Background

I got pilled on Bitcoin in 2013, when I was 16 years old. With my still developing brain I was right for the wrong reasons. What initially captivated me was the concept of disintermediating financial rails. I had a knack for finding ways to make money in the digital world, and the financial system has a bias against kids.

For some reason I actually cared about doing something useful with blockchain/crypto. For many years in the startup trenches I tried and failed to do anything useful. After some retrospective first principle thinking concluded a poverty of verifiability was to blame.

This thesis lead me to zkTLS as the best path forward. In Nov 2023 Opacity was formally incorporated and I became a founder. It’s been a wild journey, but I can confidentally say the thesis has been validated (Daisy, Nosh, Earnifi, EarnOS …).

I am very proud of what we have accomplished, yet I keep getting accusations that Opacity is not a crypto company. The purpose of this article is lay out a new narrative for crypto. One that includes stablecoins, restaking and opacity.

Decentralization and Trust minimization

The accusation of not being a crypto company is annoying because it has some truth. People have similar critiques of stablecoins and crypto-economically secured restaking protocols.

To understand let’s analyze invoice factoring as a zkTLS use case.

Alice owns a trucking company. She has an invoice from Coca-Cola to be paid in a month, but she needs the cash to operate the business. Alice goes to Bob, a invoice factorer, who verifies the invoice and fronts the money minus a fee.

We can use zkTLS to do this with smart contracts as opposed to a human-in-the-loop that happens today. Invoice factoring is a market on the scale of TRILIONS of dollars btw. This isn’t ‘crypto’ though. You don’t have the same guarentees as sending eth. Alice could run off with the money instead of sending to Bob.

The proper ‘crypto’ way to do this is to do all the payments between Alice and Coca-Cola on-chain. Using smart contracts Bob could have assurance that the payment would get redirected to him. The issue with this is it assumes the existing market is willing to move everything on-chain. The assumption of cooperation from the world has killed a lot of dreams in crypto.

The benefit of zkTLS is we can build and sell it today.

A New Narrative: Open Software Ecosystems

Look, here's what people miss. The crypto OGs are still obsessed with trust minimization above all else. It's understandable - after all, "don't trust, verify" is Bitcoin's original promise.

But market adoption tells a different story.

Market Reality Check

• Stablecoins are centralized as hell, yet their adoption has absolutely skyrocketed. Why? Because USD in a software-defined system is simply better than legacy banking. The market doesn't care about your decentralization purity tests when the alternative is waiting 3 days for an ACH transfer.

• Using an AVS via EigenLayer is faster to build and has better protocol economics than spinning up your own L1 or consensus mechanism. Restaking isn't "pure crypto" but it works NOW, and the capital efficiency is undeniable. Pragmatism beats purity.

• zkTLS has enabled brand new markets to be created on top of existing APIs. We don't need to convince the entire world to migrate to our crypto utopia. We can build bridges between crypto and the real world today.

The pattern is clear: open software ecosystems are winning, even when they make compromises on trust minimization.

I'm not saying trust minimization doesn't matter - it absolutely does. But the market is telling us that it's willing to accept trade-offs for usability, integration, and real-world impact. The purists hate this, but users vote with their wallets.

The new crypto narrative isn't about creating parallel systems that expect the world to adopt them wholesale. It's about building bridges, creating interoperability, and accepting that the path to adoption might be messier than we initially imagined.

Opacity fits perfectly into this narrative. We're not asking enterprises to rebuild their entire infrastructure. We're meeting them where they are, bringing crypto's benefits to existing systems. This is how crypto actually wins.