🔐 Extreme Privacy in Web3

Today's Highlights

• Sunscreen - innovating privacy in Web3
• Learn - a couple of courses to further your knowledge in crypto.
• In Other News - a few interesting developments we're tracking.

Sunscreen - innovating privacy in Web3

Privacy is a core concern in crypto. Once a crypto wallet address corresponds to a certain individual, it can track all the transactions that individual has made through their wallet on any public blockchain, including Bitcoin and Ethereum.  Some cryptographers think the solution to crypto’s privacy concerns lies in zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), a technique that allows for a transaction to be verified on a blockchain without the underlying data being shared. While zero-knowledge proofs could indeed improve privacy and scalability for some of the most popular blockchains, they are far from being the only cryptographic method that could accelerate progress in web3.

Ravital Solomon, co-founder and CEO of Sunscreen, thinks fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is even more promising in its potential to bolster privacy in web3. The technology allows for individuals to perform computations on encrypted data without needing to decrypt it. One of the obvious use cases that comes to mind is for financial institutions, which could use FHE to slice and dice transaction data to detect potential fraud while maintaining more privacy for customers than is currently the norm.

Zero-knowledge proofs are really exciting in terms of what they can offer to web3. There are all these exciting applications for gaming and identity, but zero-knowledge proofs aren’t necessarily the be-all and end-all for crypto or privacy. Fully homomorphic encryption is a different kind of privacy technology, and it is complementary to zero-knowledge proofs. Part of the challenge with zero knowledge proofs is that using them can be pricey. Many projects built with ZKPs expect users to have computing power far beyond what the average consumer would have at home in order to perform as intended. Sunscreen, aims to boost the development of FHE technology. It's very difficult to write FHE programs because the space is still so nascent, for one thing — which is part of why Sunscreen is building developer tools to simplify processes around it.

Sunscreen has raised a total of $5.2M in funding. Ravital Solomon and Maclane Wilkison are the co-founders of Sunscreen.

📚 Learn

In Other News