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digital
daily

digital daily: Enclaves

Enclaves: The digital ecosystem is enamored with zero knowledge, for good reason. Fundamental breakthroughs in math combined with ready-made applications (blockchains) are rare. Long-term impact can be dramatically underestimated. But novelty is seductive and can distract us from practical solutions. For example, hardware enclaves. Tools for private, trustless computing exist on a second computer inside most mobile phones, and industrial versions are available on demand from cloud computing providers. They are the engine of biometric ID, receiving encrypted data from your phone's camera and unscrambling it inside the enclave. Once under lock and key, a program checks that you're you and sends the all-clear. Phone unlocks. No one can get inside the enclave, not even the phone's owner, so no one sees your raw biometric data. Zero-knowledge offers a software-only version of the technology promising to bring trustless verification to a much wider set of applications, but those tools need time and investment to mature. A hardware version is available today. Enclave Markets, a protocol launched on Avalanche, uses enclaves to create a private exchange where order details are never exposed, including to the exchange software. Over time, many centralized exchanges have been accused of trading against their customer's order flow. Exchange protocols harnessing private, trustless environments offer trading venues where the operator has no opportunity to cheat. The shift from trusted to trustless is an inflection point, changing the building blocks we use to solve problems. It will ripple through our digital infrastructure in unexpected ways. That ripple doesn't need to wait for zero-knowledge software to ripen into cheap, practical technology. There are tools at hand that can help us accomplish similar goals today. And more builders are picking up those tools.

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