Opacity

Dug in and broke down the privacy terms I'm increasingly seeing 👇

Multi-Party Computation (MPC) — Distributed computation that allows multiple groups to collectively compute something without revealing their own information.

➢ Think you and five friends want to find your average salary without revealing individual amounts. Each person splits their salary into six random shares and sends one to each person. Everyone performs math on the shares to compute the final average without learning individual salaries.

Building with MPC: Fireblocks (institutional custody), Arcium (private AI processing), Renegade (onchain dark pools)

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) — Allows data processing without decryption, meaning sensitive data remains encrypted when stored, transmitted, and analyzed.

➢ Like a locked safe with programmable gloves. You put private data inside, program instructions, send to someone else. They operate blindly following instructions without seeing what's inside, return correct results.

Building with FHE: Zama (FHE tooling), Fhenix (real-world applications), PrivaSea (encrypted ML)

Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) — Secure hardware zones that store and process data in isolation, preventing the rest of the machine from accessing that data.

➢ Think iPhone biometrics. Face scans stored in secure chip zones, matching happens inside sealed hardware. Apps only get yes/no, never see actual biometric data.

Building with TEEs: Space Computer (satellite nodes), Oasis Protocol (confidential smart contracts), Phala Network (decentralized cloud)

zkTLS — Merges TLS with zero-knowledge proofs to keep information private yet verifiable, turning any Web2 platform data into a public API.

➢ Prove your bank balance for onchain loans without revealing exact amounts or transaction history. Generate ZKP of balance, submit to DeFi platforms for creditworthiness verification.

Building with zkTLS: ZKP2P (on/off ramps), EarniFi (privacy-preserving loans), DaisyPay (influencer payouts)

https://www.bankless.com/read/cryptos-privacy-tech-wave

Founder of /opacity here. Farcaster has known about zkTLS for way longer than CT.

Nitpick

> Requires oracle involvement, adding latency and trust.

This depends on the provider - not universally true.

I wouldn’t have started a company here without seeing a path to remove trust assumptions.

We use shared security in a network design that ensures secure proofs even with just one honest node.