Summary
The latest allocation from the ENS Public Goods (PG) Working Group Strategic Grants programme is a $25,000 USDC allocation to Phantom Zone (PZ). PZ is a research and engineering team dedicated to making advanced cryptographic primitives practically efficient and ready for real-world use—covering fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), encrypted execution environments, and new experimental approaches to obfuscation.
Alongside earlier strategic grants to Remix Labs, Fabric, Vyper, Argot, ICANN Engagement & Policy Advocacy and the DRC, this allocation continues our work in reinforcing the long-term health, expansion, openness, and privacy of the Ethereum ecosystem. As part of our co-funding model in collaboration with the Ethereum Foundation ESP programme, Phantom Zone also secured a meaningful matching agreement with the EF, reinforcing shared confidence in their roadmap and research direction.
Why This Funding Matters
Ethereum’s future depends on the availability of robust, trustworthy, and privacy-preserving computation. As the network evolves, new categories of applications—ranging from confidential coordination mechanisms to identity systems and encrypted DeFi—require computation on private data without compromising decentralization or trust assumptions.
Phantom Zone is advancing this frontier. Their work lowers the cost of using powerful cryptographic tools, expands what developers can build, and creates new pathways for onchain privacy that do not rely on trusted parties.
What follows is an overview of their work, in their own words.
Why ENS PG is Supporting Phantom Zone
At Phantom Zone (PZ) we work to make cryptographic primitives that are impactful to the world concretely efficient. Our desire is to drive forward the progress in these primitives, to reduce their overhead, and to make them widely accessible. It’s with this lens we set our priorities.
PZ has 3 core initiatives:
- Poulpy
- Phantom
- Local mixing obfuscation
These areas form the backbone of PZ’s contribution to the ecosystem: practical FHE tooling, an encrypted virtual machine, and experimental work aimed at achieving obfuscation with fewer trust dependencies.
"I’m very grateful to the ENS community for extending their support to Phantom Zone. PZ is pushing the frontiers of use of modern cryptographic primitives on ethereum with phantom, poulpy, and our research efforts. It’s quite exciting to see others support our work. " - Janmajaya Mall, Phantom Zone
What Phantom Zone Offers:
Poulpy: a fast & modular FHE library with 3 cores features:
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It has a common plaintext space for all FHE schemes. For developers, it means no more haggling with which scheme to use. Instead, using poulpy, write circuits that compose over all schemes. It not only eases developer pains, but allows for more efficient FHE circuits
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It has well defined hardware abstraction layer (HAL). For FHE, hardware acceleration support is necessary. Poulpy realizes this and provides a well defined HAL, which makes it easy for hardware accelerators to plug into Poulpy seamlessly and gain a direct access to Poulpy’s developer base.
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It’s backend agnostic. This means all schemes are implemented using only the HAL and nothing more. This guarantees hardware developers that HAL is treated as first class citizen in poulpy. Additionally, it makes developer’s life easy because switching between different backends requires only changing a couple lines.
Poulpy can be used for efficient instantiation of FHE applications. For example, private information retrieval, private machine learning inference, oblivious message retrieval, etc. Poulpy can also be used to instantiate threshold-FHE protocols (i.e. FHE based multi party computation). Threshold FHE is applicable to encrypted mempools, encrypted block building on public blockchains, computation on private states stored onchain, and, obviously, Phantom.
Phantom
Phantom is a risc-v virtual machine implemented using fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) primitives. It’s an encrypted virtual machine - it guarantees that no-one can poke its memory, nor learn anything from its execution trace.
Phantom natively supports execution of rust programs. Developers can write rust programs, encrypt them locally on their device and send them to phantom. Phantom can then execute the encrypted program on arbitrary user provided encrypted inputs, while no information of the program, the inputs, and the execution is revealed.
One valuable use-case for Phantom is encrypted smart contracts on Ethereum. Better put, smart contract with encrypted global state. To give a flavour of applications, think of public smart contract that execute as they should but look garbage to the public. It opens doors to private De-FI, hidden information games, etc.
Apart from encrypted smart contracts, Phantom opens a new paradigm for applications. In particular, applications where both the program instructions and the memory are encrypted. This allows to write “public” programs with hidden secrets. One valuable example is anonymous-sybil resistant identity system, which is hard to achieve otherwise. For encrypted smart contracts, smart contracts with hidden secrets allows for new mechanism designs.
Checkout Phantom’s repository for more information.
Obfuscation Research
State of the art primitives for computing on private data are limited. All require certain amount of trust. In case of FHE, MPC the user is trusting a quorum of servers ( albeit in some threshold fashion ) to not collude. In trusted execution environments, the user is trusting the hardware manufacturer and the cloud provider.
Obfuscation is a cryptographic primitive to compute on private data with no additional trust assumptions. That is, user only trusts the math. However existing constructions of obfuscation, based on standard cryptographic approaches, are far from practical. At PZ, we have a different lens. We’re actively working with practical but not yet proven secure approaches to obfuscation and are running experiments to study their security, and, hopefully, anchor them in a much firmer & secure ground. One such instance is local mixing approach to obfuscation (link, related to which we launched a bounty last year (available here) at Devcon Bangkok. Regarding local mixing, we’re actively working with original authors to study its security.
Next Steps
With this grant, the ENS Public Goods Working Group aims to help ensure that the cryptographic foundations required for the next era of Ethereum applications remain open, robust, and community-governed.
In collaboration with the Phantom Zone team, we will share progress updates as the work advances, including:
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Improvements to Poulpy’s scheme agnostic API, HAL and the architecture
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Ongoing development of the Phantom encrypted VM and tooling for Rust developers
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Research findings from the local mixing obfuscation line of work
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Broader contributions to privacy-preserving infrastructure across Ethereum
This grant reflects our belief that practical, trust-minimized cryptography is not optional for Ethereum’s future—it is foundational.