiable disclosures.

Web3 promises to empower users with control, but it has yet to deliver on that promise in handling everyday Web2 data.

Missing Key: Verifiable Web2 Data

The real bottleneck lies in how to enable Web3 applications to leverage the data that has been generated, while not compromising user privacy or introducing new trusted intermediaries. This involves two core challenges:

1. Verifiability: How to cryptographically prove the credibility of Web2 source data without relying on centralized oracles or APIs.
2. Privacy: How to prove only the necessary information without exposing the complete data.

zkTLS technology provides a breakthrough to address these challenges.

zkTLS: A Technological Innovation Bridging Web2 and Web3

zkTLS (Zero-Knowledge Transport Layer Security Protocol) is built on the existing TLS protocol, allowing users to extract and prove specific facts from Web2 data streams without revealing the complete content or trusting third parties. It achieves two key functions:

1. On-chain verifiability: proving that the data comes from a specific Web2 source and has not been tampered with.
2. Selective disclosure: proving specific attributes without revealing the complete data.

The working principle of zkTLS includes capturing the encrypted TLS session between the user and the website, generating zero-knowledge proofs, and verifying the proof on-chain. This avoids the need to expose data to third parties or rely on centralized servers, embedding trust into the cryptographic proof itself.

Practical Applications of zkTLS

zkTLS technology is revolutionizing data processing and application development in multiple fields:

Financial Services

By verifying income, cash flow, or account history, zkTLS enables DeFi protocols to offer more flexible services, such as unsecured loans and lines of credit. For example, some platforms are developing peer-to-pool credit protocols that provide USDC credit lines based on verifiable DeFi, CEX, and banking data.

Consumer Platform

zkTLS makes digital goods, subscriptions, and purchase history portable and verifiable without platform permission. This opens up new possibilities for peer-to-peer transactions, access control, and loyalty programs.

Identity and Reputation

zkTLS allows for selective disclosure of information from trusted sources, changing the current fragmented and overly exposed digital identity situation. Users can build verifiable cross-application reputation profiles without traditional KYC.

Social and Content

By making data portable and programmable, zkTLS opens up new avenues for attention markets and participation-driven rewards. Users can prove content interactions or gaming performance to earn rewards while keeping their data private.

Impact and Behavior

zkTLS enables the possibility of proving actions without surveillance, providing new opportunities for fitness, sustainability, and reward systems.

Emerging Frontiers

In the field of artificial intelligence and decentralized coordination, zkTLS provides critical infrastructure for decision verifiability, the credibility of anonymous communication, and the validation of training data.

Future Outlook

As more applications adopt zkTLS, we will see a compound effect: more verifiable data leads to more powerful applications, giving users greater control. This is not about replacing existing systems, but rather empowering users with control over them, building a path where trust, privacy, and composability can all expand together.

zkTLS provides the necessary infrastructure for encryption technology to enter the mainstream, achieving encrypted trust of Web2 service data, privacy protection verification without third parties, a user-controlled composable identity layer, and new types of applications based on verifiable real-world interactions. It is not just a protocol, but a new way of thinking that redefines how information flows between platforms and how trust is established on the Internet.