My dear friend Reka went from treating sick animals to building the infrastructure for unlimited blockchain computation, and somehow along the way she's convinced half of crypto twitter that zero knowledge proofs are actually berries. It sounds unhinged, but stick with me, because if you've ever tried to understand zero knowledge technology, you know we desperately need someone to make it make sense.
I'll be honest: every time someone tries to explain zero knowledge proofs to me, my eyes glaze over about thirty seconds in. But here's the simple version: ZK lets you prove something is true without revealing the underlying data. Think proving you're over 21 without showing your birth date, or proving a computation happened correctly without re-running it. The magic is that no matter how massive the computation, the proof stays tiny.
The problem has always been that writing ZK circuits was impossibly hard. So Boundless built a ZKVM that lets you write normal Rust code instead, then added a decentralized network to actually run the proofs. Think Chainlink for computation instead of data feeds.
Sometimes the most interesting crypto stories start in the most unexpected places. Reka was a veterinarian in 2016 when she first discovered crypto, not because she was chasing gains, but because she wanted to build "more care, more flourishing, more freedom." She saw blockchain as the backend for a more independent future, one that could make humanity progress faster by putting the collective first.
That idealism led her through founding startups in food production and social media, then to Guild where she spent years scaling onchain communities. But even after helping hundreds of teams grow their audiences and building DeFi automation tools, something wasn't clicking. "Wasn't enough," she said. "I knew I needed to go deeper in the stack." So she took three months off to talk to 35+ teams building everything from L1s to rollups, logging over 100 hours of conversations with founders and VCs.
What was she really looking for? "Something that enables that future of more," she told me. "That enables that future that actually is and feels different. I wanted something that makes me believe that the things that are hard to imagine to be true can be true, and makes the impossible possible." It's a beautifully idealistic way to think about infrastructure, but that's exactly what drew her to zero knowledge. After all those conversations, she kept coming back to one conclusion: most of crypto's problems come down to computational limits. Blockchains are slow, expensive, and can't talk to each other easily.
Her original vision has only gotten clearer since 2016. "We've made enough mistakes as an industry that the path forward is less abstract now," she explains. "Finance was just the entry point. What matters more is the infrastructure we're building… tools that let us coordinate, transact, and interact peer-to-peer without needing permission. In the future I see, money fades into the background."
That's what drew her to zero knowledge and ultimately to join RiscZero to launch Boundless. But here's where it gets interesting: Boundless isn't actually a blockchain. "It has chain-like characteristics, but it's more than that," Reka explains. "It sits between existing chains, rollups, bridges, and even physical infrastructure. It connects compute providers, onchain networks, and the internet in a unified way." Her bullishness cuts through the usual technical jargon: "Look at what's happening with AI, intents and automations and tell me we are not going to fill every piece of 'free' computation we have. Humanity will need infinite compute, we aren't even close to having enough." ZK proofs can compress massive computations into tiny, verifiable packages.
Their first real use case, Signal, brings full Ethereum consensus proofs to Base, not the "probably fine" light client sampling most people use, but cryptographic verification of the entire network state. Once you can trustlessly verify any chain's state anywhere else, the concept of "my assets are on this chain vs that chain" starts to melt away. Your Ethereum NFTs could work seamlessly in Solana games. Your Bitcoin could earn yield in Arbitrum DeFi. No more wrapped tokens or sketchy bridges, just math proving that your stuff is actually yours, wherever you want to use it. It's like having a notarized receipt for everything that happened onchain, but one that any other blockchain can instantly verify. When the community crowdfunded $600k in less than a week to pick the next chain to prove, that told me people actually want this infrastructure built, not just theorized about.
But here's where Reka's Boundless lore gets delightfully weird. Faced with the challenge of making zk proofs accessible to god forbid actual real humans, she did what any reasonable person would do: she rebranded the entire field around fruit. "Berryfiable compute" started as wordplay on "verifiable compute," but it's evolved into a full multimedia experience that's somehow made ZK proofs... fun? Her berry NFT launch saw 1.5 million mints in 48 hours and accounted for 12% of Base's traffic. She's berryfied people at conferences, built a 9,000-person+ community around berry memes, and created an entire mythology where provers are farmers, requesters are chefs, and Boundless is the farmers market where computation gets bought and sold like produce.
It's absurd, but it works. The berry metaphor actually clarifies something important: just like you don't need to inspect every seed to know a berry is sweet, you don't need to re-run a computation to verify it happened correctly. The proof is compact, portable, and trustless. And just like a berry you can take anywhere and turn into something better. When she tweets "berryfiable compute has never looked so sweet" alongside team photos, you realize she's not just building infra, she's building culture around infra. In an industry that takes itself way too seriously, watching Reka turn zk into a fruit-based lifestyle brand feels like exactly the kind of creative chaos crypto needs.
What surprised me most about Reka's crypto journey is her perspective on the industry's maturity. "Crypto isn't fringe anymore. It's global. People know it, use it, and build with it. There's funding, infrastructure, real governance, data we can learn from," she says. "We don't need mass onboarding. We need to act like this is already a serious industry and push the boundaries of what's possible."
Looking ahead five years, she sees interactions becoming "way smoother and more natural, both online and onchain. Technology will be less siloed and way more personalized. The products that win will be the ones that feel socially alive, where your people are, and also deeply personal, where everything feels built just for you."
It's that same idealistic drive from 2016, just with a lot more technical sophistication and a clear target.
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Cheryl Douglass
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