Interview With Shiv Shankar, CEO Of Boundless On Being The Largest ZK Protocol

Tell us about Boundless. What does your project do, and what value does it add?

There are five essential pillars for building applications in the blockchain space: scale, interoperability, security, privacy, and compliance. Whilst blockchain and distributed ledgers solve part of the problem, taking them to a point where they are applicable in the real world and competitive with Web2 products, zero knowledge has always been the last mile.

Boundless is the universal ZK protocol. We bring scale, interoperability, and security to every chain, every developer, and every application. We are the world’s largest ZK protocol (not to be confused with a chain; we work with every chain and on every chain), with the capacity to prove every transaction on Ethereum, every L2 on Ethereum, Solana, and every other major chain combined. Our network has the capacity to process 400 trillion cycles a day. All of it is live, permissionless, and decentralised.

What this means in practice is that we’ve made ZK accessible to every developer on every platform, as if there were an AWS sidecar attached to every chain. You don’t have to go anywhere or ask for permission. There are machines available to perform your ZK computation, scaling you and your application at every point.

What inspired the founding of Boundless, and how did your background at Grab and Lyft prepare you for leading the project?

Boundless was inspired by conversations. We were all enamoured by the power of ZK and what was achievable. We were bound together by a mission to make ZK accessible and improve the developer experience for building ZK applications, and we found our inspiration in delivering ZK to every chain in a permissionless and decentralised way.
My background in rideshare at Grab and Lyft taught me about markets and the power of markets. One of the key challenges with ZK, much like AI, is that accessibility is difficult because of the need for specialised hardware, in this case, GPUs, which are constantly in demand.

How do you create a marketplace where you can access these machines at the lowest possible price point, pay for what you use, without having to own or rent a GPU, and pay for idle time? Building a multi-tenant marketplace was really our goal, and Grab and Lyft are examples of global-scale marketplaces that bring service providers and people who need those services together.

Tell us about your core product or service, and what a ZK marketplace is, in simplest terms? What most excites you about the future of zero knowledge?

A ZK marketplace, in the simplest possible terms, is a neo-cloud: a cloud service where you can access specialised hardware at the lowest possible price point. If you need a ZK workload run at any point during your program, you call into Boundless and request that the work be performed. The marketplace initiates a bidding process where the provider offering the lowest bid claims your job. We achieve 99.9% SLAs, putting us at par with AWS and other major cloud providers, but at 1/20th of the cost. That is the power of tokenomics and the market at work.

What excites me most about zero knowledge is the pace of innovation. Two years ago, the zkVM was invented. A few months later, a second zkVM appeared, and today there are multiple zkVMs. There are large teams backed by major VCs funding research into ZK, and that can only mean one thing: more adoption, better performance, and a wider variety of ZK products on offer.

What has been the biggest challenge you’ve had to overcome while building Boundless?

The biggest challenge has been kick-starting the market. The cold start problem is always the biggest issue when building marketplaces, which is why we needed to put together a coalition of people who were building with ZK and ready to provide their machines in the early days. We have a strong set of partners on both sides who helped kick-start the market and made Boundless the world’s largest ZK protocol and marketplace.

What is your number one piece of advice to aspiring entrepreneurs?

Don’t lose track of the vision. One of the interesting things about building in Web3 and crypto is that distractions are plenty: Twitter conversations, news cycles, whatever the new shiny thing is. Sticking to your original vision and delivering on it is appreciated by your partners, customers, investors, and your team alike. Constantly flip-flopping on where you are headed can be extremely confusing for everyone around you.

What can we hope to see from Boundless in the future?

Boundless currently leads in offering blockchain builders scale, interoperability, and security. We are now entering privacy and compliance, something I am deeply passionate about, given my background at Coinbase and Lyft, where I headed up compliance and onboarding engineering. It is also the last mile for large-scale businesses to truly onboard onto crypto. Whilst people talk about privacy and compliance as if they are features, they are in fact a whole suite of products that require love, attention, innovation, and integration; all problems we need to solve for our end customers.

How do you see Boundless transforming the privacy landscape, both on and off the blockchain?

Boundless has the potential to transform the privacy landscape for a few key reasons.
First, we are chain-agnostic. One of the realities of building on blockchains is the expectation of alignment: Ethereum-aligned, Solana-aligned, Canton-aligned, Avalanche-aligned, and so on. Businesses are simply not used to that, nor do they want to be held captive by one ecosystem. Chain agnosticism is what they are looking for, and Boundless delivers that.

Second, we offer industrial-grade privacy and security. Whilst decentralisation provides one form of security, mathematical security is guaranteed by ZK systems. Beyond that, ZK offers programmability. As your product matures, how easy is it to evolve your application without being limited by your ecosystem? With Boundless, you are limited only by your imagination. Every application built on Boundless has boundless reach and boundless flexibility.