Ontropy

It is now three months since Ontropy raised and announced our Pre-Seed round! Now, I am excited to unveil our new vision, display our progress, and discuss what is to come!

New Vision

Since May, the Ontropy team has theorized, researched, and tested what we believe will be the next technical leap for blockchain, ushering in the next wave of Web3 users: Virtual Rollups.

Virtual Rollups enable Free Gas and Web2 UX For Web3 Games.

0xParc’s Autonomous Worlds and the notion of “fully on-chain gaming” demonstrate the importance of enabling truly trustless games as a first step towards a fully decentralized web. Currently, dApps are just apps with some NFTs, most crypto trading happens on CEXs, and fully on-chain games run on centralized servers. It is not an exaggeration to state that Web3 has yet to reach its full potential. We believe this is down to one fundamental reason: compute.

Blockchain, by its very nature, has limited compute. This creates a trifecta of problems that prohibit mainstream adoption:

• Cost- in the form of paying gas for expensive block space.
• Latency- in the form of global consensus, hampering local user-based applications that require frequent communication
• User Experience- in the form of high cost and latency, but also in additional wallet clicks, permissions, and security worries.

Virtual Rollups are p2p state channels that users can permissionlessly open between each other as a private ledger. All collateral is stored on the underlying blockchain with only light weight signatures, derived from their same public-private key pairs, being sent and stored among users.

It is because of this fact, and because finality is achieved at the speed of the user’s internet connection, that Virtual Rollups maintain a minimum trust assumption. This means they are unilaterally fault-tolerant by any one player, as Virtual Rollups have no external nodes or validators. In Ontropy, the users frictionlessly become the validators, oracles, and provers of their data.

To accomplish this feat, our team of cryptographers and engineers have developed novel zero-knowledge accumulators that maintain a fixed size and cost when signing unlimited transactions with unlimited possible users. We also utilize a process of distributed key generation for ephemeral session keys based on a user’s existing EOA key. BLS signatures, KATE and FROST2 commitments, and much more are also in our tech stack. Tune in next Wednesday for a full Virtual Rollups post!

Summer Progress

In addition to creating and developing Ontropy's new vision, we have grown with regard to our team, partners, and backers.

Starting with backers, Ontropy’s community continued to grow by over 1,000 people even during our stealth. In addition, we’ve secured more capital and technical investors in our Pre-Seed round, where details are planned to be released in September.

Ontropy is now running a closed beta with 10 integrated and integrating games! These partners range from exciting stealth projects to some of the largest Web3 games on the planet.

Our team has also quadrupled. Ontropy is now made up of two Ph.D. cryptographers, four total developers, and 7 members overall. We are continuing to expand with the hiring of senior blockchain engineers as well as ambitious business developers and marketers. Click here to apply now!

Finally, we placed third in ETH CC’s ZK Day with our Virtual Rollups game demo that demonstrates how Ontropy overcomes the limits of the blockchain in terms of latency, cost, and UX.