Introducing Boundless: The Verifiable Compute Layer | RISC Zero
Introducing Boundless: The Verifiable Compute Layer
Santiago Campos-Araoz
Blockchain technology emerged as a revolutionary solution to the double-spend problem, introducing trust in digital transactions without intermediaries. However, it required all participants to re-execute all data to achieve consensus. While this approach solved critical issues, it also introduced scalability challenges that have constrained the blockchain ecosystem's growth and potential.
Despite significant advancements in blockchain technology, we've reached a crossroads. The current paradigm, where onchain applications require global re-execution of all transactions, faces scalability limitations. Although more nodes make the network more secure, they don't enable more capacity as everyone must re-execute all data. But what if we could change this paradigm? What if we all could agree on data validity without everyone needing to re-execute it?
Starting today, we’re removing blockchain’s biggest barrier to bring the whole world onchain. Introducing Boundless: The Verifiable Compute Layer, which dramatically expands the capabilities and composability of all chains.
By harnessing the power of zero-knowledge proofs, Boundless enables blockchains to verify the correctness of computations without re-execution. This groundbreaking capability, known as verifiable computing, allows execution done by a single node in a network to be verified cheaply by every node.
Boundless brings this transformative capability to all blockchains, creating a new standard for efficiency and scalability. It preserves the core tenet of blockchains — decentralization and censorship resistance — while eliminating the constraints that have held us back.
On Boundless, developers can access:
Unlimited Execution: Infinite compute at a fraction of the cost, bypassing traditional onchain execution limits.
Global Composability: Seamless interaction with assets and information across different blockchain ecosystems.
On-demand Scalability: Elastic scaling with no performance trade-offs, meeting real-world demand head-on.
Uncompromising Security: Inherit the full security guarantees of the target chain.
Welcome to the Era of Boundless Possibilities
Boundless isn’t just enhancing blockchains — it’s redefining the entire web3 landscape by enabling verifiable compute for every developer, across every blockchain. This unification unlocks unprecedented possibilities.
Here’s what Boundless makes possible:
Modern App Experience. Blockchains applications are no longer forced to run at the speed of the slowest node. This dramatically increases capacity, allowing developers to build applications with the richness and responsiveness users expect from modern web services.
Verifiable AI. Verifiable AI models can now post responses that settle onchain, revolutionizing the integration of artificial intelligence with blockchain technology. Imagine smart contracts that can interact with sophisticated AI models, with the results verifiably recorded onchain.
Unified Global Liquidity. Decentralized exchanges allow users to implement advanced trading algorithms that seamlessly tap into the liquidity of all major ecosystems simultaneously, creating a truly interconnected and efficient global marketplace.
With Boundless, we're not just improving existing blockchain infrastructure and applications — we're enabling entirely new categories of decentralized services that were previously unthinkable. The future of blockchain is now truly limitless, practical, and unified.
The Magic Behind Boundless
Many in the blockchain community believe that zero-knowledge proofs, while promising, are too expensive and have too much overhead to be practical. We’ve already shown this is not true, and the limits of what is practical are expanding rapidly.
Boundless is built upon the latest generation of zero-knowledge proofs, enabling computations orders of magnitude larger than previously possible, at costs orders of magnitude lower. At the core of Boundless lies a powerful zero-knowledge stack, which is the key to enabling verifiable computing. The stack is specifically designed to address these concerns, making verifiable compute not just feasible, but efficient and cost effective for all chains.
Here's how each component of the Boundless stack makes this possible:
Build with Familiar Languages: Create any blockchain-based solution — from L2s and L1s to dApps and beyond — without grappling with ZK complexities or unfamiliar languages. Leverage the verifiability of ZK while coding as you would in modern software development.
Streamlined ZK Integration: A suite of powerful components including Steel, Blobstream Zero, and Zeth. This layer streamlines the developer experience, simplifying the integration of ZK technology into existing and new infrastructures and contracts, accelerating go-to-market times.
On-demand Decentralized Proving: An on-demand, decentralized network of provers that scales dynamically backed by a novel incentive mechanism, a type of ZK-mining. With built-in liveness guarantees and censorship resistance, it ensures applications always have the necessary proving power, adapting to demand in real time regardless of what network they’re on.
Efficient Proof Aggregation: Batch proofs from various systems, allowing for shared onchain verification costs and improved efficiency. As proof demand grows, onchain costs reduce significantly, making ZK solutions more economically efficient at scale.
Universal Proof Verification: Enables proof verification across any blockchain, allowing developers to inherit the security of their preferred settlement layer. This provides the foundation for cross-chain composability while giving developers the flexibility to choose their trust assumptions.
Global Composability and Execution: Boundless leverages ZKPs to enable seamless, native interaction between applications across multiple blockchains. This allows Boundless applications to not only interact across chains but also to securely compute using data from any blockchain, all without sacrificing trust or security.
These components work together to create a powerful, integrated solution for developers and blockchain networks alike. By directly solving the pain-points of ZK, this vertically integrated stack enables verifiable compute on any chain for the first time, unlocking unlimited execution, global composability, and infinite scalability—all with the security and privacy guarantees of ZK proofs.
Now in Early Testing
Boundless is already in early testing, demonstrating its capabilities in real-world scenarios. We’ve partnered with leading blockchain networks and applications to rigorously test and refine Boundless. These collaborations will help validate the design and accelerate the path to a public testnet.
The Future is Boundless
Boundless isn't just improving blockchain technology: it's redefining what's possible. We're creating a future where blockchain applications are as powerful, user-friendly, and ubiquitous as traditional web applications, but with all the benefits of decentralization and cryptographic security.
Today is more than just the introduction of Boundless. It's the beginning of a new era in Web3, one where the only limit is your imagination.
Are you ready to build without bounds?
If you're a node operator or developer looking to be at the forefront of this revolution, we want to hear from you. Complete the interest form to learn how you can contribute.
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