The Bridge Between Web3 and Web2: The Rise and Application of zkTLS

Although Web3 has built powerful tools and infrastructure, ordinary internet users are still primarily active in the Web2 environment. The cryptocurrency sector has made significant progress, such as the launch of Layer 2 scaling solutions and the emergence of zkVM, but for most people, blockchain remains a distant concept.

The fundamental reason for this situation does not lie in the technology itself, but rather because Web3 has not yet deeply integrated into our daily digital lives. Ordinary users still browse, trade, and socialize on centralized platforms that control users' data. To achieve mainstream adoption, the key is to connect the Web2 and Web3 worlds in a trustless manner that protects privacy.

Currently, our online interactions mainly take place within strictly controlled ecosystems, such as banks, social media, and government portals. This leads to two core issues: data silos and lack of ownership. Our digital identities are scattered across various platforms, each controlling a part of our lives, while we do not actually own this data.

This situation has caused many inconveniences in daily life. For example, when proving income or verifying an address, it is often necessary to provide complete bank statements or utility bills. The existing system assumes that complete transparency is the only way to build trust, due to the lack of infrastructure for selective, verifiable disclosures.

The emergence of zkTLS (Zero-Knowledge Transport Layer Security Protocol) provides new possibilities for solving these problems. It allows users to extract and prove specific facts from Web2 data streams while protecting privacy and not relying on third parties. zkTLS achieves on-chain verifiability and selective disclosure, enabling the proof of specific attributes without exposing the complete data.

In the financial services sector, zkTLS is being used to build innovative credit protocols and lending markets. For example, certain projects are developing unsecured USDC credit lines based on verifiable proofs of users in DeFi, centralized exchanges, and banks. Other projects support flexible peer-to-peer lending markets where borrowers can privately prove income or account activity to obtain funds.

On the consumer platform side, zkTLS makes data such as digital goods, subscriptions, and purchase history portable and verifiable without platform permission. This opens up new possibilities for secure peer-to-peer transactions and reward programs based on purchase history.

In the realm of identity and reputation management, zkTLS is transforming the issues of fragmented and overly exposed digital identities. Some projects are developing privacy-preserving identity oracles that convert data from Web2 platforms into selective on-chain proofs, allowing users to build verifiable cross-application profiles.

In the social and content space, zkTLS is unlocking user engagement data that is trapped on platforms. Some projects are exploring how to allow users to prove their interactions with content or advertisements while protecting privacy, thereby achieving a fairer attention economy.

In addition, zkTLS has also shown potential in emerging fields such as impact and behavior verification, and artificial intelligence decision auditing. It provides a way to prove real-world actions that is both transparent and privacy-preserving, laying the foundation for the development of decentralized coordination and autonomous agents.

As more applications adopt zkTLS, we might see a positive feedback loop: more verifiable data leads to more powerful applications, which in turn gives users greater data control. This is not about replacing existing systems, but rather about meeting user needs on the existing internet infrastructure and paving the way for encryption technology to enter the mainstream.

The emergence of zkTLS marks a new way of thinking, redefining how information flows between platforms and how trust is established on the internet. It provides the key infrastructure for building a more open, transparent yet privacy-protecting digital world.