How We Build: Boundless Product Engineering and the Post-TGE Era

Original Source: Brett Carter, Vice President of Product at Boundless
Original Translation: peggy

With the official launch of Boundless, we can finally pause for a moment to reflect on this journey and look ahead to the future. This successful launch is not just a technical milestone, but also an important step toward our vision of a decentralized, efficient, and user-friendly ZKVM proof protocol. We have achieved something remarkable: Boundless and its proof marketplace are now fully live. More importantly, we have successfully resolved the organization's short-term survival crisis. Now, thanks to the team's efforts, Boundless has become the first truly decentralized, permissionless protocol capable of handling any general-purpose ZKVM proof request. The design and engineering work required behind this achievement was immense and deserves our sincere celebration.

On the road to mainnet, we collaborated with dozens of protocols, tested and iterated on various design prototypes, and successfully attracted around 2,700 provers to join. To date, Boundless has generated proofs for over 20 quintillion cycles across 145 ZKVM programs, and may have created the largest ZKVM proof to date—over 100 billion cycles.

Boundless is a user-centric multilateral marketplace that is rapidly evolving into a vast ecosystem. The protocol’s user base is highly diverse, including:

· Provers: such as A41, ZAN, Cysic, Snarkify, Aoraki, Bitfufu

· Proof Pools: such as InfStones, zkPool, Mintair

· Requesters: such as internal teams, Rollup projects, DeFi projects, etc.

· Rollup Projects: such as Base, Citrea, BOB, Bitlayer, Linea, Katana, Taiko, OP Mainnet

· Channel Partners: such as Alchemy, Conduit, zkSync Elastic Chain, Caldera, OP Superchain, Arbitrum, Polygon Ag Layer

· DeFi Projects: such as Malda, EigenLayer, Lido

· L1 Public Chains: such as Hyli, Sei, Ripple, Stellar, Spacemesh, Cardano, Avalanche, Cartesi

· Cross-chain Interoperability Protocols: such as Wormhole, LayerZero, Across

We believe that Rollups, L1s, and cross-chain protocols are the most promising sources of demand for the future, and we will focus our resources on stimulating growth in these areas.

Our Future Direction

We have completed the foundational construction from 0 to 1. Next, Boundless will enter a new phase: scaling from 1 to 10. In this stage, our focus will be on two core directions:

· Making Boundless the lowest-cost, highest-performance proof network, driven by the PoVW (Proof of Verifiable Work) mechanism;

· Fully leveraging our abundant and inexpensive computing resources, as well as our strong engineering capabilities, to introduce as much real proof demand as possible.

We do not pretend to have a universal strategic blueprint that guarantees success. Although we have built infrastructure like Kailua, which enables rapid onboarding of new projects, we will continue to "do things that do not scale"—whether it’s Rollups, bridge protocols, or L1s, as long as there is potential, we will do our utmost to drive integration.

Current Top Priorities

With the rapid growth of the protocol, it is now time to "zoom out" and examine the fundamental elements that will determine our long-term success from a broader time horizon and strategic perspective. Currently, our main focus is further optimizing the marketplace.

· Fixing the Market Mechanism: There is still significant room for growth in market participation. Many provers have chosen between "participating in the market" and "switching to mining," with the latter becoming mainstream due to lower costs and simpler operations. This binary choice limits the vibrancy of the market. Fixing this issue is the top priority for the Boundless engineering team.

Based on recent research and experience, we are confident that we can solve the market participation problem without adjusting the token economic model.

· Introducing Real Demand: Another key task is to bring in real proof demand. We need to win over customers and get them to truly start using Boundless. Currently, Citrea and Taiko are very close to launching, MegaETH has begun testing, and at least 5-6 other protocols are actively working on integration.

Our BD team will continue to focus on "converting the bottom of the funnel," ensuring that these potential customers can smoothly complete the onboarding process and truly become Boundless users.