zkTLS: The Protocol Turning Web2 Data Into Verifiable Truth

The internet as we know it operates on a fundamental assumption: when data moves between servers and users, both parties inherently trust what they're seeing. This trust model has served the web well for decades, enabling everything from online shopping to banking. But what happens when you need to prove to a third party—say, a blockchain or a decentralized application—that the data you received from your bank is authentic? This question sits at the heart of one of crypto's most persistent challenges, and it's exactly what zkTLS aims to solve.

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In a comprehensive discussion on the Midcurve podcast, Opacity Network's co-founder and CEO Hersh Patel and Chief Vibe Architect David explored how their protocol is addressing what Patel calls "the poverty of verifiability"—the fundamental limitation that prevents most real-world data from being used in decentralized applications. Their conversation revealed not just the technical underpinnings of zkTLS, but also why the team chose to build on Solana and integrate with Jito Restaking, and what this means for the future of Web2-Web3 interoperability.

The Origins of a Mad Scientist's Obsession

Hersh Patel's journey to founding Opacity reads like a detective story spanning over a decade of crypto exploration. His introduction to cryptocurrency came in 2013 at the age of 16, when he became "fully peeled on Bitcoin and decentralization, probably right for the wrong reasons." Unlike many who entered the space chasing financial returns, Patel spent his formative years in crypto trying to build genuinely useful applications—an endeavor he admits led to numerous failures before the breakthrough that became Opacity.

A pivotal moment came during his college years when he helped a family friend determine optimal locations for Airbnb rentals in Chicago. His unconventional approach involved reverse-engineering Uber's mobile API to scrape driver location data, using their positions as a proxy for where young people congregated in the city. "I remember thinking at the time, all the APIs behind the applications we use is like a goldmine if only we can build on top of them," Patel recalled. This insight would simmer for years, eventually forming the foundation of what Opacity would become.

The technical foundation for Opacity emerged during Patel's tenure at Dimo, described as "Helium for cars"—a decentralized automotive network. Working on hardware devices that connected vehicles to the network, Patel began exploring software-only alternatives that could accelerate user onboarding. His proposal to reverse-engineer first-party automotive applications like the Ford mobile app and leverage TLS authentication for seamless integration was rejected by company leadership, but the seed had been planted.

Understanding the Poverty of Verifiability

The core problem that Opacity addresses is deceptively simple yet profoundly limiting for blockchain applications. When developers attempt to bring real-world information on-chain—whether it's verifying a Twitter handle, proving employment status, or confirming ownership of a specific vehicle—that information must be verifiable in a way that allows any observer to agree it's canonically correct. As Patel explained, "out of the box, the internet is like basically there's no information like that that's verifiable."

This limitation manifests across countless potential use cases. During his time at Dimo, Patel and his colleagues harbored "romantic ideas around using DeFi for car loans and car insurance." But when they actually sat down to build such applications, they discovered it was impossible. The root cause wasn't immediately apparent—what Patel describes as "the hardest thing to see in life is the thing that's not there, but if it was there, it'd make your life easier."

The thesis Patel eventually developed centered on this poverty of verifiability as the fundamental constraint limiting crypto use cases. While blockchain technology excels at maintaining verifiable records of on-chain activity, it has no native way to verify claims about off-chain reality. This gap has historically required one of two approaches: either convince data providers to actively participate in verification systems, or accept that certain use cases simply cannot exist.

The Failed Promise of Verifiable Credentials

Before arriving at zkTLS, Patel explored the world of verifiable credentials, working for Spruce ID, a competitor in the decentralized identity space. The technical solution behind verifiable credentials is relatively straightforward: organizations register public keys on a blockchain, then sign standardized JSON credentials (often using the JSON-LD format) that can be independently verified by anyone with access to the key registry.

