The Interfold (formerly Enclave)

Enclave is now The Interfold. What we built isn’t a hardware enclave, but a distributed network for confidential coordination. The Interfold names that network. 🌐

Private voting fails if you can still prove your choice. The Interfold uses vote masking to break that proof. Read the technical deep-dive on vote masking and receipt-freeness by @ctrlc03 ↓

Execution is how systems produce reality. Most agent systems still don't define what is allowed to execute. x.com/zodiaceco/stat…

Why is cross-institutional data sharing so hard? Because sharing data = losing control over it. So organizations don’t collaborate. Interfold's infrastructure flips the model: → Data stays private → Computation is shared → Results are provably correct

Catch up on what’s new in our latest community update! From protocol progress to ecosystem growth, we’re building toward a future of verifiable, privacy-preserving computation. blog.theinterfold.com/interfold-comm…

Privacy isn’t a feature at the Interfold - it’s the execution environment. 🖥️💫🖥️

I do find it kind of hilarious that the a main criticism of Ethereum has been that it remains laser focused on the reasons blockchains exists at all

❌ How do we hide information? ✅ How do we coordinate around private information?

We talk about privacy as exposure. But execution concentration may be the bigger issue. Change execution, change coordination.

Come and join Session co-founder @Cryptic_cm and @auryn_macmillan for a chat about messaging, privacy, and analytics.

Tune in to our X space today focused on building privacy-first infrastructure with Interfold and Session (@session_app) We will dive into how messaging and analytics can coexist without compromising user privacy. with @auryn_macmillan & @Cryptic_cm 6PM EDT | 10 PM GMT | 9 AM AUDT x.com/i/spaces/1AxRn…

Enclave Team Reads 📘 "Laws of (New) Media" by @amicusadastra Reminder that every technology enhances something, obsolesces something, retrieves something from the past, and eventually reverses into its opposite. A useful lens for thinking about encrypted execution and how confidential coordination reshapes trust.

Hardware acceleration for FHE is an important step forward. But performance is only part of the problem. The harder question is still architectural: who controls execution, and who controls the decryption keys? tomshardware.com/tech-industry/…

Interesting architecture for what AI-mediated governance could look like. Additional thing worth highlighting: private aggregation infrastructure doesn't just enable voting. The same pattern supports sealed auctions, data pools, collaborative AI training, and other forms of confidential coordination.

