quote: sorry for ruining the joke https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2089036530039890323 | 5-10 years ago I used to joke a lot that someone should combine Fully Homomorphic Encryption with Blockchain-based smart contracts. In theory, it's an amazing combination: blockchains are by their nature fully public, since they work by having many independent nodes verify the computation. But FHE can fix this, since it allows an encrypted computation to be performed on a machine where the machine itself cannot see the encrypted data. Also FHE and blockchain are both things VCs were pouring money into at the time, so this idea would be the ultimate funding magnet. What made it a funny joke is that FHE and blockchain are two technologies that each impose like ~1000x overhead on the compute, so combining them meant ~1,000,000x overhead. Processing one smart contract could have taken enough energy to power a small country, etc. But it stopped being funny to me when I discovered a startup that actually raised a bunch of money on this idea. 🤦 Anyway, that was back before AI got popular. Now we have yet another high-compute-overhead technology to throw into the mix. So here's my new pitch: We run an LLM, inside fully homomorphic encryption, on the blockchain.

quote: sorry for ruining the joke https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2089036530039890323 | 5-10 years ago I used to joke a lot that someone should combine Fully Homomorphic Encryption with Blockchain-based smart contracts. In theory, it's an amazing combination: blockchains are by their nature fully public, since they work by having many independent nodes verify the computation. But FHE can fix this, since it allows an encrypted computation to be performed on a machine where the machine itself cannot see the encrypted data. Also FHE and blockchain are both things VCs were pouring money into at the time, so this idea would be the ultimate funding magnet. What made it a funny joke is that FHE and blockchain are two technologies that each impose like ~1000x overhead on the compute, so combining them meant ~1,000,000x overhead. Processing one smart contract could have taken enough energy to power a small country, etc. But it stopped being funny to me when I discovered a startup that actually raised a bunch of money on this idea. 🤦 Anyway, that was back before AI got popular. Now we have yet another high-compute-overhead technology to throw into the mix. So here's my new pitch: We run an LLM, inside fully homomorphic encryption, on the blockchain.

Source:https://x.com/zama/status/2089259373675549062