The elegance of verifiable credentials lies in their simplicity. A credential might contain a user's name, employer, start date, and other relevant information, all cryptographically signed by the issuing organization. To prove employment, a user simply shares the credential with a verifier, who can confirm its authenticity against the on-chain key registry. Revocation is handled through published lists of invalidated credential hashes.

However, Patel quickly discovered that technical simplicity didn't translate to practical adoption. "The hard part is actually the BD because you have to convince people to actually implement software and start managing keys," he explained. The fundamental problem wasn't technology—it was incentive alignment. Organizations holding valuable data view that data as their competitive moat. Asking them to sign credentials that make their users' data portable is, as David colorfully put it, "literally like selling an Eskimo tearing his house down."

The incentive structure is inherently adversarial. Banks, social media platforms, and employers have no compelling reason to help their users export verified data to competing services or decentralized alternatives. Any such effort requires convincing organizations to "act against their own interests to help people that they don't care about, do something that they don't care about."

How zkTLS Bypasses the Cooperation Problem

The breakthrough of zkTLS lies in its ability to generate cryptographically verifiable proofs of web data without requiring any cooperation from the data source. When a user connects to their bank's website or a social media platform, they establish a TLS-encrypted connection—the same security protocol that enables secure web browsing. zkTLS enables users to prove to third parties exactly what data was exchanged during that session, transforming private communications into publicly verifiable facts.

The technical challenge is substantial. TLS was designed by Marc Andreessen and his team at Netscape specifically to protect sensitive data like credit card numbers during online transactions. The protocol establishes shared keys between client and server, which creates what cryptographers call "deniability"—neither party can prove to an outside observer what was actually communicated, because both possess the keys needed to forge messages.

"If you show me the response from your Chase bank account, I can't believe it because there's a potential that you could have faked it," Patel explained. For years, he believed this problem might be fundamentally unsolvable. The eventual solution involves sophisticated cryptographic techniques combined with economic security mechanisms.

Rather than requiring data providers to participate, zkTLS works entirely through the user. The user logs into their account, and the zkTLS protocol generates a proof that the data returned by the server is authentic. This proof can then be verified by smart contracts, decentralized applications, or any other system that needs to trust the information.

Economic Security Through Restaking

The key insight that makes zkTLS practically viable is the recognition that cryptographic certainty isn't achievable—but economic security is. The opacity protocol requires a network of nodes to facilitate proof generation, and these nodes must have sufficient economic stake to make malicious behavior prohibitively expensive.

"The best you can do is economic security," Patel acknowledged. "And that's probably why this ultimately how we are working with Jito where to generate these proofs off of HTTPS APIs, you need a restaking platform so people can run nodes and there's like a whole way you can define how these nodes have to operate and of course with slashing conditions."

Opacity's protocol design allows for amplifying security guarantees through repeated proof generation. Even if only one honest node exists on the network, verifiers can require multiple independent proofs, creating exponentially increasing confidence in the validity of the data. This approach provides practical security without requiring perfect trust in any individual participant.

The alternative—launching a native token to provide economic security—carries significant downsides that the crypto industry has learned through bitter experience. Patel pointed to Cosmos as an example of how even valid technical approaches can fail when token economics require unsustainable inflation rates to maintain security. "Even if you have useful apps being built on top of it, if the foundation doesn't have sound economics, it's just not gonna work."

The Jito Restaking Integration

Opacity's decision to build on Jito Restaking reflects both technical and practical considerations. The Solana-based restaking protocol allows node operators to stake existing assets—whether JitoSOL, USDC, or other tokens—rather than requiring them to acquire and hold a new native token. This dramatically reduces the barrier to participation and leverages existing pools of underwritten capital.

David articulated the business logic clearly: "If someone is obsessed with launching their own token, then you're never going to stop them. But it's sort of clear that the goal is to have a token, not to have a great business." For teams genuinely focused on building useful products, spending engineering time and legal resources on token launches represents pure overhead that could be better directed toward product development.

