The Bridge Between Web3 and Web2: The Potential and Applications of zkTLS

Although Web3 technology has developed powerful tools and infrastructure, the daily lives of ordinary internet users still remain in a Web2 environment. Despite significant progress in the cryptocurrency space, such as the launch of Layer 2 scaling solutions and the advent of zkVMs, blockchain still feels like a distant concept for most people.

The reason for this situation is not the limitations of the technology itself, but rather that Web3 is currently unable to deeply penetrate our digital lives. Most internet users are still browsing, trading, and socializing on centralized platforms that control user data. To achieve mainstream adoption, the key is to connect the Web2 and Web3 worlds in a trustless manner that protects privacy.

Challenges Facing Web3

Our daily online interactions mainly occur within strictly controlled ecosystems, such as banks, social media, streaming platforms, and government portals. This leads to two core issues:

1. Data silos: Users' online identities are scattered across various platforms, with each platform holding a portion of their information.
2. Lack of ownership: Users do not actually own their data; they only have access rights at most, and these rights can be revoked or restricted at any time.

These issues manifest in various frictions in daily life, such as the need to provide complete bank statements to prove income, or to upload entire utility bills to verify addresses. The current system assumes that complete transparency is the only way to establish trust due to the lack of infrastructure for selective and verifiable disclosures.

zkTLS: The Key Technology Connecting Web2 and Web3

zkTLS (Zero-Knowledge Transport Layer Security Protocol) builds new functionalities on top of standard TLS, allowing users to extract and prove specific facts from Web2 data streams without revealing the complete content or relying on third parties. This technology achieves two key capabilities:

1. On-chain verifiability: Proof that the data comes from a specific Web2 source and has not been tampered with.
2. Selective disclosure: only 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 that proof on-chain. This eliminates the need to expose data to third parties or rely on centralized servers.

Practical Applications of zkTLS

zkTLS is revolutionizing applications and services in multiple fields:

1. Financial services: Allow verification of income, cash flow, or account history without exposing sensitive documents, providing more possibilities for DeFi protocols.

2. Consumer platform: Makes digital goods, subscriptions, and purchase history portable and verifiable without platform permission.

3. Identity and Reputation: Allow selective disclosure of information from trusted sources to change the current fragmented and overly exposed state of digital identity.

4. Social and Content: Unlock user engagement data within the platform, making it portable and programmable.

5. Impact and Behavior: Enabling the proof of actions without monitoring, such as verifying the usage of solar panels or physical activities.

6. Emerging Frontiers: Providing key proof and trust infrastructure in the fields of artificial intelligence, autonomous agents, and decentralized coordination.

Future Outlook

zkTLS not only makes Web2 data available in Web3 but also allows it to be owned. As more applications adopt zkTLS, we will see a compounding effect: more verifiable data leads to more powerful applications, giving users greater control.

This technology provides the necessary infrastructure for cryptocurrencies to enter the mainstream, enabling encrypted trust in Web2 service data, privacy-protecting verification, a user-controlled composable identity layer, and new applications based on verifiable real-world interactions.

As our online lives become more accessible through verifiable claims, a new generation of applications will emerge that will empower users with greater control, reduce friction, and unlock real value. zkTLS is not just another protocol; it represents a new way of thinking that redefines how information flows between platforms and how trust is established on the internet.