HashKey Capital Insights shared a comprehensive article explaining both the challenges and paradigm-shifting potential of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (#FHE). We were happy to contribute to this article alongside other prominent Web3 FHE projects.

We're going to break it down for you and give you the takeaways.

1⃣

The big takeaway: FHE is the Holy Grail of Cryptography for a reason. It is changing the way we secure data across platforms, painting an almost unbelievable new era for data privacy.

2⃣

The primary limitations of FHE DevEx:
1) Easy front-end language
2) A fully functional FHE compiler
3) FHE schemes are too slow

3⃣

New solutions to these limitations:
1) Web3-specific FHE compilers offer the best performance without hardware accelerators
2) New FHE libraries that leverage the popular Web3 programming languages
3) Zama's toolkit exposes homomorphic operations as precompiled contracts

4⃣

ZKPs & FHE - a match made in privacy heaven. FHE allows anyone to perform computation on encrypted data. ZKPs allow one to prove something is true without revealing the underlying information itself. This is how they work together:
1) Making sure the ciphertext meets the requirements of the encryption scheme
2) Submitting a proof that an input plaintext satisfies a given application's conditions
3) The validator node needs to prove they've correctly executed the FHE computation

5⃣

ZKPs of ciphertext. ZKPs like SNARKS and STARKS do not rely on lattice cryptography; FHE does. This means that FHE is 'post-quantum'. In other words, ZKPs alone are not resistant to quantum computing attacks, but FHE is.

6⃣

The hardware problem. FHE on existing hardware is inefficient and not scalable in a decentralized way. Verifiable FHE solves this by allowing the computing party to submit a ZKP for proof of honest execution of transactions.