Welcome to Little Learnings, a series of educational posts I release every Friday where I pick a topic and break it down as simply as I can.
This post is sponsored by Euphoria
Euphoria has fully gamified the trading experience, abstracting away any reliance on order books and making it a "click the box" style game.
It’s honestly an incredibly fun way to trade, can see this going viral or becoming a mainstream app what with the gamblification-of-everything we're seeing in society lately.
Is it going to replace orderbook trading for sophisticated traders? No. Is it a fun way to spend a few spare minutes you might have here and there? Hell yes.
One thing I am always interested in is when and how crypto connects to “the real world”. Stablecoins are an obvious and great example, but there’s something a bit more technical that works behind the scenes / under the hood that is pretty damn cool and worth knowing about: zkTLS.
The name stands for zero knowledge transport layer security. TLS is the protocol behind that little padlock symbol you might sometimes see in your browser, essentially helping secure some websits/data. zkTLS wraps that connection in a zero knowledge proof, so you can prove things about what the server told you without showing anyone the actual response.
As a quick example, let’s say you have a bank acocunt with a balance of $50,000. A DeFi lender wants proof you have at least $10,000 to your name before giving you an undercollateralised loan. With zkTLS, you can generate a proof that says yes, my bank balance is above $10,000, and provide it to the lender. The lender sees the proof but they don't see your real balance, your name, or anything other identifying information. Privacy secured.
This all works using the underlying ZK-Proof technology, which I wrote about a couple of years back.
zkTLS gets even more interesting when you consider AI agents and getting them to do things for you in a secure manner. When websites start catching up and implementing the ability to check for proofs, you can provide proof to your agent that you have X, Y or Z and they can then go out into the real world and do things on your behalf and be able to prove that you do have X, Y and Z, without actually being a security risk of leaking any of the underlying information.
I think in a number of years, this tech is going to be uniquitous and powering a lot of things in our digital world, and I think it’s cool and interesting to know about this kinda stuff and how things work, at least at a very high level. Hopefully you found it cool and interesting too!
Thanks as always for reading, and see you next week with another little learning!
Disclaimer: The content covered in this newsletter is not to be considered as investment advice. I’m not a financial adviser. These are only my own opinions and ideas. You should always consult with a professional/licensed financial adviser before trading or investing in any cryptocurrency related product. Some of the links shared may be referral links.
