Narrative Violation
One of the usecases that we thought would be incredibly important for zkTLS, when we started out, was vampire attacks. Infact, that was the motivation behind the name Reclaim Protocol.
However, after having been in business for over a year -- I wish to share some observations, because of which vampire attacks haven't seen the uptick we hoped for.
Product Market Fit
We see a lot of web3 companies use zkTLS to vampire attack customers from incumbent services. Notably, Uber and Uber Eats. People have been talking about a decentralized Uber for several years now - largely because people were frustrated about the take-rates and opaque surge pricing. With zkTLS, now there was a credible way for people to join this new decentralized Uber and port their reputation from Uber itself. So, the meme caught on. On to me, including.
But we realized a harsh truth as soon as we started talking to customers. The challenges a decentralized Uber has is being able to have a product that is 10x better than Uber. That's incredibly hard to begin with. Your product needs to be stellar - Uber's product is probably best across categories. Your product needs to have enough drivers and riders to match Uber's density. And once you have both of those, is when you can make an argument for having 10x less fees to lure people into your product and network.
Don't get me wrong - i'm not saying it's not possible to build a better, incentive aligned Uber. Infact some companies are making significant strides and eating into Uber's business - notably NammaYatri and Drife.
Only when the product has this kind of product market fit, can you try to vampire attack the Ubers of the world in any meaningful way.
And as you'd have guessed -- this is hard, takes time and only a few companies make it to this stage to even consider vampire attacking and thereby zkTLS.
PR
PR is obviously not a problem for a young startup. There's nothing to lose. But as we saw in the previous section, vampire attacking doesn't even make sense at the earliest stages.
But, from our experience -- when things are working, product has product market fit; the teams are much more focused on growing their business. In such cases, the founders don't want the head ache of dealing with the backlash of vampire attacking. And that kind of makes sense. When something is working, the founder should, by all means, double down on that.
So, even after product market fit founders aren't willing to use zkTLS for vampire attacking.
Where it makes sense
However, there are two cases where we've seen traction in terms of vampire attacking using zkTLS.
- When the companies are large. They have exhausted their growth channels, and are looking at eating into competition. Vampire attack makes a lot of sense. But, this segment is incredibly small.
- Companies that have a brand and thrive on being seen as disruptors. For them, vampire attacking is a great marketing stunt. But usually nothing more.
So, for Vampire Attacks using zkTLS to work -- it needs a product to have PMF, have out grown its initial growth channels, and be willing to be seen as a brand that's an offense-disruptor. This combination is incredibly rare and valuable. If these traits exist in a company - they're already successful and vampire attacks are just a small tool in their vast arsenal.
| zkTLS doesn't help new businesses exist because of the capability to vampire attack. It enables successful companies with a new tool to grow their userbase.
We've learnt there are many more usecases that are way more interesting than just vampire attacks, and enable net new usecases. Many of these look like vampire attacks, but really are extending functionality of the original product - rather than displacing them.