The integration also benefits from Solana's monolithic architecture. On Ethereum, a zkTLS application would likely need to coordinate between the L1 (where restaking state lives) and an L2 (where affordable transaction execution occurs). This requires bridging, introduces latency, and adds complexity. Solana's single-chain approach simplifies the end-to-end integration, particularly for consumer applications building on top of Opacity.

"The Solana architecture because there's just one chain ultimately just simplifies the end-to-end integration," Patel noted. This architectural advantage extends through the entire stack, benefiting not just Opacity but every application building on their infrastructure.

Earnify: Democratizing Access to Wages

Among Opacity's most compelling use cases is Earnify, an application that enables hourly workers to access their earned wages before their scheduled payday. The platform emerged from a chance conversation at DePIN Summit in late 2024, when a 20-year-old founder recognized how zkTLS could disrupt the predatory earned wage access industry.

The current landscape of payday lending and earned wage access services charges workers devastating interest rates—often hundreds or even thousands of percent annually—for the simple service of accessing money they've already earned. Companies like Go partner with large employers like Walmart to offer "early paycheck" services, but the terms remain deeply unfavorable to workers living paycheck to paycheck.

Earnify's innovation lies in shifting verification from retrospective to real-time. By having users log into their HR systems (ADP, Gusto, or similar platforms) and prove their hours worked and wage rates, the platform can underwrite loans based on present circumstances rather than past payment history. This dramatically reduces risk, enabling Earnify to offer the service for free while still maintaining a viable business model.

"You can basically live stream people their wages," Patel explained. The platform launched in January and rapidly achieved remarkable traction, reaching number one in the Finance category of the Apple App Store. For Patel, this represents something profound: "We were able to use crypto to provide a non-predatory alternative that actually solves a problem for everyday Americans, which is a pretty big accomplishment for crypto."

Daisy: Revolutionizing Influencer Marketing

Another breakout success built on Opacity is Daisy, a platform that allows social media influencers to verify their TikTok and Instagram activity to earn rewards from brands. The company addresses fundamental inefficiencies in the influencer marketing industry—an intermediated market where multiple companies specialize in managing relationships between brands and content creators.

The founder of Daisy, who appeared on stage at Solana's Accelerate conference, brings deep industry experience to the problem. As David explained, "he's worked in influencer marketing his entire career. And he said every new job that he's gotten, he just gets closer and closer to the influencer. And with Daisy, he's just at the end of it, he's just dealing with the influencer directly."

Without zkTLS, programmatic influencer compensation remains impossible. Brands can't automatically verify that an influencer posted specific content or achieved certain engagement metrics. Everything requires manual verification, contract negotiations, and delayed payouts spanning months. By enabling influencers to cryptographically prove their activity, Daisy transforms the entire value chain.

The data being verified is public—no one disputes that TikTok videos exist or that engagement metrics are real. But making that information programmatically verifiable enables automation, reducing friction and enabling direct stablecoin rewards to flow to creators. This creates value for all participants: influencers get paid faster, brands achieve more efficient marketing, and TikTok benefits from increased content creation activity.

KYD: Unlocking Value for Live Entertainment Venues

Keep Your Distribution (KYD) represents yet another vertical where zkTLS enables previously impossible financial products. The platform focuses on music venues—businesses that generate substantial, predictable cash flows but face significant capital requirements for booking artists, renovations, and operations.

These venues often find themselves locked into relationships with platforms like Ticketmaster, which control their revenue streams and distribution channels. Traditional lenders struggle to underwrite these businesses because their revenue isn't visible through conventional financial channels. By enabling venues to verify their ticketing sales and revenue data through zkTLS, KYD can facilitate DeFi loans to creditworthy businesses that simply lack access to traditional capital markets.

David noted that KYD is already closing seven-figure deals, demonstrating that the value proposition resonates with real businesses facing genuine pain points. "These are incredible businesses that literally print cash. They just need a bunch of money upfront to book artists and do renovations."

