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Here's the thing about DeFi onboarding - it sucks.
Users want to prove they're legitimate humans without doxxing themselves. Protocols want verified users without the liability of storing passport photos. Everyone's stuck with slow, clunky verification that makes people abandon ship halfway through.
30-60 second wait times might not sound like much, but in crypto, that's an eternity. Users bounce. Platforms lose customers. The whole "verified, not doxxed" promise feels broken when the tech can't keep up.
Time to fix that.
Our latest Keyring Connect upgrade tackles three critical areas:
Faster Verification
Notarisation times slashed from 30-60 seconds to 15-30 seconds
Significantly improved user experience and conversion rates
Eliminated timeouts for users with slower connections
Enhanced Contextual Integrity
Bulletproof verification of claims within their full context
Zero tolerance for malicious data injection attempts
Enterprise-grade fraud prevention for sensitive applications
Expanded API Compatibility
Native support for chunked transfer-encoding
Broader exchange and platform integrations
Cleaner, more maintainable verification pipeline
The core performance improvement comes from TLS Notary alpha 10's architectural overhaul. The previous alpha 5 implementation relied heavily on an "online" phase where the client, notary, and API server interacted in real-time, constructing the TLS connection using garbled circuits. This was inherently latency-sensitive - slow connections to our notary could drag the entire process down, occasionally causing timeouts.
Alpha 10 shifts much of this computational work to an "offline" phase, where the client and notary handle cryptographic proofs without tying up the API connection. This dramatically improves reliability and reduces the impact of network latency on verification times.
Quicksilver Proving System: The offline phase now uses Quicksilver, a proving system based on Vector Oblivious Linear Evaluations (VOLE). Compared to the previous JKO13 garbled circuits, Quicksilver delivers substantially faster proof generation - like upgrading from dial-up to fiber for cryptographic operations. Combined with alpha 10's round optimizations in the MPC engine, this creates a much smoother user experience.
MPC-TLS Architecture: We continue to use Multi-Party Computation TLS over alternatives like ZK-TLS because it's fundamentally more censorship-resistant. Unlike centralized proxy solutions that exchanges could block, MPC-TLS permits direct or flexibly-proxied connections, ensuring platforms and users can always trust the verification process.
Beyond the TLS Notary upgrade, we've implemented significant security improvements:
Contextual Integrity: Our verification now requires users to reveal all HTTP headers and the complete JSON response structure (keys without sensitive values). This prevents malicious actors from injecting fake data into unexpected fields or headers that could fool our verifier. We enforce verification of claims within their known JSON path in the authenticated API response, ensuring every claim is legitimate.
Think of it like checking a passport - we don't just verify the name, we check the issuer, format, security features, and context. A claim of "verified: true" is only meaningful when we can prove it came from the right field, in the right response, from the right API endpoint.
Enhanced API Compatibility: Some exchange APIs use chunked transfer-encoding, which TLS Notary's built-in parsing couldn't handle cleanly. This forced us into workarounds that were harder to maintain and potentially weakened our contextual integrity checks.
Our solution adds native chunked encoding support and enhances TLS Notary's utilities to automatically enforce contextual integrity. This means cleaner integrations with complex APIs and more robust verification across different data sources.
Fast verification isn't just a nice-to-have - it's make-or-break for mainstream adoption.
For Protocols: Higher user conversion, lower bounce rates, institutional-ready compliance without data liability.
For Users: Prove you're legitimate in seconds, keep your privacy intact, access the same opportunities as institutions.
For the Ecosystem: This is how DeFi scales without becoming TradFi. Verified access that preserves crypto's core values.
We're not stopping here. Alpha 11 integration is already planned, new data sources are coming, and verification times will keep dropping.
Fast, anonymous, bulletproof verification. That's how we bridge institutional capital and user privacy. That's how DeFi grows up without selling out.
Ready to integrate verified access into your protocol? Keyring Connect takes 3 hours to set up and 3 minutes for users to verify. No passport selfies required.
Read on X:
Learn more: keyring.network
Integration docs: docs.keyring.network
Contact: contact@keyring.network
Justin Martin
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