The Holy Grail of Crypto Privacy: Encrypted Ethereum, FHE & Living Forever | Rand Hindi, Zama Co-Founder

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 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. 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 you should 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, It was kind of like an artifact of not having homomorphic encryption in these techniques fifteen years ago. But what you really want is public verifiability. And I think there are many, many attempts to doing that. For example, some early privacy protocols like Zcash, big fan of Zcash. You know, being a long time I've been a long time holder, I'm very happy it's finally happening. It's totally happening. Right? It's one call style. Yes. 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 multi party computation, like Tease to try and create this shared private state that you could build DeFi on, that you could build other blockchain applications. For the non cryptographers, Rand just mentioned, teas and multi party 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. …