Fixing the Internet's Biggest Bottleneck: Opacity x Jito zkTLS Cambrian Explosion on Solana

Solana wasn’t part of our roadmap when I co-founded Opacity, but my initial experiences with the ecosystem changed everything. I knew the ecosystem had quietly solved a problem most chains still wrestle with, so I booked a ticket to Solana Accelerate with an open mind, not really knowing what to expect. What I found was a culture laser-focused on building real businesses that people actually enjoy using. For a builder chasing real crypto utility, it felt like ground zero for crypto’s inevitable consumer Cambrian explosion.

I've been building in crypto for the better part of a decade, chasing the promise of genuinely useful applications. Like many builders, I burned through countless ideas that looked revolutionary on paper but crumbled when they hit reality—DeFi car insurance/loans at DIMO, supply chain finance, creator monetization based on social metrics. The pattern was always the same: brilliant concept, elegant tokenomics, completely unbuildable. The hardest thing to spot in life is the thing that isn't there, but if it were, it would make life easier. The turning point came when I recognized what I now call the poverty of verifiability—the idea that our digital world's biggest bottleneck isn't computation, storage, or even capital, but something more fundamental.

The utility of crypto is constrained by its adoption. If only three merchants accept stablecoins, it is not that useful to adopt stablecoins. To make crypto more useful, we face a binary choice: either go convince everyone to adopt crypto, or make the existing internet composable with crypto with minimal need for cooperation. The first path is a decade-long evangelism campaign. The second is simply an engineering problem.

This insight led me to start Opacity in November 2023, focused on zkTLS infrastructure that makes the existing internet composable with crypto without requiring institutional cooperation. Today, we power a thriving ecosystem of apps that that crypto has otherwise been unable to deliver in 10 years: @daisypayapp coordinates influencer marketing with industry leading metrics, @goearnifi hit #1 in the iOS App Store finance category by offering non-predatory alternatives to payday lending, @KYDLabs underwrites future ticket sales for artists and venues, and @earnos_io inverts the flow of advertising spend by letting brands reward users directly.

But here's where it gets interesting. While I was still debating with researchers about whether zkTLS counts as “crypto” in my CT feed, several of our ecosystem projects independently decided to build on Solana.

Why zkTLS is the Endgame for Verifiable Data

Before founding Opacity, I was in the decentralized identity space, convinced that signed attestations were the cleanest technical solution to the poverty of verifiability. Solutions like Ethereum and Solana’s Attestation Service (EAS and SAS, respectively) follow this logic: have authoritative sources directly sign credentials, eliminating any questions about data provenance.

However, this approach assumes cooperation from companies. Want to prove hours worked for a loan application? You need to convince the payroll system to integrate with these services and spit out signed timecards. Need to verify income? Every employer needs to adopt new APIs and credential standards. In some scenarios, there may be a neutral incentive for these integrations. More often, there's a negative incentive—why would a bank want to make it easier for customers to switch to competitors by providing portable financial credentials?

The beauty of zkTLS is that it only requires cooperation from the user, not from companies. Instead of convincing Gusto to integrate with EAS or SAS and sign your hours worked, we prove you logged into Gusto and retrieved that data yourself. The company doesn't need to change anything—the user just needs to be willing to authenticate.

This creates a powerful forcing function: any application successful with zkTLS must be compelling enough that users will actually log in and generate proofs. This isn't just a technical constraint—it's an opportunity to fix the internet.

Today's internet resembles industrial monocropping, with large corporations at the center optimizing around narrow variables. This creates a sterile digital landscape where innovation is constrained by what serves corporate interests. These companies can extract value from users precisely because they have strong network effects and high switching costs—once you're locked into their ecosystem, they can do whatever they want, knowing you won't leave.

When we put users at the center—apps can only succeed by delivering genuine value to the people using them rather than the reverse—we get something closer to a healthy digital rainforest. Diverse, interesting applications can develop organically because they're rooted in solving real human problems rather than maximizing corporate leverage.

That's what fixing the internet actually looks like: shifting from extraction enabled by lock-in to creation driven by genuine utility.

Why does Opacity need a Jito Node Consensus Network (NCNs) for zkTLS?

Node Consensus Networks (NCNs) are custom networks built on @jito_sol's staking infrastructure.

At its core, zkTLS sounds deceptively simple: generate cryptographic proofs on top of standard HTTPS APIs. Want to prove your bank balance without revealing your account details? zkTLS lets you demonstrate you have over $10,000 in your account, without exposing the exact amount or your transaction history.

But building internet capital markets-grade zkTLS is brutally hard. Here's the core problem: TLS was designed in the Netscape era to solve a simple problem—people needed to use credit cards online safely, so Marc Andreessen built end-to-end encryption. Nobody was thinking about verifiability back then. But as the internet evolved, this design choice accidentally created a fundamental challenge for proving data authenticity.

Imagine a locked box with only two keys—Alice has one, Bob has another. When Alice opens it and finds a gold coin inside, she knows it came from Bob. But if Alice tries to prove to Charlie that Bob put gold in the box, Charlie has no way to verify this claim. From his perspective, Alice could have put the gold coin in that box herself. Now, instead of gold, imagine it's an unpaid invoice worth $5M or a paystub showing overtime hours—suddenly, the stakes become very real.

