The Gap Between Web3 and Web2: Can zkTLS Become a Bridge?

Web3 technology has made significant progress, with innovative solutions like Layer 2 scaling and zkVMs emerging one after another, and even cryptocurrency ETFs have received regulatory approval. However, for ordinary internet users, blockchain remains an inaccessible field, and their digital lives are still bound within the world of Web2.

The fundamental reason for this situation is not the limitations of the technology itself, but rather the inability of Web3 to reach users' everyday digital lives. Although Web3 has built powerful tools and infrastructure, most people still browse, trade, and socialize on centralized platforms that tightly control user data. To achieve mainstream adoption, the key is to connect the worlds of Web2 and Web3 in a trustless and privacy-preserving manner.

Bottlenecks that Web3 Struggles to Break Through

Our daily online interactions, whether it's banking transactions, social media, or government services, occur within strictly controlled ecosystems. Users' digital identities are fragmented across various platforms, each controlling a part of life. This fragmentation brings two core issues:

1. Data silo: Online identities are scattered across different platforms, each operating independently.
2. Lack of Ownership: Users do not truly own their data, at most they only have access rights.

These issues lead to many frictions in daily life. For example, proving income requires providing complete bank statements, and verifying an address requires uploading the entire utility bill. The existing system believes that the only way to build trust is through complete transparency, due to the lack of infrastructure for selective and verifiable disclosures.

Web3 promises to empower users with data control, but it still falls short in handling everyday data derived from Web2.

The Missing Key: Verifiable Web2 Data

To enable Web3 applications to leverage user-generated data without compromising privacy or introducing new trusted intermediaries is the real bottleneck. There are two main challenges faced:

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

Oracle providers have made progress in public data, but different approaches are still needed for individual-specific data ( such as financial records, qualifications, etc. ). This data often resides within encrypted channels after logging in and is not designed for extraction or sharing.

This is exactly where zkTLS shines.

zkTLS: A Bridge Connecting Web2 and Web3

zkTLS( Zero-Knowledge Transfer Layer Security Protocol) is built on the existing TLS protocol and introduces new functionalities: allowing users to extract and prove specific facts from Web2 data streams without revealing the full content and without trusting third parties. This achieves two key capabilities:

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

The working principle of zkTLS is: to capture the encrypted TLS session between the user and the website, generate a zero-knowledge proof to prove a specific statement, and then conduct trustless and private verification on the chain. This avoids exposing data to third parties or relying on centralized servers, instead embedding trust into the cryptographic proof itself.

Practical Applications of zkTLS

zkTLS is reshaping the boundaries between Web2 and Web3 across multiple domains:

Financial Services

• Point-to-Pool Credit Agreement: Provides traders, farmers, and businesses with unsecured USDC credit lines based on Web2 financial data.
• Flexible peer-to-peer lending market: Borrowers can privately prove income or account activity to unlock funds.
• RWA Tokenization: Achieving compliant on-chain assetization by verifying land or property ownership through government portals.
• Decentralized fiat to cryptocurrency gateway: Users can prove payments on platforms like Venmo and settle instantly without KYC.

Consumer Platform

• Game skin trading: Verify Steam data to achieve secure peer-to-peer transactions without platform intervention.
• Subscription content access: Proof of access to closed communities or premium content without the need for account linking.
• E-commerce rewards: Prove past purchases or loyalty program activities to unlock cashback or token rewards.

Identity and Reputation

• Privacy-preserving identity oracle: converting Web2 files and data into selective on-chain proofs.
• Cross-application reputation layer: verify credit scores, location, and other information to build verifiable user profiles.
• Trusted Work Profile: Create verifiable professional profiles based on employment history and social graphs.

Social and Content

• Attention Market: Users can prove they have viewed or interacted with ads, earning rewards while protecting their privacy.
• Game achievement verification: Prove game profiles and performance data to receive skill-based rewards.

Impact and Behavior

• Proof of sustainable energy usage: verifying ownership and usage of solar panels without exposing user identity.
• Fitness Rewards: Link exercise rewards to verified activity data without disclosing health or GPS information.

Emerging Frontier

• AI Decision Audit: Generate verifiable decision logs for autonomous agents.
• Anonymous expert certification: Allow whistleblowers and experts to validate qualifications without revealing their identities.
• Machine learning data validation: ensuring the authenticity of training data while protecting contributor privacy.

Looking to the Future

zkTLS not only makes Web2 data available in Web3, but also turns that data into assets that users can own. As more applications adopt zkTLS, we will see a compounding effect: more verifiable data leads to more powerful applications, which in turn gives users greater control over their data.

This is not meant to replace existing systems, but to empower users with control over their data, while building a path for trust, privacy, and composability to expand together. If encryption technology wants to enter the mainstream, it needs to meet user demands on the existing Internet. zkTLS provides the infrastructure to achieve this goal, enabling encrypted trust for Web2 data, privacy protection verification without third parties, a user-controlled composable identity layer, and new applications based on verifiable real-world interactions.

As more online experiences become accessible through verifiable claims, a new generation of applications will emerge. These applications will give users greater control, reduce friction, and unlock real value. zkTLS is not just a new protocol; it represents a completely new way of thinking, redefining how information flows between platforms and how trust is established on the Internet.