Projects will be looking for ways to become more censorship resistant and one of the easiest changes they can make towards that goal is to end their reliance on centralized cloud services (AWS) by integrating something called “Oyster” which enables uncensorable serverless frontend UI for any dAPP as well as serverless Backends. Oyster also has use cases for ZK proofs.
Marlin, which is a Binance Labs project, has been developing this for the past year and is about to roll it out. They're doing a little conference tour at the moment to round up partners to integrate with.
Quick rundown:
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Serverless Frontends and Uncensorable UI
Projects that use centralized frontends pose the risk of a single point of failure. Pretty much the whole thing can be shut down by taking out the servers. With Oyster, DAOs & Web3 projects can deploy frontends on a decentralized validator network running secure enclaves via smart contracts.
A benefit of this beyond becoming more decentralized is it enables Uncensorable UI. It's pretty obvious DEXs will be targeted in the future and at the moment, they are easy targets. Agencies can just send a threatening letter and if the DEX won't comply all that is needed is a court order to take it down from the server.
With Oyster, there are no servers to be taken down. If a DEX is sufficiently decentralized there is really nothing that can be done to make people stop trading on them. The frontend trading UI can't be shutdown by Blackrock just because they're mad nobody is using their CEXs.
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Serverless Backends and the end of Projects focusing on DevOps
Oyster allows DAOs to focus on their mission rather than DevOps. Nobody has to manage authorization keys. The cost of instances is decreased by dividing them amongst users who are only charged by their personal consumption. Oyster improves security as well by providing a secure execution environment for sensitive workloads via oyster enclaves.
ZK Proofs Usecase – Oyster works in tandem with the other tech Marlin has been developing, Marlin's ZK Provers, which aim to increase the speed of ZK proof generation using hardware acceleration. The ZK Provers remove the computational burdan from users and routes it to specialized hardware (there will be a ZK Prover market which will allow people to rent out their hardware for this task). Oyster ensures that no data is leaked during this process.
The main point of this post is that Marlin will have real usage because many projects will be integrating Oyster. I think it's a solid infrastructure play and it's mid cap project with a lot of room to run.
https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/marlin