The Holy Grail of Crypto Privacy: Encrypted Ethereum, FHE & Living Forever | Rand Hindi, Zama Co-Founder

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Technology, Tech News, News

4.7 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 1 December 2025

⏱️ 92 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ethereum is transparent by design, and that’s a problem if you don’t want your entire financial life on display. Rand Hindi, co-founder of Zama, joins us to explain how fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) can turn Ethereum into an encrypted, confidential blockchain where contracts stay composable and UX feels exactly the same. We get into why blockchains were public in the first place, why “anonymous addresses” were never enough, how FHE compares to ZK and MPC, and what a world of private DeFi, encrypted stablecoins, and on-chain “digital immortality” could look like. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔵COINBASE | ETH & BTC BACKED LOANS https://bankless.cc/coinbase-borrow 🪙FRAXNET | MINT, REDEEM, & EARN https://bankless.cc/fraxnet 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR L2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 💤EIGHT SLEEP | IMPROVE YOUR SLEEP https://bankless.cc/eight-sleep ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 0:24 Why Are Blockchains Public? 9:11 Privacy vs Confidentiality 11:13 Zama: Privacy on Ethereum 15:05 Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) 19:34 Multi-Party Computation (MPC) 23:50 FHE vs ZK 37:25 FHE Critiques 40:08 Nation State Attacks 45:58 Combining ZK & FHE 49:20 Privacy Season 51:39 Compliance 1:00:18 Zama 1:04:03 Confidential Tokens 1:08:12 How it Works 1:11:30 Zama Token & Protocol 1:14:09 Privacy Competitors 1:17:36 Fhenix 1:19:46 Rand’s Background 1:23:07 AI Privacy 1:26:42 Longevity 1:33:01 Crypto & Privacy in 2026 1:33:33 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Rand Hindi https://x.com/randhindi Zama https://www.zama.org/ Fhenix https://www.fhenix.io/ Unit Ventures https://github.com/randhindi/unit-vc ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Transcript

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0:00.0	it'll feel just like using Ethereum, right?
0:02.4	For developers, it'll feel like just like building for Ethereum.
0:05.2	Everything is in solidity and you're pushing your contract to Ethereum.
0:08.8	For users, everything's going to feel like Ethereum.
0:10.8	You're using a wallet to make a transaction to Ethereum.
0:13.9	And that's really how we thought about this, right?
0:16.1	It's we don't want people to use something else.
0:18.8	We want people to use Ethereum confidentially.
0:24.6	Rand, I think everyone listening to bank lists knows that crypto has a privacy problem.
0:31.1	We want privacy.
0:32.1	We don't have it yet.
0:33.3	Here's how you put it in a recent tweet.
0:34.9	You said, go to anyone on the street and ask them to show you their bank account.
0:39.6	That's blockchain today.
0:41.5	It's obvious we need confidentiality.
0:45.0	Why don't we have privacy yet?
0:47.5	Well, I think if you look at the history of blockchain, maybe the first thing we have to
0:51.9	understand is why is data public in the first place.
0:55.8	The reason why data is public on a public blockchain is because you want public verifiability.
1:01.3	If you want anybody to be able to recompute the states, they need to be able to use and see the data that was part of computing that state.
1:10.6	And so there was really no other way if you wanted decentralization and public verifiability,
1:15.5	but to make the data public.
	...

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