Fhenix CEO Guy Itzhaki revealed in an interview with Blockworks that the company had raised $7 million from investors including Multicoin Capital and Collider Ventures as part of a seed round. Bode Capital, Robot Ventures, Bankless, HackVC, TaneLabs, and Metaplanet are just some of the other companies that have put money into the company.
FHE, or fully homomorphic encryption, is a subset of symmetric encryption that allows for computations to be conducted on secret information. This allows for the privacy-preserving and tamper-proof execution of operations, interactions with contracts, and data collaboration by numerous users simultaneously.
Itzhaki points out that this method of encryption eliminates the need for users to decrypt data before processing it, unlike other methods of encryption and trusted execution environments.
Instead of moving the data off-chain and letting the prover see the decrypted message as in zero-knowledge technology, FHE computation can be accomplished while the data is still encrypted. The computed results will be encrypted as well.
Itzhaki remarked that while zero-knowledge technology is wonderful for scalability, “there are limited user cases.” For the first time, thanks to FHE, encrypted data may be stored on the blockchain while yet maintaining the same level of privacy as non-encrypted data.
FHE can be used to enable a wide variety of applications. As examples, Itzhaki mentioned voting tools for DAOs, trustless games, and account abstraction.
Because private keys may be stored on an FHE-encrypted smart contract and then used to sign transactions elsewhere, “we make account abstraction really easy,” Itzhaki added.
According to Itzhaki, Fhenix will use fhEVM, a variant of the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM).
“[Developers] don’t need to learn any new language, they can use Solidity and the same developer tools they are used to, there is an additional library that they have to decide what it is they actually want to encrypt,” Itzhaki says.
A proof-of-stake, layer-1 developer testnet was live in July, but Itzhaki points out that the actual testnet rollout will be as an Ethereum layer-2.
Long-term, “the goal is to be perceived as some kind of extension to Ethereum,” Itzhaki said. If you need to implement encryption when constructing either your [layer-1] or your [layer-2], you can do it with Fhenix.