This isn't just a theoretical problem—it's why entire industries have had to build workarounds that compromise security and privacy, and why many crypto use cases remain impossible. Plaid started by asking users for their bank login credentials so they could automate browsers to scrape account data. In invoice factoring, the standard practice is to share passwords with bankers so they can manually verify invoices. These solutions work, but they require users to surrender control of their most sensitive accounts to third parties. For crypto, this poverty of verifiability has been the main bottleneck to practical use cases.

I had come to the conclusion that this was impossible to get around until a random insight revealed the answer: economic security emerges as the best available solution. Rather than relying purely on trusted third parties, we can align economic incentives so that attacking the system costs more than any potential gain. Opacity is the first team to design a zkTLS system where security can be precisely tuned to match use case requirements—a small DeFi transaction might need thousands of dollars in economic backing, while a multi-million dollar invoice factoring deal demands correspondingly higher security guarantees.

This is where Jito's NCN model becomes transformative for us: we can source security through Jito's existing staking infrastructure and market structures. Validators can opt into securing our zkTLS network while earning additional yield, creating a scalable security model that grows with demand. Most importantly, the NCN framework on Jito’s staking infrastructure lets us focus our energy on what matters most: helping apps and founders build the future, rather than having to launch a native token with high inflation emissions,  manage all the additional workstreams said native token introduces, and bootstrap a validator set from scratch or operate our own.

The beauty of Solana's monolithic design means our NCN and the consumer applications it powers all live on the same chain. No cross-chain bridges, no fragmented liquidity, no complex interoperability protocols—just seamless composability between users, low costs, high performance, our Opacity NCN, and the apps that depend on it.

Enough talk, show me the apps!

The real proof of the @OpacityNetwork VDN isn't in the technical specifications—it's in the applications that couldn't exist without it. Here's a peek at what our ecosystem is building:

DaisyPay is THE engagement engine for brands that pays creators in stablecoins for doing what they already do: liking, commenting, sharing, and creating posts across social media. They are going after two converging markets: Digital ad spend is $700B, Creator Economy is $300B.

Here’s how @daisypayapp works:

• Creators automatically verify their social promotions

• Brands pay creators directly, no intermediaries

• Each like, comment, and share boosts visibility through social algorithms

• Real-time engagement drives stronger reach, higher CTRs, and longer-lasting content

• Creators get paid instantly for the actions they already take every day

DaisyPay is growing very fast and is in need of talented full-stack developers. If you’re interested in leading the charge to get creators onboarded into crypto, reach out to them via their links.

@GoEarnifi tackles America's $90 billion predatory payday lending problem head-on. Founder @ArynChadha realized you can make the earned wage access market dramatically more efficient by going through the user instead of intermediaries. This enables real-time wage streaming without exploitative fees. Early on, Aryn got a job at the Cheesecake Factory to learn how he could help those workers—founder mode that paid off as the app became the #1 finance app in the App Store.

But here's what makes Earnifi's success particularly compelling: it just won Best Financial Services App at the 2025 American Business Awards (@TheStevieAwards)—not a crypto award, but a mainstream recognition won by companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Google. You might not hear your favorite influencer talking about it because it doesn't involve memecoins or gambling, but that's precisely the point. While crypto Twitter debates the latest token mechanics, Earnifi is solving real problems for paycheck-to-paycheck Americans and earning recognition from the broader business world.

For more information about Earnifi, check out these links

@KYDLabs solves a fundamental problem in live events: legacy ticketing platforms hold fan data hostage in exchange for cash advances to venues. KYD flips this entirely—venues tap USDC working capital without surrendering their data, margin, or control over resale.

The results are striking. Legendary venues like Le Poisson Rouge have seen 30% increases in ticket sales and doubled their marketing ROI, while KYD has driven $4M+ in ticket sales across the ecosystem. Fans purchase tickets in under 30 seconds and earn loyalty points instead of paying exploitative service fees.

The real innovation is KYD's factoring protocol: accredited investors lend USDC to venues and artists, earning yield every time fans attend shows. It creates sustainable working capital for the live events industry without the traditional data extraction model.

@EarnOS_io flipped customer acquisition on its head. Instead of brands spending $300+ to acquire customers through guesswork, users prove their value privately and get rewarded for it. Want to target active traders? Users can prove 30-day trading volume to Robinhood without revealing transaction details. Frequent runner? Prove your Strava activity to Nike for exclusive rewards. As the #1 mini app in the World App store with over 2 million users, EarnOS demonstrates that privacy-preserving verification has massive consumer appeal.

Apps wanted!

We focus on supporting apps from idea all the way to PMF. If you're building a user-facing app, we would love to talk to you. Reach out to @thepablob or myself on X; our DMs are open.

Make sure to follow @OpacityNetwork as we have a lot of exciting updates in the pipeline😉🚀.

Definitely check out our developer portal here.

@dawufi and I also host the @Rubicon_pod where we regularly talk to founders building the future of crypto.

Special thanks to @magicdhz, @brian_smith_0 and the @jito_sol for all their help 🙏