Ep 20 - On FHE, Zama, and New Internet Standard

@Sakura please summarize this article, thanks uwu.

TLDR

This episode of the Decentralised.co podcast explores the transformative potential of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) and how Zama, a company founded by Rand Hindi, is addressing the key challenges to make FHE more practical and accessible.

Key Points :key:

  • FHE allows computations on encrypted data without exposing it, enabling truly private and secure financial systems.
  • Zama has made FHE 100x faster and integrated it into existing developer tools, making it more accessible.
  • Zama has also significantly reduced the size of FHE-encrypted data, from 20,000x to just 50x, with further improvements coming.
  • These advancements in FHE could pave the way for a fully encrypted internet and revolutionize privacy, blockchain, and the future of the web.

In-depth Summary

In this episode, Rand Hindi, the CEO and co-founder of Zama, discusses the groundbreaking potential of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). FHE is a technology that allows computations on encrypted data without exposing it, which could eliminate the opportunity for front-running and other manipulative behaviors in financial systems.

Rand explains how Zama has addressed the major challenges traditionally associated with FHE, such as speed, usability, and scale. Zama’s technological advances have made FHE 100 times faster and integrated it into existing developer tools, making it accessible to developers without needing a deep understanding of cryptography.

A key breakthrough discussed is Zama’s work in reducing the size of FHE-encrypted data. What used to expand data sizes by 20,000x has now been compressed to just 50x, with more improvements coming that could bring it down to 10x. This makes FHE viable for use on Ethereum and other blockchain platforms.

The episode also touches on Rand’s background, including his previous company Snips, which was acquired by Sonos, and his work advising the French government on AI policy.

ELI5

Imagine you have a secret message that you want to share with someone, but you don’t want anyone else to be able to read it. Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is a way to do that, where you can do things with the secret message without anyone else being able to see what it says.

The company Zama has made FHE much faster and easier to use, so that developers can start using it to build really secure and private apps and services. This could help make the internet and financial systems much more private and secure in the future.

Writer’s Main Point

The main point of this article is to highlight the transformative potential of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) and how Zama, a company founded by Rand Hindi, is addressing the key challenges to make FHE more practical and accessible. The advancements in FHE could pave the way for a fully encrypted internet and revolutionize privacy, blockchain, and the future of the web.

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