With growing concerns around surveillance and data exploitation, the crypto space has recently accelerated efforts to integrate privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) into its core infrastructure.

Blockchains are radically transparent by design and while the crypto industry has long valued privacy methods — coin mixers or privacy-based tokens — it has also struggled to expand what can be private – beyond simple DeFi and payments – without siloing that privacy to specialized networks.

With blockchains increasingly used for AI training and institutional finance, applications using alternative cryptographic techniques are becoming popular. Four technologies in particular are catching steam: Multi-Party Computation (MPC), Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), and Zero-Knowledge Transport Security Layer (zkTLS).