Im watching the confidential NFT space closely. Also, for transparency, I bought a few OG NFTs a while back, as a souvenir of a wild TGE. I never meant to profit from them so I will never sell them and I will donate all airdrops I get to the Zama DAO
Some thoughts: - maybe if banking apps and websites didnt suck and had proper APIs, people wouldnt need to give full access to their agents to do basic financial automation. - use a blockchain for moving money. You can program any rule you want in a smart contract and force your agent to abide by the code. Its 100x better for agentic finance. - using a blockchain for banking means you need programmable, compliant confidentiality (@zama)
I never bought a car, but now I really want a flying Tesla 😍
The highest revenue onchain protocol today makes 400x less revenue than Google. We are so early
A few people yesterday asked how AI could impact FHE / @zama, so here is a quick tldr: 1. There is no evidence that lattices / FHE can be broken by AI, SI or quantum. If anything, there is a growing consensus that fully breaking lattices might imply P = NP. 2. However, it's almost certain that better attacks will be discovered, which would require increasing parameter size and taking a short-term hit on performance. The Zama protocol is modular, so we can increase parameters size or swap out any component quickly, without changing the UX or rotating user keys. 3. Zama uses FHE only for privacy, so breaking FHE would not allow stealing funds that are shielded, it would only allow seeing balances and amounts. This is unlike ZK, where breaking the cryptography means you can steal funds and mint infinite tokens. 4. We do a lot of work on cryptanalysis and improving the security of FHE. We spend millions a year on audits (AI and human), research grants, bounties, have 30 PhDs in the team, etc. We have a plan A (the current thing we do), but also a plan B and a plan C if things go wrong. Whatever the future throws at us, we will have a way to adapt to offer the same service. 5. Hashes have been broken in the past, many times (MD5, SHA1, etc), so saying they are more secure than lattices, which have been extensively studied for decades is a stretch to say the least. Not saying its impossible, but history is on the side of lattices here. Lets also remember that if indeed lattices and elliptic curves are broken and there is no public-key encryption anymore, then hiding your balances onchain is the least of your worries, because the world as we know it would be over: no private communications, no online banking, your AI prompts would be public, etc.
This great report by @DefiLlama is a very detailed analysis of confidential DeFi, with a deep dive on @zama . Must read if you are interested in the space! Oh, and the Zama TVL numbers have almost doubled since then, and is now sitting at ~90m shielded TVL :)
Imagine if Anthropic or OpenAI used their revenue to buyback and burn their shares instead of reinvesting it into building better models, buying more compute and onboarding more clients. They likely would be dead already and we would all have worse AI products as a result. Why would it be different for crypto protocols? Hint: it's not, and you should compound revenue into growth, then do buybacks only when you captured your market.
