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

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

After the official launch of Boundless, we can finally take a moment to pause, reflect on this journey, and look ahead to the future. This successful release is not just a technical milestone but also a significant step towards our vision of a decentralized, efficient, and user-friendly ZKVM proof protocol. We have achieved a remarkable feat: Boundless and its proof market are now fully online. More importantly, we have successfully overcome the short-term survival crisis faced by the organization. Now, thanks to the team's efforts, Boundless has become the first truly decentralized, permissionless protocol capable of handling any general ZKVM proof request. The design and engineering effort behind this are immense and deserving of a serious celebration.

On the path to the mainnet, we collaborated with dozens of protocols, tested and iterated on various design prototypes, and successfully attracted approximately 2,700 provers to join. To date, Boundless has generated over two trillion trillion cycles of proof in 145 ZKVM programs and may have produced the largest-scale 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 Layer 1 Chains: Such as Hyli, Sei, Ripple, Stellar, Spacemesh, Cardano, Avalanche, Cartesi

· Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocols: Such as Wormhole, LayerZero, Across

We believe that Rollups, L1, and Cross-Chain protocols are the most promising sources of demand in the future, and we will focus our resources to drive growth in these areas.

Our Future Direction

We have completed the 0 to 1 foundational build-out. Next, Boundless will enter a new phase: the 1 to 10 expansion period. In this phase, our focus will be on two core areas:

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

· Leveraging our abundant and inexpensive computing resources, along with strong engineering capabilities, to onboard as many real-world proof demands as possible.

We do not pretend to have a one-size-fits-all strategic blueprint for success. While we have built infrastructure like Kailua that enables rapid onboarding of new projects, we will continue to "do things that don't scale" — whether it's Rollups, bridging protocols, or L1, as long as there is potential, we will go all-in to drive adoption.

Current Top Priority

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 or failure from a longer-term time and strategic perspective. Currently, our focus will be further optimizing the market.

· Fixing Market Mechanics: There is still significant room for growth in market participation. Many validators have had to choose between "market participation" and "turning to mining," with the latter becoming mainstream due to lower costs and simpler operations. This binary choice limits market vitality. Fixing this issue is the top priority for the Boundless engineering team.

Based on recent research and experience, we are confident that we can address the issue of market participation without adjusting the tokenomics.

· Introduction of Real Demand: Another key task is to introduce real proof of demand. We need to win over customers and get them actually using Boundless. Currently, Citrea and Taiko are very close to launch, MegaETH has also started testing, in addition to at least 5-6 protocols actively working on integration.

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