Guy Zyskind

Computer scientist & entrepreneur
MIT PhD; Founder of Fhenix

Highlights Publications

I work on applied cryptography and privacy. As part of my doctoral work at MIT, I introduced new directions for how blockchains can protect data — from using blockchains as a mechanism for access control, to proposing the model that became known as confidential smart contracts, where data remains encrypted at all times. I later launched the first production system that ran these contracts at scale, securing billions of dollars in value, and today my work extends into fully homomorphic encryption and privacy-preserving AI.

🔑 Access control on blockchains 🔒 Confidential smart contracts 🌐 Privacy-preserving DeFi & media 🤖 FHE & private AI

Signature Work

Foundations in Cryptography

At MIT I explored how decentralized systems could enforce access control and computation cryptographically.

In 2015 I co-authored the first proposal for confidential smart contracts: combining MPC with blockchains to enable private computation [1] [2].
That work has been cited thousands of times and is widely recognized as the starting point for confidential smart contracts [3].

Confidential Smart Contracts

Secret Network turned the proposal into a live system:

First production system with encrypted inputs, outputs, and state — powered by TEEs.
Showed that confidential computation can run at blockchain scale; TEEs have since been adopted widely across Web3.
Covered alongside a $400M ecosystem fund: [4] [5] [6].

Culture & Adoption

Pulp Fiction Original Manuscript encrypted NFTs with Quentin Tarantino — global coverage [7] [8].
Kevin Smith's KillRoy Was Here — first full-length feature film minted as an NFT [9].
SecretSwap — a privacy-first AMM designed to resist front-running and MEV; $Billions in volume.

Current Interests

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) for smart contracts — making confidential computation composable across Ethereum.
Privacy-preserving AI — secure transformers and private inference on encrypted/sensitive data.

Selected Research & Publications

Enigma: Decentralized Computation Platform with Guaranteed Privacy (arXiv, 2015)
Decentralizing Privacy: Using Blockchain to Protect Personal Data (IEEE Security & Privacy Workshops, 2015)
Secure Computation in Decentralized Systems (MIT PhD thesis, 2024)
High-Throughput Three-Party DPFs with Applications to ORAM and Digital Currencies (ACM CCS, 2024)
Unstoppable wallets: Chain-assisted threshold ECDSA and its applications (ACM AsiaCCS, 2024)
FHE-Rollups: Scaling Confidential Smart Contracts on Ethereum and Beyond (ACM BSCI, 2024)
Don't Forget Private Retrieval: Distributed Private Similarity Search for Large Language Models (PPAI, 2024)
Full list on Google Scholar →

Press Archive

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