The pattern is consistent across these use cases: entities with valuable data locked inside platforms they don't control can now export that data in a verifiable format, unlocking new financial services and business models that were previously impossible.

Invoice Factoring and the Time Value of Money

One of the clearest demonstrations of zkTLS's potential lies in invoice factoring—a multi-trillion dollar market where businesses receive early payment for outstanding invoices. The industry is particularly prevalent in trucking, where approximately 50% of U.S. operations use factoring services to bridge the gap between delivering goods and receiving payment from customers like Coca-Cola.

The current invoice factoring process involves remarkable inefficiencies. Companies routinely share passwords with financial intermediaries who manually verify invoices. The industry suffers from a classic double-spend problem—nothing prevents a trucking company from selling the same invoice to multiple factors. This has led to each U.S. state maintaining separate registries of factored invoices, adding bureaucratic overhead to every transaction.

zkTLS transforms this complex human process into a purely software operation. Users can prove their pending invoices directly from the relevant platforms, eliminating password sharing, enabling real-time verification, and preventing duplicate factoring. Combined with stablecoin rails, the entire workflow from invoice creation to payment receipt can be automated.

"The pattern that I noticed originally is crypto, we all agree is useful, but the utility of it is actually constrained by the adoption of it," Patel observed. If only three merchants accept stablecoins, the technology isn't particularly useful regardless of its technical merits. zkTLS serves as a "forcing function" that enables crypto utility without requiring end parties to directly onboard—Coca-Cola and trucking companies can continue using their existing systems while still benefiting from blockchain-based financial infrastructure.

Beyond Finance: AI Applications and Data Integrity

While financial applications dominate Opacity's current use cases, the team is exploring applications in artificial intelligence that highlight a different dimension of the verifiability problem. David described a new partnership with an AI company building a LinkedIn-based assistant—a high-quality concierge product that analyzes professional networks to make recommendations.

Even without explicit economic incentives for fraud, AI systems face significant risks from unverifiable data. Consider a scenario where someone fabricates thousands of DM conversations with prominent figures. An AI assistant might then recommend that the actual prominent person reconnect with their "frequent correspondent"—destroying the product's credibility. "Your product's actually dead in the water if you cannot have people faking these connections," David noted.

The financial system makes data integrity failures obvious and immediate—fraudulent wire transfers are clearly problematic. But AI systems face subtler trust issues where data accuracy directly impacts product quality. Being able to verify that LinkedIn connections and communications are authentic represents a foundational requirement for building reliable AI products on social data.

This expansion beyond pure finance suggests that zkTLS's addressable market extends far beyond the DeFi applications most commonly discussed in crypto contexts. Any system that needs to trust data from external sources—whether for AI training, business intelligence, or automated decision-making—potentially benefits from verifiability guarantees.

The User-Centric Design Philosophy

A crucial aspect of Opacity's approach is that all verification flows through the user. The company cannot scrape data, harvest information, or operate without explicit user participation. Every proof requires the user to log into their account and authorize the verification process. This creates natural alignment between Opacity and end users, as the protocol has no way to extract value without user consent.

"Because you need the user to log in to validate their data, you're sort of forced to stand by them," David explained. "You have no way to create something predatory because people will just say, 'I'm going to go to another zkTLS provider that treats me better.'" This constraint shapes the entire ecosystem—any application built on Opacity inherits the same user-centric orientation.

The design also addresses common concerns about data sovereignty. Users aren't surrendering control of their data to a new intermediary; they're simply proving facts about their existing data to whomever they choose. The proof attestations can be stored wherever makes sense for the application—on a blockchain, in AWS, or anywhere else. The choice belongs to developers building specific products, not to Opacity as infrastructure.

This philosophy extends to the developer experience. Opacity provides an SDK that allows developers to define their own instruction sets for interacting with APIs, rather than waiting for Opacity to add support for specific platforms. A developer experimenting with a new use case can immediately start building by examining browser network requests and defining the relevant API interactions. More robust mobile API integrations—which are more stable than web APIs—can be developed later as applications scale.

