#20 Cryptography and Encryption in Blockchain with Jason from Zama

Jason is the Ecosystem Lead at Zama, a cryptography company that works to introduce Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) to blockchain. FHE is almost like magic, as it allows computing data without ever decrypting it.

What is Fully Homomorphic Encryption?

FHE is a type of encryption that allows computations to be performed on encrypted data, without ever needing to decrypt it. This might sound like magic, but it's a real technology that's set to revolutionize how we handle data privacy.

Imagine you could send your DNA to a medical provider without worrying about privacy breaches. They could perform tests on your encrypted data and return results that only you could decrypt. This is the promise of FHE — maintaining the confidentiality of your data throughout the entire process.

Why Isn't FHE Everywhere?

Despite its potential, FHE isn't widely used yet. Historically, the technology was too slow and computationally expensive for practical use. However, Zama.ai has been making strides in this area, improving performance by thousands of times since their inception, making FHE more feasible for real-world applications, especially in blockchain.

Zama has in fact been 10x ing the performance of FHE year on year.

FHE in blockchain

Blockchain technology presents unique challenges and opportunities for privacy. Transparency, while a fundamental feature, is also a limitation when privacy is needed. This is where FHE can play a crucial role. By enabling confidential transactions on transparent networks like Ethereum, FHE could help blockchain achieve a balance between transparency and privacy, much like moving from HTTP to HTTPS improved security on the internet.

On chain privacy is becoming a significant topic of discussion in the industry and FHE could provide a new way to interact with on-chain protocols while never sharing personal information.

Jason also highlighted ongoing projects that work with Zama.ai, where they're integrating FHE with various blockchain protocols to enhance privacy without compromising on the composability that makes blockchain technology so powerful. The Cosmos privacy network Secret is in fact in the process of adopting and testing out FHE.

Quantum Resilience

Another significant aspect of FHE is its resilience against quantum computing attacks. Due to the paradigms such as entaglement and superposition quantum computing is capable to easily break many encryption protocols, making it a highly disruptive technology when it hits the market.

FHE offers a quantum-resistant alternative, ensuring long-term security post quantum-computing.

In order to get there, the computational intensity of FHE needs to be addressed through further optimizations and potentially through specialized hardware like GPUs and ASICs designed to handle these kinds of cryptographic calculations. 

This podcast is fueled by Aesir, an Algorithmic cryptocurrency Trading Platform that I helped develop over the last 2 years that offers a unique set of features.  

Zama Website 

Aesir Website