#BUIDLers Season 1: Project 5 of 8 (Torus)
In this series, we’re thrilled to reveal our eight Binance Labs Incubation Program Season 1 teams and their projects. Learn about Torus below and in this video.
Torus
- Location: Singapore
- Founders: Zhen Yong Yu, Leonard Tan
- Team size: 4
In your words, what is Torus?
Torus provides frictionless logins for Dapps. Although there has been a lot of hype surrounding the blockchain and crypto scene, mainstream adoption has stayed relatively low. Torus works on solving this through a distributed key generation scheme, linking current existing user accounts (e.g. Google accounts) to public-private key pairs. By tying online identities to keys, Torus allows users to use their digital credentials anywhere on the decentralised web.
Tell us about your founders. What is their story?
Before embarking on Torus, the founders worked on different Ethereum Foundation projects. Zhen worked on PeaceBridge, a plasma bridge between ETC and ETH, and Leonard worked on ENS. Having known each other for more than 4 years, the founders worked together on several research projects, one of which became Torus.
What makes your project unique?
While designing and testing our product, we focused on leveraging existing things instead of reinventing the wheel. The current design for Torus is the result of multiple iterations and pivots.
For example, we chose to embrace the OAuth standard for our frontend because it is already widely used by many users. Our backend is also an implementation of pre-existing research that leverages open-source libraries. The end result of such a design process is that we have a much shorter iteration and testing cycle, and a low onboarding cost for both developers and end users.
What are your major achievements and status updates?
Over the new year we launched our private beta, and we have been actively testing our solution with existing dapps. We are in the midst of closing our second round of fundraising, which includes investors such as Coinbase Ventures and ChainRock. Currently, we are completing our security audit and our public beta is slated to launch in 2 months.
What are your plans for the first half of 2019?
After the public beta launch, we will be working with ecosystem developers on multiple blockchain support. In particular, we are looking to integrate our login solution with EOS and Tron dapps.
How was the Binance Labs Incubation Program?
The Binance Labs team was really helpful and made introductions to many mentors and experienced industry experts. The onsite program also allowed us to focus our efforts on BUIDLing and finding product-market fit for Torus, something which we were unable to do while working on it as a side project.
To learn more about Torus, visit https://tor.us/ or reach out to Leonard and Zhen at hello@tor.us. You can also find them on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TorusLabs.
Applications are open for Season 2 of the Binance Labs Incubation Program, held in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Lagos, San Francisco and Singapore.
Apply by February 28, 2019 at https://www.binancelabs.co/ to join the strongest network of early-stage blockchain developer teams.
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About Binance Labs
Binance Labs is an infrastructure impact fund and an initiative launched by Binance to incubate, invest in, and empower blockchain and cryptocurrency entrepreneurs, projects, and communities. The mission of Binance Labs is to solve the problems that matter most to the ecosystem and change the world for the better. To learn more about Binance Labs, visit: https://labs.binance.com/
