As a developer who has been navigating the DeFi space for three years, I am familiar with various scaling solutions. Layer 2, sidechains, state channels, I've tried them all. But to be honest, most solutions have their own issues. It wasn't until I recently tried Boundless that I felt ZK technology might really take off.
First, let me talk about my pain points. Our protocol requires a large amount of off-chain computation, such as calculating user yield and assessing risk parameters. If all these computations are done on-chain, the gas fees would be outrageous. But if done off-chain, there are trust issues. Why should users trust that our calculations are correct?
The previous solution was to use oracles, but oracles themselves also have trust assumptions. Or using an optimistic approach, which requires a challenge period, leading to a poor user experience. ZK proofs theoretically can solve this problem, but it is too complicated in practice.
The emergence of Boundless has changed the situation. Through their SDK, I can write computational logic in Rust and then generate proofs to submit on-chain. The entire process does not require me to understand cryptography or to build the infrastructure for proof generation myself.
For a concrete example. We have a feature that calculates the value of a user's portfolio, which requires aggregating price data from multiple DEXs. Previously, this calculation had to be done entirely on-chain, costing hundreds of dollars in gas each time; or done off-chain, but users were not very trusting.
Now using Boundless, we run calculations in zkVM, generate proofs, and then only spend a few dollars on gas to verify the proof. Users can be assured that the calculations are correct because the proofs are verifiable. Costs have been reduced by 99%, and it is completely trustless.
The Steel tool is particularly useful. It allows me to directly call Solidity functions in zkVM. This means I don't need to rewrite existing contract logic; I just need to move the parts that need optimization off-chain. This gradual migration approach greatly reduces the risk.
But there are still issues. The biggest challenge is the time to generate proofs. Complex calculations may take several minutes to generate a proof. For some scenarios that require real-time responses, this delay may be unacceptable. The team says they are optimizing and hope to improve soon.
Another issue is cost. Although it is much cheaper than on-chain calculations, generating proofs still costs money. For small transactions, this cost may not be worth it. Our solution is batch processing, aggregating multiple user requests together to generate a single proof.
The overall development experience is quite good. The documentation is relatively complete, with detailed tutorials and sample code. The community is also quite active; when encountering problems, asking in Discord usually yields answers. This is much better than many projects that only have white papers.
I encountered some pitfalls during the integration process. For example, the memory limits of zkVM cannot handle large datasets. Also, certain Rust libraries are incompatible, and alternatives need to be found. But these are solvable technical issues, not fundamental obstacles.
From a broader perspective, Boundless represents a new development paradigm. Previously, we had to make trade-offs between decentralization and performance. Now we can achieve both: calculations are executed efficiently off-chain, and results are verifiably trusted on-chain.
I think this will give rise to a new batch of applications. For example, on-chain machine learning, complex financial derivatives, large-scale data analysis, etc. These functions that were previously impossible on traditional blockchains are now feasible.
Of course, technology is just one aspect. Whether Boundless can succeed also depends on ecosystem building. More developers need to use it, more applications need to be implemented, and a network effect needs to form. From the current momentum, I am still relatively optimistic.
For other developers, my advice is to try using the testnet first. Especially for projects limited by gas fees, Boundless may open up new possibilities. Even if it is not used in the end, it is valuable to understand the latest developments in ZK technology.
