Arcium: Solana / FHE / Dark Pool Past

Fashion is a reincarnation, Crypto is a cycle, maybe the cycle is no longer, but the imitation disk is eternal.

The encrypted supercomputing project Arcium on Solana chose Coinlist for the community round, which instantly reminded me of the Coinlist quota script war from 2017 to 2021, and the novice village of scientists and Mao Party.

A new generation is better than the old, but Arcium has changed its banner three times, struggling to find a way out for itself. It luckily escaped the Solana Meme Season, and I don’t know if it can realize its dream in the BSC Meme Season.

Previous life: The dark pool Elusiv that deleted the database and ran away

In three sentences, you can summarize why Elusiv transformed into Arcium:

• You know that Arcium is not my real name, Elusiv is my real name;

• Data-based MPC encryption is a disguise, dark pool is our real business;

• Privacy 1.0 is a personal private state, and Avatar 2.0 emphasizes shared collaboration.

Elusiv originated from the Solana hackathon. In the early days, it was a Solana imitation of encrypted privacy such as Zcash, Monero, Tornado Cash, etc., focusing on ZK/FHE/MPC to build dark pool services.

Dark pool services are not complicated. Like the dark web, they all refer to deep behaviors beyond the surface, which has a sense of deep government.

On the blockchain, the open and transparent ledger system makes all transactions public, which is also the source of MEV, so there are specific needs for switching to anonymous transactions.

However, as mentioned earlier, there is no essential difference between Privacy 1.0 at this time and mixers, Monero, etc. After Tornado Cash was regulated, doing so would be a provocation to the US authorities, so Elusiv’s code stopped updating 2 years ago.

If you search for Dark Pool and FHE on @ArciumHQ, you will find that they focus on two things: talking about the advantages of MPC over FHE, mainly in terms of computing efficiency and cost, and secondly, they are optimistic about Dark Pool in the long term, but it was named Elusiv in the early days and now uses Arcium.

However, there is no absolute distinction between the advantages and disadvantages of technologies such as MPC/FHE/ZK/TEE. The difference is more in the application scenarios. MPC focuses on trusted computing between multiple subjects, FHE focuses on the computing behavior after encryption, and ZK ensures the validity of data before encryption.

In fact, it can be said responsibly that now all kinds of privacy technology-oriented projects are not doing well. Why target each other? Working together to expand the market is a more win-win choice. However, this is not the most effective show. After Tornado Cash ushered in a turnaround, Arcium began to promote Dark Pool again.

It is difficult to do a project, and it is even more difficult to do a famous project. You have to be able to be tempered by the market and still be like your first love; it is difficult to be a retail investor, and it is even more difficult to be a profitable retail investor. You have to interpret every word in "Huanglongjiang School All Wear Bluetooth".

This life: Parallel FHE turns to encryption supercomputing

Arcium has its own ideas about data-based privacy.

In short, Arcium considers how to combine blockchain features with MPC. The answer is also simple. Since MPC requires multi-party computing and blockchain requires multi-node operation, combining the two is not a multi-party execution environment (MXEs, Multi-Party eXecution Environments).

Based on this, coupled with parallel execution technology, combined with technical features such as FHE/ZK, a fast and secure blockchain encryption system can be created.

If you are interested in parallelization, you can read the old article that is not slapped in the face:Parallelism is not only EVM, high-performance L1 (Sui) vs. Ethereum L2?

However, these are not particularly important. Like Nillion, the core problem of privacy technology now is the lack of scenario support. Arcium has selected AI, DePIN and DeFi. The first two can be used as gimmicks for financing and issuing coins. Only dark pools and privacy transactions (mixed coins) in the DeFi field have real market demand at present.

Arcium's claim of being 10,000 times faster than the FHE architecture has no practical significance, because the blockchain's demand for FHE is zero, so 10,000 times of zero is also zero.

I am not denying Arcium or MPC/FHE technology, but their long-term demand is not clear, and the project party, under the pressure of issuing coins, can only look for non-real demand, just like the buyback of junk coins will still be junk coins.

Afterlife: Free Solana Privacy 2.0

But things will always turn around. Helius once contributed the most easy-to-understand technical article on Solana 2.0, and is now redefining the concept of Solana Privacy 2.0. Although I don’t believe this, it sounds reasonable.

There is only one core point: Privacy 2.0 is multi-party privacy, typically shared private state, in other words, MPC. To be more specific, it is a collection of Arcium concepts:

1. arxOS is an encrypted operating system used to aggregate the computing power of Arcium nodes;

2. MXE is a computing execution environment used to enable secure computing to occur on Arcium;

3. Arcis is a programming language modified from Rust, just like the relationship between Move language and Rust.

I really have to complain here. StarkNet, Move language, and Arcis are all adapted from Rust. Maybe the project owners think that they can maximize the full effectiveness of customized languages, but it will not have any practical effect except increasing the burden on developers.

Image Description: The difference between Privacy 1.0 and 2.0

In fact, privacy AI may not require technologies such as MPC/FHE. If LLM can be small enough, MCP can become the de facto industry standard, which can directly meet the daily needs of individual users without excessive exposure of privacy.

If privacy or private AI refers to a company, entity or individual deploying LLM on their own, then the interaction delay and computing power consumption brought by MPC/FHE technology can be added inefficiently. MPC's cheap big bowl is relative to FHE, and its own computing power consumption is not cheap.

Secondly, the problems faced by dark pools and privacy transactions (anonymous small transfers, currency mixing) are mainly supervision, followed by cost issues. Dark pools are dedicated to large investors. The battle between dark pools and SEC in traditional financial markets has been ongoing, and the same is true for currency mixers.

Although Trump has put on a spirit of making money even if there is a flood after my death, the dark pools on the chain are really rising. Can they learn from RailGun and the privacy model reported by the official? Then the peace between large investors will only hurt retail investors.

The US government has officially given up hunting down Tornado Cash, but after this battle, pure, classic true privacy solutions will no longer become the mainstream of the market. The active and passive compliance of TRM Labs and RailGun can allow regulators to control on-chain behavior.

The only real thing is anonymous small transfers in the market space, but ordinary individual users will not pay extra for privacy. You can treat it as a service, but it is difficult to use this to support the complete PMF logic.

Conclusion

Arcium's entry into the TGE process marks the end of the classic privacy project, which is more classic than the reversal of Tornado Cash. From now on, the project party will actively set limits on itself, and the boundaries will be established.