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Zama's homomorphic encryption tech lands it $73M on a valuation of nearly $400M

25 points by zacchj 3y ago

vlovich123 3y ago
It’s unfortunate that all the applications right now feel very hand-wavy. Still, $50M in projected contract value is a nice sounding number which probably was used to land the $73M investment. It’ll be interesting to see if they can break out of niches because it’s highly likely that FHE will remain at least an order of magnitude more expensive than normal computers even with HW acceleration.
- qeternity 3y ago
  I would take those figures with a huge grain of salt. They were backed by crypto VCs and it sounds like their use-case at the moment is going to be allowing sensitive data to be persisted to and computed on-chain. I'm not saying this isn't a valid use-case, but I wouldn't be surprised if the contracts are from their VC's portcos and that the value is in tokens, not in cash. Nonetheless, glad to see homomorphic encryption getting funded.
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    Yeah, I do take it with a grain of salt, especially since the valuation could be a form of self-dealing to hype up other investments. This is a legit company though and the researchers there are really moving the field forward and maybe someday it’ll have real applications. Certainly more interesting use of funds than other blockchain wastes of time.
- acchow 3y ago
  HW acceleration isn’t going to help much here because it’s really the exploding space complexity that needs to be addressed.
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    I didn’t explain why I thought HW wouldn’t help as much but yes, the exploding space complexity is definitely a big problem.
monero-xmr 3y ago
HN has a major blindspot for blockchain tech. The biggest pay packets for engineers I'm seeing are for AI and blockchain companies, and the liquidity events for blockchain engineers are far faster. There are many deep tech problems in the blockchain space that are interesting to solve, from cryptography to distributed computing to verifiable computation to economic incentives. The valuation of crypto has risen significantly lately, despite endless speculation from the cognoscenti about its demise, and very little chatter on HN about it.
- hobs 3y ago
  I don't think we do, its just that just like I don't want to work for big oil, defense, or tobacco companies, I have no interest in working on cryptocurrencies when their biggest contribution I see is rug pulls and proof-of-waste algorithms.
  - monero-xmr 3y ago
    I don't think companies like Coinbase, Circle, or Kraken are rug pulls. USDC is a very interesting concept. Ethereum uses Proof of Work (which is an interesting game theory problem to solve itself), which does not energy consumption to secure their network.
    - monero-xmr 3y ago
      @dang why the heck is this thread flagged? Makes no sense
    - treyd 3y ago
      It's still undeniable that most crypto projects exist primarily to get retail investors to buy in to allow VCs and other insiders to cash out on them. Not directly as a simple rugpull but a longer term slow bleed, using the leverage they hold in an ecosystem in the near term to manipulate it in a direction that's useful to them in the long term. a16z is massively guilty of this.
    - Nouser76 3y ago
jlund-molfese 3y ago
I wish people didn't use HN only for self-promotion. One account doing it isn't too noticeable, but it adds up when everyone does. Would be cool to write client side solution that checks users' submission history, caches it on a server somewhere, and automatically hides posts made by users on the spam list.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

25 points by zacchj 3y ago

It’s unfortunate that all the applications right now feel very hand-wavy. Still, $50M in projected contract value is a nice sounding number which probably was used to land the $73M investment. It’ll be interesting to see if they can break out of niches because it’s highly likely that FHE will remain at least an order of magnitude more expensive than normal computers even with HW acceleration.

qeternity 3y ago
I would take those figures with a huge grain of salt. They were backed by crypto VCs and it sounds like their use-case at the moment is going to be allowing sensitive data to be persisted to and computed on-chain. I'm not saying this isn't a valid use-case, but I wouldn't be surprised if the contracts are from their VC's portcos and that the value is in tokens, not in cash. Nonetheless, glad to see homomorphic encryption getting funded.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  Yeah, I do take it with a grain of salt, especially since the valuation could be a form of self-dealing to hype up other investments. This is a legit company though and the researchers there are really moving the field forward and maybe someday it’ll have real applications. Certainly more interesting use of funds than other blockchain wastes of time.
acchow 3y ago
HW acceleration isn’t going to help much here because it’s really the exploding space complexity that needs to be addressed.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  I didn’t explain why I thought HW wouldn’t help as much but yes, the exploding space complexity is definitely a big problem.

monero-xmr 3y ago

HN has a major blindspot for blockchain tech. The biggest pay packets for engineers I'm seeing are for AI and blockchain companies, and the liquidity events for blockchain engineers are far faster. There are many deep tech problems in the blockchain space that are interesting to solve, from cryptography to distributed computing to verifiable computation to economic incentives. The valuation of crypto has risen significantly lately, despite endless speculation from the cognoscenti about its demise, and very little chatter on HN about it.

hobs 3y ago
I don't think we do, its just that just like I don't want to work for big oil, defense, or tobacco companies, I have no interest in working on cryptocurrencies when their biggest contribution I see is rug pulls and proof-of-waste algorithms.
- monero-xmr 3y ago
  I don't think companies like Coinbase, Circle, or Kraken are rug pulls. USDC is a very interesting concept. Ethereum uses Proof of Work (which is an interesting game theory problem to solve itself), which does not energy consumption to secure their network.
  - monero-xmr 3y ago
    @dang why the heck is this thread flagged? Makes no sense
  - treyd 3y ago
    It's still undeniable that most crypto projects exist primarily to get retail investors to buy in to allow VCs and other insiders to cash out on them. Not directly as a simple rugpull but a longer term slow bleed, using the leverage they hold in an ecosystem in the near term to manipulate it in a direction that's useful to them in the long term. a16z is massively guilty of this.
  - Nouser76 3y ago

jlund-molfese 3y ago

I wish people didn't use HN only for self-promotion. One account doing it isn't too noticeable, but it adds up when everyone does. Would be cool to write client side solution that checks users' submission history, caches it on a server somewhere, and automatically hides posts made by users on the spam list.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]