Liam

Introducing Confidential Balances Token Extensions 🛡️ Confidential Balances are now live on Solana mainnet — the first ZK-powered encrypted token standard built for institutional compliance without sacrificing sub-second finality. Everything devs need to know 🧵

Had been diving deeper into TEEs for a project (more about the project below). I was pretty pessimistic about them until I started looking at them from an application perspective. The initial skepticism came from the earlier hype and people claiming it to be a silver bullet for all purposes and the fact that "they can replace ZKPs" while obvious trust assumptions and attack vectors existed. TEEs aren't the magical solution some marketing suggests, but they do solve real problems in practical ways. The key is understanding what TEEs actually deliver vs. promise. They don't eliminate trust — they shift it to a more centralized authority in exchange for some practical benefits through isolation, specifically privacy (and probably it's extent should stay there). Bottom line: TEE work best when those limitations are acknowledged and when combined with other security approaches. Good for solving today's problems while we work on more robust cryptographic solutions. ---- Right now I am kinda working on a setup for private proving. The problem: ZK proving is computationally intensive and often impractical on consumer devices, but outsourcing proving exposes sensitive user data to third parties. This is particularly valuable for zkTLS systems, where protecting user data during the proving process is essential. Fusing TEEs with zkVMs forms a powerful hybrid solution: - zkVMs handle the validity guarantees - TEEs provide the practical confidentiality layer, protecting sensitive data Together, they create a system that's both mathematically verifiable and pragmatically private. Let's see where this endeavour goes. --- Planning to write a longer form of this post separately (as if this isn't long enough hah). Meanwhile, here's a thread of resources I found useful for my research 🧵

Nike: Everyone is an athlete Apple: Everyone is an artist Shopify: Everyone is an entrepreneur YouTube: Everyone is an storyteller Cursor: Everyone is a developer crypto: everyone is an exit liquidity.