Vitalik: Privacy is the guarantee of freedom, order and progress

If you’ve been tweeting lately, you’ve probably seen Vitalik Buterin ring the alarm again: “Privacy can no longer be ignored.” ”

This time he is not talking about abstract “human rights” or another technological breakthrough of ZK, but pointing to a reality that is visible to the naked eye: we are entering an era of information anxiety. AI is getting smarter, data is becoming more and more centralized, and we are no longer simply “streaking”, but being scanned, modeled, evaluated, and finally accurately sold.

You don’t even know which time you clicked “Accept all cookies” and your data was sold to advertisers, risk control systems, or the next decision-making agency.

Vitalik wrote:

“Whoever has the information has the power.”
“AI can read our data and maybe even our minds in the future.”

You think it’s a science fiction brain hole? No, this is the path to reality that YC and OpenAI have pitched countless rounds.

The key technology named by Vitalik is the one that has been quietly precipitated in the past decade and is now gradually entering the main stage: Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE)

What kind of fairy technology is FHE?

In a word: let AI do “understandable” things on “invisible” data.

Let’s say you feed an encrypted X-ray image to an AI, and it can’t see what’s going on, it doesn’t know who you are, but it can tell you, “You may need to do further testing.” "It doesn’t peek, it doesn’t upload, it doesn’t store. The entire computation process is encrypted, and only the user can decrypt the results.

It’s the beauty of the paradox of technology: opaque data, transparent conclusions.

And this mechanism is the key to the next generation of “Encrypted Agents”. Under this path, the agent can be “useful” to you, but “ignorant” to you – which may be the real “data cooperation rather than data selling”.

Vitalik is right, but who’s doing it?

One of the answers: FHE projects such as Mind Network, Privasea, etc.

Among them, the popularity of PHE’s head project Mind Network is no longer in the stage of cold start recently: the market performance after TGE is remarkable, especially the market discussion and heated discussion after the release of the roadmap, which is essentially based on the technology and product precipitation in the past two years, and benefits from the accurate control of narrative and rhythm.

More importantly, it always adheres to the expansion based on FHE technology, which provides three core directions: data sovereignty + encrypted computing + AI native chain.

Christian Pusateri, CEO of Mind Network, also recently tweeted: "In the era of AI, computing must be encrypted, agents must be autonomous, and data must be sovereign. ”

Their goal is not to build a smarter Skynet, but to build a new digital order where you have data sovereignty, you choose the boundaries of interaction, and you can confidently host AI without sacrificing convenience.

This is exactly the direction of the “privacy collaboration system” that Vitalik emphasizes in the article - and Mind Network, which is building a true cryptographic infrastructure.

FHE ≠ ZK, but they are twin stars walking side by side

Many people will ask: why do we need FHE when we already have ZK?

ZK (Zero-Knowledge Proof) allows us to verify that a claim is true without knowing the process or the raw data. FHE, which further allows us to perform arbitrary calculations in the state of full encryption of data.

One is “Verify Trust” and the other is “Compute Trust”. A guarantee that “the results you provide can be verified” and a guarantee that “the process you do is secure and encrypted”.

In the age of agents, their synergy will be a key combination: ZK is responsible for proving that you are not cheating, and FHE is responsible for letting agents run logic on top of privacy.

If ZK is a magnifying glass that “can see the truth”, then FHE is an encrypted key to “lock freedom”.

Agent, from memes to operating systems

In the past few months, the Web3 circle has played “Agent” flying, from AgentFi to AgentChain, from Meme to Ecology. But what can really make the “agent” from a meme into a system is not emotional, but engineering.

Vitalik writes clearly in the article: "We have more tools than the Cypherpunks of the 90s. The FHE, ZK, fuzzy computing, trusted hardware, and even the next-generation MPC solutions he mentioned could be the building blocks of the future AI collaboration model.

The question is: who is making the SDK? Who is writing the frame? Who’s running the first agent chain?

Answer: Mind Network is launching a series of modular components based on AgenticWorld, such as AgentEnroll, AgentTrain, and Encrypted Storage SDK, to help developers deploy agents with data self-hosting capabilities.

They also plan to open up the Web2 application layer, so that ordinary developers can quickly build AI services based on privacy-preserving computing.

In other words, they are not only building an operating system for cryptographic computing, but they are also helping to build an encrypted version of ChatGPT: not only does it understand what you say, but it also protects you from being heard.

Do we really need privacy?

This is a real question in the hearts of many people.

In the past, when we talked about privacy, it was always a bit heavy - it was like a line of defense, and it was also like a wall; It’s like confronting the world, and it’s like giving in to freedom. Today, however, privacy may not be about “protecting oneself,” but about giving boundaries to cooperation and order to autonomy.

As AI becomes more and more like a digital agent in your life, when all your decisions, habits, and even thoughts can be predicted by machines, we may really need an answer:

In the digital world of the future – you, or you?

Privacy is not an accessory, but the main axis of the new era

Vitalik raises the banner of privacy as a reminder to build a foundation of trust in open-source privacy tools. At the same time, the project team and developers have gone all out to the engineering battlefield of “data does not go out of the chain, and the calculation cannot be confidential”.

From market buzz to product launches, from community mobilization to developer growth, what we see is not a boom in narratives, but the emergence of a new order.

Privacy may no longer be a concession of sorts; It’s the beginning of your partnership with AI, the safeguard that you won’t be disciplined, the shield of your digital identity, and the only way you can be sovereign in the Web3 world.

If ZK allows us to “see trust”, then FHE is the magic that allows us to hand over data without handing over freedom.