MACI made one thing clear:
private inputs and shared outcomes shouldn't depend on one operator.
Voting was the starting point.
The Interfold generalizes that pattern into a network for confidential coordination.
More people should know about the Interfold.
It's basically what I've been yelling at people to build with the MACI ideas ( https://t.co/mlDy84zXQo ) for almost a decade, and now it exists, in a generalized form.
The idea is: a privacy protocol optimized for things like voting (and other use cases eg. secret-ballot auctions). The mechanism generates a threshold encryption key, and people send in their votes onchain, using a ZKP to prove eligibility. An arbitrary computation on the votes gets run inside FHE, and then threshold-decrypted.
From what I can tell (the docs are good https://t.co/adzwK6ezMN ), it gets pretty optimal security guarantees:
* Voter anonymity can be made unconditional if eligibility is proven with ZK-SNARKs
* Censorship resistance is guaranteed by ethereum (votes can be posted directly onchain, and there's a proof that all posted votes are taking into account)
* The correctness of the outputted result can be ensured via ZK over FHE
* Liveness and coercion resistance depend on M-of-N honesty; unavoidable given present-day technology
The main limitation is that today "ZK over FHE" is only properly available for additive vote tallying, as it's too expensive for computations that involve multiplication or other more complicated manipulation at the moment. There's work in progress on slashing-based / optimistic computation for such situations.
(And of course ideally in the long term we'd figure out obfuscation so you can get rid of the M-of-N committeesπ)
New Interfold website.
If you've been trying to understand confidential coordination, multiplayer privacy, ciphernodes, or what we're actually building, this is a good place to start.
https://t.co/wLgUtOBCOc
Public blockchains made shared state verifiable, but not ππππππππππππ.
Most real-world coordination requires both: πππππππ ππππππ and ππππππππππ ππππππππ.
That's why the next infrastructure problem is execution itself: how encrypted inputs become shared results without a single operator controlling the process.
Meet Alessandro (@ctrlc03), Senior Engineer at The Interfold.
With experience spanning cybersecurity, cryptography, contributions to MACI, p0tion, and @PrivacyEthereum infrastructure, he's helping build the foundations for multiparty privacy at scale.
We're grateful to have him on our team!
https://t.co/DfJsyZWKU6
hey, today gave a lecture on ZK and posted some notes about what I said and the exercises! Very beginner friendly and helps you get the mental model, cheers!
https://t.co/1ZnthKfUgV
Yes. Iβd start with the essay series for the thesis around confidential coordination, then the docs for the technical model around E3s, ciphernodes, and network execution.
https://t.co/Qcf5IPRaFr
https://t.co/jooYUhxRsM
Those should help clarify why ciphernodes matter, and why the network is necessary.
A lot of new people found Interfold this past week.
Welcome!
The short version: The Interfold is a distributed network for confidential coordination. Private inputs, shared outcomes, no single operator controlling execution or release.
This week, weβll publish a primer on ciphernodes: what they do, why they matter, and how serious operators can get involved.
Coolest use case of @theInterfold imo is the ability to derive data on user statistics for private messenger app @session_app. Obv very useful to the team that created it for decision making, but also very hard to do, because well.. private messaging app = private dataβ¦ it shouldnβt be possible reallyβ¦but it is!
principled people like @auryn_macmillan delivering confidential compute via @theInterfold
also avail as a talk at Cypherpunk Congress: https://t.co/PsOhX538vs
Privacy gets more interesting when it has to produce a shared outcome.
A winner.
A tally.
An evaluation.
The hard part isn't hiding information.
It's producing a verifiable result without giving one party control over the process.
New Launch Primer β