Recently, @boundless_xyz has been quite active, reminiscent of last year.

Last year was the year I was most interested in ZK, although it was the year of BTC narratives, during that time ZK still had a significant voice on BitVM (although it was opZK 😂).

At that time, @RiscZero and @SuccinctLabs took two completely different paths, R0 chose to focus on applications and build a collaborative environment. SP1 chose to follow ETH and was the first to launch a usable ZKRollup solution - RSP. To be honest, the results were remarkable; several L2s adopted RSP or modified versions of RSP. Although later R0 followed up by making OP Layer2 ZK-compatible, the excitement was short-lived. (To be precise, the Layer2 race has ended; everyone realized that Layer2 is just a SaaS that costs 3000u a month.)

Now R0 and SP1 are also on two distinctly different paths. Succinct chooses to focus solely on its own brand; products are secondary, the key is to establish its name.

R0, on the other hand, has chosen to step back and fully support its own Boundless, so most of the current activities revolve around Boundless.

There isn't much to say about financing; these ZKVM projects are all top-tier and, overall, have the fastest speeds (of course, there are many other ZKVMs, like nexus, zkm, lita, blah blah blah, which we can discuss later).

From the overall positioning, Boundless seems more like an ecosystem software package, encompassing a series of products from top to bottom, allowing developers to easily build their own content, from proof services, verification contracts on various chains, related ZK programs, execution layers, and so on.

However, to be frank, the main core business of both R0 and SP1 still lies in the computation network they provide externally, which is also the core of ZK. Therefore, in the future, the two will engage in an arms race due to the economic models and participation levels of this computation network. So, to put it straightforwardly, the best way to participate in ZKVM projects is to become part of the computation network, which means running nodes (GPU nodes are more important).

However, that said, the use cases of ZKVM still revolve around simplicity; in most cases, they are proving things that are difficult to compute on-chain, with common examples being cross-chain data reading and writing or Rollup mechanisms that ensure security. These things feel a bit too far from consumers, and I hope there will be more scenarios closer to consumers in the future. (Perhaps RWA has a strong demand in this regard... but decentralized RWA itself seems a bit strange...)

I've always thought ZK is a very magical and interesting technology; unfortunately, it still needs a strong wind to be recognized in the current environment. However, I remain firmly optimistic about the future of ZK (not necessarily in Web3).