The breakthrough technology that nobody talks about

How Fully Homomorphic Encryption can create a new Internet standard with privacy at its core.

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is one of those things that when you first hear about it, you can’t quite wrap your head around just how powerful this technology is.

FHE is a type of encryption that allows computations to be performed on encrypted data, without ever needing to decrypt it. This might sound like magic, but it’s a real technology that’s set to revolutionize how we handle data privacy.

I first learned about this when I reached out to Zama, a cutting-edge cryptography company working to make FHE into a new Internet standard. The concept was so exciting to explore that I sat down with their ecosystem lead, Jason, to talk about Zama’s work on FHE in Fintech and Cryptocurrency.

The discussion is available on Spotify and Apple Music if you want to jump straight into that.

What is Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) ?

FHE allows computations to be performed on encrypted data without needing to decrypt it first, but what does that actually mean?

By far the biggest advantage is that your data can remain confidential and secure even while it’s being processed.

Imagine you could send your DNA to a medical provider without worrying about privacy breaches. They could perform tests on your encrypted data and return results that only you could decrypt. This is the promise of FHE — maintaining the confidentiality of your data throughout the entire process.

In typical encryption, data is encrypted into ciphertext to protect its contents, and it must be decrypted back into plaintext to be processed or analyzed. FHE, however, allows operations to be performed directly on the ciphertext, resulting in an encrypted result that, when decrypted, matches the result of operations performed on the plaintext.

Hopefully, by this point you’re starting to realise why I’m so excited about this type of encryption, and your brain is firing all sorts of scenarios on potential applications. But before we jump into those, let me provide a quick…