Rand Hindi, CEO of Zama, dives into the world of fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and its potential to revolutionize blockchain privacy. He discusses the innovative Zama Protocol, which allows for confidential smart contracts on any public blockchain without additional execution burdens. Rand highlights the evolution of blockchain privacy tools and the significance of FHE in enabling secure transactions and scalability. He also contrasts FHE with Zero-Knowledge protocols, emphasizing their respective strengths and challenges in preserving privacy.
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insights INSIGHT
Confidential Contracts Without Chain Changes
Zama built an off-chain coprocessor network so confidential smart contracts can run on existing public chains without changing them.
This decouples on-chain commitment from off-chain FHE execution and preserves blockchain throughput.
insights INSIGHT
FHE Enables Composable Encrypted State
FHE lets you compute on encrypted balances but requires same public key and selective decryption for composability.
Zama solves this by emitting contract events that coprocessors pick up and execute off-chain under FHE.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Vet MPC Operators For Real-World Security
Restrict MPC decryption to vetted, high-reputation operators to add off-chain reputation security.
Use validators, custodians and infrastructure firms rather than anonymous participants for MPC keys.
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Blockchains operate as a public ledger, ‘disclosing’ the entire transaction history and associated data to everyone. While verifiability and traceability are key traits, as blockchains gain global adoption, those very features hinder the process. Self custody, on-chain identities, corporate strategies, transaction history, private deals, all represent highly sensitive information that call for provable confidentiality. Fully homomorphic encryption has long been considered the ‘holy grail’ of cryptography as it enables computation to be performed on encrypted data without the need of prior decryption. This basically translates to true end-to-end encryption, both on-chain and off-chain. As cryptographic research advances, so does the scalability and applicability of FHE. As a result of more than 5 years of work, Zama has now released Zama Protocol, which enables confidential smart contracts on top of any L1 or L2 using FHE, without any additional execution burden. By encrypting all ciphertexts with the same public key, FHE ensures composability and seamless integration across different blockchains and applications, making it a true cross-chain confidentiality layer. Through parallel execution, Zama Protocol already surpasses Ethereum’s throughput, yet future roadmap includes open-source development of FPGA & ASIC in order to scale it even further, to accommodate faster, non-EVM chains.
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