A Deep Dive into Arcium: The Encrypted Supercomputer

The Arcium Community Round on CoinList is live now until April 1st, 2025 at 17:00 UTC. 

We sat down with the Arcium team to discuss their encrypted supercomputer, their GTM and growth strategy, key functions of the ARX token, and what differentiates them from competitors like Nillion.

Let’s dive in.

1. What is Arcium? How does your technology keep information private while letting companies use it?

Arcium is the encrypted supercomputer, providing developers, applications, and industries with a trustless, verifiable, and high-performance framework for encrypted computation.

By leveraging advanced cryptography, specifically Multi-Party Computation (MPC) to enable secure and efficient computation over fully encrypted data, Arcium unlocks entirely new possibilities across industries including blockchain, finance, healthcare, defense, AI, and more,

2. What is an encrypted supercomputer and what does it do?

To package the capabilities and functions of Arcium, we describe the network as an ‘encrypted supercomputer.’ Analogous to a traditional computing stack, each node acts as a single processor contributing to the encrypted supercomputer. Through the assembly and unification of all these processors, the supercomputer materializes with its unique features. Arcium is engineered for private, decentralized, and efficient computing, enabling shared private state for any application.

3. What are the key functions of the ARX token?

The Arcium token is integral to the Arcium Network, facilitating both staking-based security and computational payments. By aligning incentives across key participants, the Arcium token ensures a trustless, scalable, and efficient decentralized computation ecosystem.

Key functions include: 

• Node Operators stake Arcium tokens as collateral to activate their Arx nodes, unlocking computational capacity and ensuring network integrity. These operators earn rewards based on completed computational work and can set delegation fees for third-party stakes. They also participate in governance, influencing computation pricing at the beginning of each epoch.
• Third-party delegators contribute to network security and decentralization by staking Arcium tokens to active Arx nodes. In return, they receive a share of computation rewards, allowing them to passively benefit from network activity while ensuring robust infrastructure.
• Computation Customers pay for secure and verifiable computations using the network’s base gas token, ensuring a seamless user experience on the Arcium Network. However, during periods of high network demand, a portion of the generated priority fees is used to purchase and burn Arcium tokens, creating a deflationary mechanism that enhances token scarcity and aligns with network activity. 

4. What is Arcium’s go-to-market strategy, and which industries are you targeting first?

Arcium will launch on Solana first, focusing on embedding privacy into existing applications while supporting teams to create never-before-possible use cases with Arcium’s stack. Arcium is inherently chain agnostic, which means we will be live on other chains after launching on Solana first. Encrypting computing unlocks an incredible amount of opportunities across DeFi, AI, Gaming and more, with specific use cases like:

• Dark Pools / Central Limit Order Books (CLOBs) - allow traders to place orders without seeing the order book, ensuring privacy in order matching.
• Private AI Inference - process proprietary models without exposing model weights, enabling applications like DeFi strategy automation and personalized AI.
• Private AI Training - enables models to learn from private datasets, such as medical records, without exposing sensitive information. This allows collaboration between data owners and model creators while maintaining privacy.
• DeFAI - Threshold decryption AI agents to enhance user experience by securely managing transactions. Using MPC, a wallet’s private key is split across multiple parties, processing transactions without ever reconstructing or exposing the key in plaintext.
• Private Gaming - Games that require a hidden state to ensure fair gameplay include casino games (e.g., blackjack, poker) and games like Doom, where the location of other plates must be hidden. 

5. What are the key milestones planned for Arcium in the coming years, and how do you envision the evolution of confidential computing?​

Arcium's power lies beyond blockchain and crypto. We aim to target traditional industries, bringing performant encrypted computation to finance, supply chains, defense, the public sector, healthcare, and more. By computing sensitive information without ever exposing it, we unlock a new era of privacy, security, and trustless collaboration.

6. How does Arcium plan to build partnerships and grow its ecosystem?

Arcium’s development history is rooted in the Solana ecosystem. By leveraging our relationships within the ecosystem and onboarding well-known projects that already have traction, we can battle-test our network at scale plus prove PMF. From there, we can expand to multiple ecosystems and even move beyond crypto use cases.  

7. Are there any projects similar to Arcium? What differentiates you from other privacy-focused crypto projects?

Our main competitor is Nillion, enabling “Blind Computation.” Nillion just recently launched on mainnet. Our key differentiators include:

• Acquisition of Inpher: In November 2024, we acquired our biggest Web2 competitor, Inpher, backed by Amazon and JP Morgan. Inpher raised over $25 million and developed the fastest MPC protocol for Private AI. Combined with Arcium’s decentralized architecture and more generalized MPC protocol, Arcium is the most advanced MPC-based computing stack. 
• Trustlessness and decentralization—One of our main focuses is to ensure there are no single points of failure. Currently, Nillion does not offer any new advantages to the private computation space as their current stack still relies on Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) for private computing. TEEs are isolated hardware-based enclaves that are protected from the rest of the CPU using encryption. Any data in the TEE can't be read or tampered with by any code outside that environment. However, it comes with poor trust and security assumptions as its hardware-based, with many hacks and exploits happening over the years. Arcium’s stack is truly novel, leveraging purely cryptographic-based primitives to carry out encrypted computation.

8. What is the best way to get involved in the Arcium community?

The best way to get involved in the Arcium community is by joining our discord and engaging in our community program. We have also created a public domain for our community called gmpc.xyz, where developers and community members come together to forge the future of the encrypted ecosystem. Here, users can vote for applications they want to see built into the public testnet, which is launching on April 30th. 

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