Fhenix is excited to announce the development of FHE coprocessors in collaboration with EigenLayer. Both projects will be dedicating significant resources towards FHE coprocessors, bringing wide-scale confidential compute to the Ethereum ecosystem.

Through this partnership, Fhenix’s FHE coprocessors will be able to provide fast transaction confirmation, allowing us to significantly scale up performance. This breakthrough marks a major milestone in the advancement of onchain FHE.

How Fhenix’s FHE Coprocessors Works

A coprocessor serves as a companion processor designed to offload specific computational tasks from a host chain – whether it’s Ethereum, an L2, or an L3, to a designated processor living outside the scope of the host.

While different types of coprocessors exist, Fhenix’s FHE coprocessors have a specific focus on maintaining data confidentiality and leveraging FHE rollups. FHE rollups have built-in encryption and unlock many novel use cases. For example, confidential AI is possible by having FHE coprocessors run intensive computations away from the host chain while ensuring that the input data is kept private.

FHE coprocessors drastically improve the efficiency of FHE-based operations, while maintaining the same level of security as the host chain.

Interacting with an FHE coprocessor is simple: an application on the host chain invokes the coprocessor, asking it to perform some specific computation over a set of encrypted inputs, and gets the result back, which it can then use onchain.

Computations are secured through Fhenix’s optimistic rollup architecture, employing fault proofs to ensure data integrity. However, these fault proofs necessitate a lengthy dispute period (normally a seven day window) for finality, which is impractical and severely limits the potential of FHE applications.

EigenLayer helps to address this challenge. It provides a ‘fast-lane’ mode in which operators verify the execution and attest to its correctness. These operators are secured by sufficient stake, and can later be slashed if they act maliciously. It’s important to note that having a dispute window is still critical, as it allows these operators to remain accountable after-the-fact, while sufficiently ensuring that no profit-maximizing operator misbehaves. In other words, thanks to EigenLayer’s cryptoeconomic security, apps utilizing an FHE coprocessor can use their output as soon as the operators verify execution, thereby facilitating substantial scaling of confidential onchain computation.

New Applications Horizon

The versatility of FHE coprocessors spans a wide range of scenarios, especially in domains prioritizing confidentiality.

For instance, consider their application in onchain auctions, where bid confidentiality ensures fairness and a more economical outcome for all bidders. Similarly, with onchain AI, FHE coprocessors can run intensive computations outside their host chain while still ensuring that the input data is kept private. The list of potential use cases is extensive, including decentralized identity, confidential DeFi, encrypted gaming, MEV protection, and many more.

To learn more about FHE use cases, click here.

A Future Shaped by FHE Coprocessors

Fhenix’s FHE coprocessors offload computational tasks and accelerate the rate in which confidential onchain transactions can be processed. Given that security is inherited from Fhenix’s optimistic rollup design, an existing limitation is that optimistic fault proofs are subject to a seven-day dispute period.

This partnership between Fhenix and Eigenlayer marks a significant milestone in the evolution of blockchain technology. By harnessing the power of FHE coprocessors, developers will be able to build applications that utilize confidential data efficiently while maintaining the same level of security. This technological advancement unlocks new capabilities for blockchain applications that were not possible before.

About Fhenix

Fhenix is building the first confidential smart contract platform using Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), a novel cryptographic scheme that enables direct computation over encrypted data without ever revealing the underlying data.

Fhenix’s goal is to advance application development in the blockchain ecosystem by bringing data encryption and encrypted data computation to smart contracts, transactions, and onchain assets for the first time.

For more information, join our Discord.

About EigenLayer

EigenLayer is a protocol built on Ethereum that introduces restaking, a new primitive in cryptoeconomic security. Restaking enables staked ETH to be used as cryptoeconomic security for protocols other than Ethereum, in exchange for protocol fees and rewards.

For more information visit www.eigenlayer.xyz/