Why Solana: Culture and Technical Fit

Opacity's engagement with the Solana ecosystem emerged organically, with several of their partner applications independently choosing to build on Solana before any formal ecosystem commitment. This pattern provided a clear signal that warranted deeper exploration, leading to partnerships with Jito and broader involvement in the Solana developer community.

Patel expressed regret at not exploring Solana earlier, noting stark differences in ecosystem culture compared to his prior experience in Ethereum-adjacent communities. "One day of quote unquote BD at Accelerate was way more valuable than a week of BD at ETH Denver," he observed. The Solana ecosystem's practical focus on user-facing applications—discussions of frontend frameworks rather than abstract smart contract patterns—aligned naturally with Opacity's consumer-oriented approach.

The cultural differences extend beyond technical priorities. In Ethereum spaces, Patel found himself frequently drawn into philosophical debates about why zkTLS was preferable to alternatives like signed data. These conversations, while potentially valuable for establishing first principles, consume time that could be spent on product development. Solana's builder culture tends toward pragmatic evaluation: does this technology solve real problems for real users?

Jito's engagement exemplified this practical orientation. Rather than accepting Opacity's pitch at face value, the Jito team sought to validate the business value proposition by talking directly to teams building on zkTLS. This "show me, don't tell me" approach resonated with Opacity's own philosophy and suggested genuine alignment on what matters in evaluating new technology.

Evaluating Opportunities: The Founder Framework

Given the breadth of potential zkTLS applications, Opacity has developed frameworks for identifying promising opportunities versus those unlikely to succeed. Patel admitted to limited confidence in predicting the next breakthrough use case—Earnify and Daisy both emerged from unexpected conversations rather than systematic market analysis. However, certain patterns have emerged from successful projects.

The common thread involves intermediated markets where someone with deep industry expertise recognizes that going directly to end users through zkTLS would be dramatically more efficient than operating through existing intermediaries. The founders of successful Opacity-powered applications invariably possess specialized knowledge of their target markets—whether influencer marketing, payroll systems, or entertainment venues.

"A really bullish sign is when you meet a founder who has deep expertise in a particular intermediate market that we may not have ever heard of," Patel explained. These founders understand both the inefficiencies of current approaches and the specific data verification requirements that would enable disruption.

David articulated more tactical filtering criteria from the business development perspective. Understanding fundamental business metrics—user acquisition, retention, customer lifetime value, willingness to pay—remains essential regardless of crypto involvement. "Getting down to the brass tacks of who's using your shit, do they actually like it, are they willing to pay for it—these things matter."

The team actively avoids projects where token speculation appears to be the primary driver. "If they just come to us like, 'we think we can use zkTLS to pump a token,' they can. Unfortunately, that's not a good business for us," David noted. This filter helps ensure that Opacity's resources support genuine value creation rather than redistribution schemes.

The SDK and Developer Experience

Opacity's technical integration prioritizes developer experience over infrastructure complexity. Applications don't require blockchain wallets, gas tokens, or deep crypto expertise to implement zkTLS verification. The user experience mirrors familiar Web2 patterns: log into TikTok, log into DoorDash, prove your relevant data. The complexity of cryptographic proof generation remains hidden behind standard API integrations.

"Log in with Google—we didn't always have that. That's pretty good," David observed. "We didn't need to reinvent the wheel." By maintaining familiar interaction patterns while adding verifiability capabilities, Opacity reduces the adoption barrier for both developers and end users.

The SDK's flexibility allows developers to define custom API integrations, though this requires understanding how to extract relevant data from target platforms. For web applications, developers can inspect browser network requests to identify relevant API endpoints and response formats. This self-service capability enables rapid prototyping without waiting for Opacity to expand their official integrations.

