The Holy Grail of Crypto Privacy: Encrypted Ethereum, FHE & Living Forever | Rand Hindi, Zama Co-Founder
Episode publishedPodcast: BanklessBankless
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It'll feel just like using Ethereum. Right? For developers, it'll feel like just like building for Ethereum. Everything is in Solidity, and you're pushing your contract to Ethereum. For users, everything's gonna feel like Ethereum. You're using a wallet to make a transaction to Ethereum. And and that's really how we thought about this. Right? It's we don't want people to use something else. We want people to use Ethereum confidentially.
Rand, I think everyone listening to Bankless knows that crypto has a privacy problem, and we want privacy. We don't have it yet. Here's how you put it in a recent tweet. You said, go to anyone on the street and ask them to show you their bank account. That's blockchain today. It's obvious we need confidentiality. Why don't we have privacy yet?
Well, I think if you look at the history of blockchain, maybe the first thing we have to understand is why is data public in the first place? The reason why data is public on a public blockchain is because you want public verifiability. If you want anybody to be able to recompute the states, they need to be able to use and see the data that was part of computing that state. And so there was really no other way if you wanted decentralization and public verifiability, but to make the data public. This was never a feature of blockchain. Right? It was was kinda like an artifact of not having homom
day offing.
Right? It's like Paul's style. Yes. Was right. So Zcash use zero knowledge proofs as a way to effectively prove that you had the tokens that you wanted to transfer. Right? And so in this case, what you would publicly verify was the proof. You didn't need the data, But the problem is that you didn't have composability on this proof. So you were stuck with basically just doing confidential transfers. And I think this is why a lot of other people started looking at other techniques like FHE, like multiparty computation, like TEAS to try and create this shared private state that you could build De
For the non cryptographers, Rand just mentioned, Ts and multiparty computation, all of that. Don't worry. We will define those things. And I hope we will simplify those later in the episode, but let's stick on this for a moment. So I think you're saying, Rand, that the reason we had public blockchains in the first place and they were constructed as such is because we were tech limited. We didn't have the cryptography at the time.
I mean Yeah.
There are a couple of other explanations I can think of. Certainly, Tech Limited is one of them. There's also maybe demand. Maybe there's just not demand for privacy and confidentiality. That's a possibility. A third possibility is the regulators wouldn't let us. Is kind of a sort of a counterfactual, historical counterfactual I've often thought of, which is the basic idea that if Bitcoin launched in a private way, governments would have strangled it in the crib. It would have never been able to rise to the the degrees that it is today and and get acceptance today. What do you think it is? Do
I I think that's that's a very interesting question. I've been in privacy for a very long time, actually. You know, my previous company was already working privacy for AI. So I've been thinking about this problem of how do you make, you know, services private? And nobody really cares about privacy because most of your life isn't publicly visible to other people. When you go to your house and close the door, nobody sees what you're doing inside. When I'm on my phone, I'm using an app, everything I'm doing on my phone isn't broadcasted to the public. So i
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