If you’ve been following Twitter recently, you should have seen Vitalik Buterin sounding the alarm again: “Privacy can no longer be ignored.”
This time he was not talking about abstract human rights or another technological breakthrough of ZK, but pointing out a reality that is visible to the naked eye: we are entering an era of information anxiety. AI is getting smarter and data is getting more and more concentrated. We are no longer simply running naked, but are being scanned, modeled, evaluated, and finally accurately sold.
You don’t even know which time you clicked “Accept All Cookies” and your data was sold to advertisers, risk control systems, or the next decision-making agent.
Vitalik wrote:
“Whoever has information has power.”
“AI can read our data and in the future may even read our thoughts.”
Do you think this is a science fiction idea? No, this is a realistic implementation path that YC and OpenAI have pitched for countless rounds.
The key technology Vitalik mentioned is the one that has been quietly developing over the past decade and is now gradually entering the mainstream: Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE).
What kind of magical technology is FHE?
To sum it up in one sentence: Let AI do “understandable” things on “invisible” data.
For example, if you feed an encrypted X-ray image to AI, it can’t see the content or know who you are, but it can tell you: “You may need further inspection.” It doesn’t peek, upload, or store it. The entire calculation process is encrypted, and only the user can decrypt the result.
This is the paradoxical beauty of technology: opaque data leads to transparent conclusions.
This mechanism is the key to the next generation of Encrypted Agents. In this path, the agent can be useful to you, but know nothing about you - this may be the true data cooperation rather than data selling.
Vitalik is right, but who is doing it?
One of the answers: FHE projects such as Mind Network and Privasea.
Among them, the popularity of FHEs leading project Mind Network is no longer in the cold start stage: the market performance after TGE is remarkable, especially the market discussion and heated discussion after the release of the roadmap, which is essentially based on the technology and product accumulation of the past two years, and benefits from the precise control of narrative and rhythm.
More importantly, we always adhere to the expansion based on FHE technology and provide three core directions: data sovereignty + encrypted computing + AI native chain.
Mind Network CEO Christian Pusateri also recently tweeted: In the AI era, computing must be encrypted, intelligent agents must be autonomous, and data must be sovereign.
Their goal is not to build a smarter Skynet, but to build a new digital order: you have data sovereignty, you choose the boundaries of interaction, and you can safely host AI without giving up convenience.
This is exactly the direction of the “privacy collaboration system” emphasized by Vitalik in the article - and Mind Network is building a real encryption infrastructure.
FHE ≠ ZK, but they are twin stars moving side by side
Many people will ask: We already have ZK, why do we still need FHE?
ZK (zero-knowledge proof) allows us to verify that a statement is true without knowing the process or the original data. FHE further allows us to perform arbitrary computations while the data is fully encrypted.
One is verification trust and the other is computational trust. One guarantees that the results you provide can be verified, and the other guarantees that the process you do is secure and encrypted.
In the era of intelligent agents, their synergy will become a key combination: ZK is responsible for proving that you did not cheat, and FHE is responsible for allowing the agent to run logic on top of privacy.
If ZK is a magnifying glass that “sees the truth”, then FHE is an encryption key that “locks freedom”.
Agent, from a meme to an operating system
In the past few months, the Web3 community has been playing with Agents a lot, from AgentFi to AgentChain, from Meme to Ecosystem. But what can really turn intelligent agents from a meme into a system is not emotion, but engineering.
Vitalik wrote clearly in the article: We have more tools than the Cypherpunks in the 90s. The FHE, ZK, fuzzy computing, trusted hardware, and even the new generation of MPC solutions he mentioned can all be modular puzzles of the future AI cooperation model.
The question is: Who is making the SDK? Who is writing the framework? Who is running the first Agent chain?
Answer: Mind Network is launching a series of modular components based on AgenticWorld, such as AgentEnroll, AgentTrain, and Encrypted Storage SDK, to help developers deploy intelligent agents with data self-hosting capabilities.
They also plan to open up the Web2 application layer so that ordinary developers can quickly build AI services based on privacy computing.
In other words, they not only built an operating system for encrypted computing, but also helped build an encrypted version of ChatGPT: it not only understands what you say, but also protects you from being heard by anyone.
Do we really need privacy?
This is a real question in many peoples hearts.
In the past, when we talked about privacy, it always felt a bit heavy - it was like a line of defense, but also like a wall; it was like fighting against the world, but also like giving up freedom. But today, privacy may not be about protecting yourself, but about giving boundaries to cooperation and order to autonomy.
When AI becomes more and more like a digital agent in your life, when all your decisions, habits, and even thoughts can be predicted by machines, we may really need an answer:
In the digital world of the future - will you still be you?
Privacy is not an accessory, but the main axis of the new era
Vitalik raised the banner of privacy and reminded us to build a foundation of trust in open source privacy tools. At the same time, project owners and developers have been working hard on the engineering battlefield of no data leaving the chain, no calculation secrets.
From market enthusiasm to product launches, from community mobilization to developer growth, what we see is not a sub-narrative boom, but the prototype of a new order.
Privacy may no longer be a concession; rather, it is the beginning of your cooperation with AI, your guarantee against discipline, the shield of your digital identity, and the only way for you to have sovereignty in the Web3 world.
If ZK allows us to see trust, then FHE is the magic that allows us to hand over data with confidence without giving up our freedom.
