About Virtual Labs

Why Should You Care About Virtual Labs?

History

Virtual Labs began as "Ontropy" in September 2022 and got accepted into Binance's prestigious S5 Incubator. In the bottom of the bear market in June of 2023, OP Crypto VC led Virtual Labs' $1.3M Pre-Seed round at a $20M valuation. Participation included the NEAR Foundation and highly technical investors focused on zero-knowledge proofs.

Virtual Labs was founded by José Betancourt, a Yale Dropout and economics analyst. He leads a team from Harvard, Composable Finance, the Defiant, and more, representing 40 years of engineering and Web3 experience.

We choose the name "Virtual" to represent our vision and product—streamlined, abstracted, and easy: Virtual.

Vision

Virtual Labs is singularly focused on one thing: bringing about blockchain mainstream adoption by improving user experience. It is our belief that lowering barriers to entry and eliminating frictions is how blockchain will become accessible and used by the masses.

Virtual Labs is a cryptography company with experience in atomic swaps, game theory, and zero-knowledge proofs. This background led Virtual Labs to develop blockchain's first ZK State Channels: a user-verified transaction bundling scheme. This as-of-yet underhyped technology is they key to achieving the zero-gas, zero-latency, and zero-friction experience to which most of the world population is accustomed.

Progress and Roadmap

Virtual Labs has been in stealth for most of 2023, proving that ZK State Channels were theoretically possible, and then testing MVPs with DApps and community members. These testnet integrated 26 DApps, onboarded 6,000 users, and processed over 1,000,000 transactions.

2023 saw development of the underlying technology of the Virtual Engine, with little focus on the application layer. In December 2023, cryptographic testing concluded and the size of the Virtual Labs team doubled in anticipation of new testnets and the upcoming mainnet launch.