As applications scale, more robust mobile API integrations become valuable. Mobile APIs change less frequently than web APIs—breaking changes require coordinated app store updates—providing greater stability for production applications. Opacity provides tooling to alert developers when API changes might affect their integrations, enabling proactive maintenance.

Competitive Landscape and Differentiation

The zkTLS space has attracted increasing attention, with fundraising activity and multiple projects pursuing similar objectives. Within Solana specifically, the emergence of the Solana Attestation Service (SAS) represents a related approach to data verification. However, Patel drew clear distinctions between zkTLS and attestation-based systems.

Attestation services like SAS likely operate through key registration—organizations register public keys on-chain and sign attestations for their users' data. This mirrors the verifiable credentials approach Patel pursued earlier in his career, inheriting the same fundamental challenge: organizations must actively participate by managing keys and signing attestations.

"The bottleneck there is you're gonna have to go convince people to make software changes to start actually managing keys and signing attestations," Patel explained. "The beautiful thing about how we do it is you don't need that at all." zkTLS requires only user participation, not organizational cooperation, fundamentally changing the adoption dynamics.

For Web2 data verification, this distinction is decisive. Banks, social media platforms, and employers have no compelling business reason to actively enable data portability. zkTLS's ability to operate without their cooperation removes the most significant barrier to real-world application.

The Vision: A Rainforest Internet

Patel articulated a compelling vision for the internet's future: "The internet today is basically like a large industrial monocrop farm. And the goal we want to get to is make it more like a healthy rainforest." This ecological metaphor captures both the current concentration of power among large platforms and the potential for zkTLS to enable greater diversity and user agency.

Rather than placing big tech companies at the center of the internet, zkTLS enables putting users at the center. Users control their data relationships, choosing when and with whom to share verified information. This aligns with the original promise of cryptocurrency that excited Patel in 2013—decentralization that empowers individuals rather than institutions.

The timing appears favorable for this vision. The United States has adopted a more crypto-friendly regulatory posture, providing clearer legal frameworks for blockchain applications. Institutional adoption of crypto rails continues accelerating. The foundational pieces for mainstream crypto utility are increasingly in place.

"There's a lot of work to be done. There's a tremendous amount of opportunity now that this tech is getting legal clarity," Patel concluded. For developers interested in exploring zkTLS applications, the invitation is open: the team remains accessible through X and Farcaster, ready to explore how user-centric data verification might transform their target markets.

Lessons Learned and Ecosystem Reflections

The conversation revealed important lessons about navigating the crypto landscape. Patel admitted to being "successfully psyoped" by crypto Twitter, forming opinions about ecosystems like Solana based on social media discourse rather than direct investigation. Direct engagement with Solana builders and users revealed a dramatically different reality than the narratives prevalent in some corners of the internet.

"Going to talk to people who are building in the different ecosystems and assessing it for yourself" emerged as the core lesson. The nature of crypto—high stakes, ideological alignment, and speculative incentives—creates environments where social media signals are particularly unreliable. The best founders evaluate ecosystems through direct engagement rather than proxy measures.

David emphasized the importance of understanding both Web2 and Web3 contexts for zkTLS applications. The technology sits at the intersection of traditional internet data and blockchain infrastructure. Founders who deeply understand one side but ignore the other face significant disadvantages. The ideal team combines understanding of why Web2 data is valuable with appreciation for blockchain capabilities.

The Restaking Economics Advantage

The choice to build on Jito Restaking rather than launching a native token deserves deeper examination. Traditional crypto projects face a challenging bootstrap problem: they need economic security to protect their networks, but generating that security through native tokens requires convincing investors to underwrite novel assets with uncertain value propositions.

This dynamic often leads to problematic outcomes. High inflation rates become necessary to compensate stakers for holding risky assets. Token prices become sensitive to sentiment shifts unrelated to underlying utility. The Cosmos ecosystem's experience—technically innovative but plagued by inflation-driven token economics—illustrates these risks.

