「ETH Bottom Returns Still a Youth, Foundation Strategy Makes a 180-Degree Turn」
The Ethereum Foundation released a strategic update titled 'The Future of Ecosystem Development at the EF' on July 10.
This strategy resembles an internal coup, with new talent starting to take the lead, focusing on four key directions.
📌 Among them, zkEVM and ZKP are the core points of the strategy. The project @tenprotocol just happens to be at the intersection of these two points.
TEN Protocol, developed by Obscuro Labs and initially incubated by global enterprise software company R3, is an Ethereum Layer 2 solution focused on privacy and scalability.
In March 2024, TEN completed a $9 million Series A funding round, valuing the company at $30 million, led by R3 with contributions from Republic Crypto, KuCoin Labs, and others.
According to the roadmap, Ten is expected to launch its mainnet in October. TEN is currently in the 'final chapter' of its incentivized testnet.
The project is expected to go live in one or two months, so the current final chapter testnet is the last opportunity for free testing.
📌 Introduction to the project
The founding team of TEN comes from a more established system—R3, a veteran player in the financial industry promoting the implementation of private chains.
This company initially served institutions like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, developing the Corda enterprise-level blockchain, with the goal of 'enabling banks to utilize blockchain.' In the case of TEN, they have shifted direction, but the underlying goal remains unchanged: to enable financial institutions to conduct trustworthy transactions on public chains.
What TEN aims to rebuild is an 'invisible on-chain execution layer,' which aligns perfectly with one of the strategic priorities of the Ethereum Foundation for the future: zkEVM.
Currently, most Layer 2 solutions are focused on one direction: moving data on-chain and making interactions efficient. However, TEN's approach is the opposite; it aims to address not 'seeing more clearly' but rather 'what is invisible is what matters.'
TEN's chosen path is to place all smart contracts and transaction executions within a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), while introducing a Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) mechanism to construct an execution layer that is both confidential and verifiable.
In this system:
- Transaction content cannot be seen by any third party, avoiding strategy leaks, ordering attacks, and MEV arbitrage.
- Contract execution is completed within an enclave, with only the results verifiable from the outside, while the process remains opaque.
- The application layer can build non-reproducible prediction markets, identity systems, and AI agents.
Such a system can actively remove visibility and shift towards structural confidentiality.
📌 Why is TEN favored by R3 and aligned with the Foundation's strategy?
R3's role ensures that it does not invest in 'speculative products'—it only invests in 'structures that need regulatory compatibility in the future.'
Future themes such as RWA, AI trading, and Web3 identity cannot thrive in an environment that is fully visible, where strategies can be replicated, and transactions are auditable. What they need is an execution system that can verify results without intervening in the process.
The execution architecture provided by #TEN is not just a 'technical innovation.' It is more like a foundational capability reserved for real scenarios in the next phase—this is precisely what the Foundation highlighted as an ecological pillar in its strategic update.
@tenprotocol is the first Layer 2 project to obtain the Ethereum Foundation's new strategic 'entry ticket' @cookiedotfun #snaps.