Manifest yourself for a public good

## AI voting proxies require two layers: private inference and private aggregation. AI voting proxies require two layers: private inference and private aggregation. Vitalik recently wrote about AI "shadows" — LLM proxies trained on your own corpus that vote on your behalf with near-100% participation. He's right that cryptography is the key enabler. But I want to make that concrete by separating it into these two layers. But first, a diagnosis from personal experience. * * * ## The DAO governance trap I'm a DAO advocate. I've spent more than a decade building and participating in them. But I've also watched the same failure mode play out repeatedly — and it stems not from the DAO model itself, but from a specific dogma within it: the wholesale rejection of hierarchy. DAOs are structurally resistant to hierarchy. The ethos is flat, everyone votes on everything. In theory this is beautiful. In practice it's paralyzing. What actually happens: DAOs end up voting only on large budget items and protocol upgrades, while deferring entirely to labs and core teams for day-to-day decisions. The org atrophies into a rubber stamp with a treasury. The deeper irony is that rejecting hierarchy doesn't eliminate it. It just makes it informal and unaccountable. Power concentrates anyway, without the transparency that explicit structure provides. "Everyone votes on everything" isn't a bad governance philosophy. It was always a hardware problem. Human bandwidth is finite. Attention is scarce. Flat structures collapsed back into de facto hierarchies because they had no other choice. AI shadows change this calculus. * * * ## Continuous governance If your vote is cast by a proxy that is trained or tuned on your values, your priorities, and your evolving perspective, and casting it costs you nothing, then the participation constraint is radically changed. Votes don't need to be reserved for high-stakes moments. They can be granular, frequent, and fast. Imagine a DAO where operational decisions resolve in minutes, not weeks. Where the organisation's direction is a continuous live aggregate of its members' preferences, not a series of discrete referendums that most people ignore. Where "everyone votes on everything" is not an aspirational gesture but a literal description of how the org runs day to day. This connects to something Karl Popper and David Deutsch identified as the core measure of good governance: not who holds power, but how easily bad policy can be corrected and bad leadership removed. Good governance is a process of conjecture and the elimination of error. The question is not "did we get the right answer?" but "can we fix it quickly when we get the wrong one?" Frequent, fine-grained, direct participation is the most natural expression of this principle. The faster errors surface and the lower the cost of correcting them, the healthier the system. A governance layer where votes resolve in minutes, on granular day-to-day decisions, is structurally more Popperian than one where correction requires waiting four years for an election or months for a DAO proposal to pass quorum. This is the Open Society, operationalised. * * * ## The cryptographic stack that makes it private For this to work at scale, and especially on sensitive decisions, inference and aggregation have to be private. Here's what that architecture looks like. ### Phase 1: Private inference Your AI shadow needs to run somewhere. You probably don't have the hardware to run a frontier model locally. Several options exist, each with a different trust model: * **"Trust-me-bro" remote models.** You send your data to a provider and trust them not to look. Simple, fast, available today. The weakest privacy guarantee. * **Local models.** You run the model yourself. Personal privacy, no third-party trust required. Constrained by your hardware and the quality of models that fit on it. * **TEEs (Trusted Execution Environments).** The provider runs the model inside a hardware enclave. You trust the chip manufacturer rather than the provider. Stronger than pure trust, weaker than cryptographic guarantees. * **MPC (Multi-Party Computation).** Inference is split across multiple parties who collectively compute the result without any single party seeing the full picture. Strong guarantees, significant coordination overhead. * **FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption).** Your data stays encrypted throughout inference. The provider computes over ciphertext and returns a result only you can read. The strongest cryptographic guarantee, and the most computationally expensive. These approaches will compete. The right choice depends on the user's trust model, hardware constraints, and tolerance for latency and cost. That choice belongs entirely to the user and has no bearing on the aggregation layer. The decrypt moment is where periodic human review naturally lives. You're not approving every vote — that would defeat the purpose. Rather, you're occasionally checking in with your shadow, discussing how your priorities, perspectives, and values have evolved, correcting it where its actions have diverged from your preferences, and letting those corrections inform its future behaviour. It's less a checkpoint and more a feedback loop. The proxy itself improves through error correction over time. ### Phase 2: Private aggregation Your proxy encrypts your vote and contributes it to a collective computation. This is where something like [The Interfold](theinterfold.com) comes in. The Interfold performs the computation over encrypted inputs and produces publicly verifiable outputs. All inputs are encrypted. The only valid output proof requires consuming every encrypted input and running the expected computation. A bonded threshold committee of node operators coordinates to decrypt the final output. The result: mathematically guaranteed correct aggregate output. No party — not the inference provider, not other voters, not the aggregation layer — ever sees individual inputs. The two phases are cryptographically decoupled. The handoff is simple: decrypt locally, re-encrypt under the aggregation scheme. The plaintext moment is brief and intentional. You are the trusted party in possession of your own data. User ↓ AI shadow inference ↓ human audit loop ↓ encrypted preference signal ↓ collective computation ↓ public result * * * ## Why this matters for Vitalik's chaotic era Vitalik argues that in a chaotic era, democratic tools shouldn't try to bind decisions. They should find consensus and give distributed groups a voice that hard-power actors can listen to. AI shadows with private aggregation serve this goal. But they go further. They don't just make participation possible at scale. They make granular, continuous participation possible. The bandwidth constraint that has always forced democratic systems toward blunt, infrequent, high-stakes votes is lifted. * * * ## Parallel societies It would be naive to expect existing institutions to adopt any of this soon. Nation-states, corporations, and legacy DAOs all have strong incentives to preserve existing power structures. Waiting for them to change is not a strategy. But there is no reason to wait. These tools can be deployed in parallel, now, within communities that choose to use them. The history of institutional change is largely a history of parallel structures that proved their worth and were eventually copied or absorbed. The goal is not to replace existing institutions overnight. It is to demonstrate, at small scale, that a more participatory and error-correcting form of governance is not only possible but practical. At @web3privacy's CC2 and @EFDevcon last year, @ArnaudS proposed his personal litmus test for Ethereum, and both @jarradhope_ and @satorinakamoto spoke about the promise of parallel societies. These two ideas have stayed with me. My litmus test for Ethereum is this: its real-world capacity to bring about the flourishing of parallel societies, ultimately in pursuit of the Open Society. Private, direct, participatory democratic systems seem like a significant step in that direction. The cryptographic foundation exists today. The question is whether we build and use it. theinterfold.com | docs.theinterfold.com

Join us for 𝙼𝚞𝚕𝚝𝚒𝚙𝚕𝚊𝚢𝚎𝚛 𝙿𝚛𝚒𝚟𝚊𝚌𝚢 - a conversation on privacy-first infrastructure We’ll discuss: - messaging without metadata leakage - analytics without tracking users - infrastructure built for privacy from the start with @Cryptic_cm, co-founder of Session @session_app and @auryn_macmillan from The Interfold Tune in tomorrow 🎙️ x.com/i/spaces/1AxRn…

̶E̶n̶c̶l̶a̶v̶e̶ ⟶ The Interfold When explaining to people what Enclave is, we kept running into this issue where the word "enclave" is kind of used interchangeably with TEE and HSM, which lead many people to misunderstand what our protocol actually does and how it works. The Interfold offers fundamentally different trust properties to hardware-based privacy solutions, rooting trust in cryptography and economics, rather than trusted vendors. The new name draws from ideas of folded space and hidden dimensionality. We took inspiration Dune's "foldspace", the "pocket universes" in Death’s End, and from manifold geometry. The core idea The Interfold allows us to co-create and collectively utilize ephemeral spaces for encrypted execution; it allows many independent parties to collaboratively compute outputs from confidential inputs, with strong guarantees that the inputs and intermediate states remain private.

Read more about why we made the name change and what’s coming up next. blog.theinterfold.com/from-enclave-t…

Enclave is now The Interfold. What we built isn’t a hardware enclave, but a distributed network for confidential coordination. The Interfold names that network. 🌐