Restaking fundamentally changes the equation. Assets like JitoSOL or USDC have already been underwritten by the market; investors have already done the work of evaluating their risk-reward profiles. Protocols building on restaked assets inherit this established trust without requiring additional underwriting.

"The more technical way of putting it is investors have to do some amount of work, spend some amount of time underwriting the risk of holding any asset, any token," the podcast explained. "If you have a large pool of capital that has already been underwritten, you could just use that as the stake versus having to convince a set of investors to underwrite the capital of your brand new token."

This insight extends beyond pure economics to reflect on priorities. Teams obsessed with token launches may be optimizing for speculative value extraction rather than genuine utility creation. Teams that embrace restaking signal focus on their core value proposition rather than financial engineering.

Consumer Applications and the Solana Advantage

The conversation consistently returned to consumer applications as the primary beneficiary of both zkTLS and Solana's infrastructure. Solana's architectural decisions—single-chain architecture, low latency, minimal transaction costs—align with consumer application requirements. Users don't need to understand or care about underlying blockchain mechanics; they simply experience fast, inexpensive transactions.

"Do you think days you or Earnify really care if stablecoin transactions happen within one second or a tenth of a second?" David asked rhetorically. Consumer applications compete on user experience dimensions that have nothing to do with throughput metrics that dominate blockchain marketing. What matters is whether the application solves real problems with minimal friction.

Solana's ecosystem culture reinforces this consumer focus. The prevalence of discussions about frontend frameworks over abstract protocol considerations suggests a community oriented toward actual users rather than technical sophistication for its own sake. For zkTLS applications—which inherently bridge Web2 user experiences with Web3 infrastructure—this cultural alignment proves valuable.

The organic migration of Opacity's partner applications toward Solana provided perhaps the strongest validation. These teams, possessing deep domain expertise in their respective markets, independently concluded that Solana offered the best environment for their products. Following their lead rather than attempting to direct their choices reflects confidence in their judgment about their own businesses.

The Apple App Store Parallel

An intriguing opportunity mentioned in the podcast involves the Apple App Store's payment timing practices. Apple holds in-app payment revenue for 45 days before distributing to developers—effectively capturing the time value of money generated by developers' work. This practice creates arbitrage opportunities similar to those Opacity addresses in other contexts.

For emerging app ecosystems like Solana Mobile's app store, zkTLS could provide competitive differentiation. If developers could prove pending App Store payouts and access those funds earlier through crypto-native financial products, alternative distribution channels become more attractive. The ability to underwrite loans against verified pending revenue represents exactly the kind of present-versus-past verification shift that enabled Earnify.

This example illustrates how zkTLS applications compound with ecosystem development. The Solana Mobile initiative creates new opportunities; zkTLS enables financial products that make those opportunities more attractive to developers; improved developer economics attract more and better applications; stronger application ecosystems drive additional users and value to Solana. Each piece reinforces the others.

Technical Implementation Considerations

While avoiding excessive technical detail, the podcast touched on practical implementation considerations for zkTLS integrations. Two primary API sources exist: web applications accessible through browser developer tools, and mobile applications requiring more sophisticated reverse engineering.

Web API integrations offer faster development cycles but come with stability tradeoffs. Server-side rendered applications may update their API contracts multiple times per week, requiring ongoing maintenance to keep integrations functional. Opacity's SDK provides immediate notifications when API changes break existing integrations, enabling rapid response.

Mobile API integrations provide greater stability because breaking changes require coordinated app store updates across all users. However, extracting mobile APIs requires specialized skills beyond standard web development. For early-stage experimentation, web APIs often suffice; production applications at scale benefit from investing in mobile API integration.

The integration model resembles Plaid's approach to financial data aggregation, with one important difference: Plaid faced an enormous cold-start problem, requiring substantial bank coverage before offering meaningful value to fintech applications. zkTLS integrations can be developed incrementally based on specific application requirements rather than requiring comprehensive platform coverage upfront.

The Path Forward

Opacity's roadmap centers on expanding their network of nodes through the Jito Restaking integration, enabling their growing ecosystem of applications to access increasing amounts of economic security. As successful applications like Earnify and Daisy scale, they drive proof volume through the network, generating revenue for node operators and demonstrating the model's viability.

The team remains actively engaged with developers exploring zkTLS applications. Their accessibility through X and Farcaster reflects commitment to ecosystem development rather than merely selling existing services. For founders with deep expertise in intermediated markets considering crypto applications, Opacity offers both technical infrastructure and business development support.

The broader vision—transforming the monocrop internet into a flourishing rainforest—requires patient ecosystem development. Each successful application creates templates and demonstrates possibilities for others. Each proof generated builds trust in the system's reliability. Each integration expands the universe of verifiable data available for new applications.

For the Solana ecosystem specifically, zkTLS represents infrastructure that amplifies the network's existing strengths. Consumer-focused applications benefit from inexpensive, fast transactions. Restaking integration provides economic security without requiring new tokens. The cultural alignment between Opacity's pragmatic builder orientation and Solana's shipping culture creates natural collaboration opportunities.

The podcast concluded with an invitation: developers interested in exploring zkTLS applications should reach out directly. The team's responsiveness to inbound interest reflects understanding that the most valuable applications will emerge from founders with specialized knowledge they don't possess. The infrastructure exists; the opportunity awaits those who can recognize where verifiable data unlocks currently impossible products.

Facts + Figures

• Hersh Patel has been involved in cryptocurrency since 2013, when he was 16 years old, making his crypto career span over a decade.

• Opacity Labs was formally founded in November 2023, establishing the company as relatively new but rapidly gaining traction.

• Approximately 50% of U.S. trucking operations use invoice factoring services, representing a multi-trillion dollar market opportunity for zkTLS applications.

• Earnify, an application built on Opacity, reached number one in the Finance category of the Apple App Store shortly after launching in January.

• Traditional earned wage access services charge interest rates as high as 500-1000%+ annually, while Earnify offers similar services for free by leveraging zkTLS verification.

• Keep Your Distribution (KYD), a venue financing platform using Opacity, is already closing seven-figure deals with entertainment businesses.

• Apple holds App Store developer payments for 45 days before distribution, creating potential arbitrage opportunities for zkTLS-based financial products.

• One day of business development at Solana's Accelerate conference generated more value than a full week at ETH Denver, according to Patel's experience.

• Daisy, an influencer marketing platform built on Opacity, has achieved substantial revenue by enabling programmatic verification of social media activity.

• The TLS protocol was originally added to Netscape by Marc Andreessen to enable secure online shopping and credit card transactions.

• Each U.S. state maintains separate registries for factored invoices to prevent double-spending in the trucking industry.

• Mobile APIs are significantly more stable than web APIs, with web APIs sometimes updating multiple times per week while mobile API changes require coordinated app store updates.

• Opacity's protocol allows verifiers to require multiple independent proofs, providing exponentially increasing security guarantees even if only one honest node exists on the network.

• The Solana Attestation Service (SAS) represents a related but distinct approach to data verification, likely using key registration rather than zkTLS techniques.

• Opacity chose not to launch a native token, instead leveraging Jito Restaking to provide economic security through established assets like JitoSOL and USDC.

Questions Answered

What is zkTLS and how does it work?

zkTLS is a protocol that enables users to create cryptographically verifiable proofs of data received through TLS-encrypted connections without requiring cooperation from the data source. When you connect to a website using HTTPS, your browser and the server establish shared encryption keys, creating a secure channel that neither party can prove to outsiders actually occurred. zkTLS solves this by using a network of nodes that participate in proof generation, allowing users to prove that specific data came from specific servers. The economic security provided by staked assets ensures that nodes remain honest, as malicious behavior results in slashing penalties.

Why