Arcium Acquires Core Tech and Talent from Inpher - A Web2 Confidential Computing Leader

Arcium, a prominent DeCC (Decentralized Confidential Computing) protocol, has announced its acquisition of Inpher, one of the Web2 world’s biggest confidential computing providers.

The landmark acquisition marks a significant milestone for Arcium and the crypto space as a whole. As the Web3 industry expands, blockchain businesses find themselves in a position to absorb the IP, branding, and technology of traditional Web2 stalwarts, and then bring that expertise and experience to push innovation on Solana even further.

Why is this acquisition so important and how does it help establish Arcium as a dominant player in the DeCC sector?

What is Inpher?

Originally founded in 2015, Inpher has been a pioneer in developing innovative confidential computing technology. Inpher’s ‘Secret Computing’ platform allows users to run analytics collaboratively on private data from multiple sources while maintaining high-security standards.

Serving financial services firms, healthcare providers, and defense contractors, Inpher has demonstrated the efficiency of its technology across various sectors.

Inpher’s highly-specialized technology drew attention from some of the financial world’s biggest players, attracting $25M in funding from household names like JP Morgan and Swisscom.

How Will Arcium Benefit From the Acquisition?

As part of the acquisition, Arcium will absorb Inpher’s powerful and extensive proprietary technology. Arcium’s already impressive stack will be further reinforced by Inpher’s industry-leading MPC protocols, including its renowned XOR protocol which is optimized for secure federated learning.

Arcium will also inherit several members of Inpher’s star-studded team. Inpher’s existing talent pool provides decades of experience across cryptography, machine learning, and confidential computation, adding even more firepower to the Arcium team. Arcium’s newest members come from varied backgrounds, having graduated from internationally recognized universities like Harvard and Berkeley.

“With this acquisition, we accelerate the adoption of confidential computing and the Arcium mainnet. Inpher’s team of top researchers and PhDs bring advanced MPC solutions that, combined with Arcium’s efficient and trustless execution engine, set a new standard for cloud-level performance data privacy—crucial for scaling decentralized systems.” - Yannick Schrade, Arcium co-founder and CEO.

By leveraging Inpher’s expertise and IP, Arcium now possesses technology that outperforms and surpasses existing solutions across the market. This marks a key turning point in Arcium’s mission to build a hyper-encrypted global internet and establishes Arcium as a leading provider in confidential computing, MPC (Multi-Party Computation), and decentralized AI.

Through the acquisition, Arcium is primed for evolution in the following areas:

• Confidential Machine Learning - Inpher’s MPC protocols enable Arcium to enhance its privacy-preserving AI models.

• Improved Performance - Inpher’s powerful technology, including GPU acceleration, compiler optimizations, and data transfer compression, is expected to make MPC computations dramatically more efficient. When integrated with Arcium’s arxOS, Arcium can offer encrypted ML operations at the scale demanded by real-world applications.

• Frictionless Integrations - Inpher’s compiler optimizations allow Arcium’s framework to support more efficient and sophisticated ML and data science processes at a grand scale.

Arcium’s acquisition of Inpher’s diverse and performant tech stack expands Arcium’s existing confidential computing product suite and allows the protocol to execute at unprecedented efficiency. 

“With this acquisition, Arcium will rapidly accelerate the future of secure computing and privacy-preserving AI. Inpher’s advanced product and technology capabilities position Arcium as the industry leader in decentralized data privacy and security solutions.” - Jordan Brandt, Co-founder and CEO of Inpher.

These improvements catapult Arcium solutions to the forefront of the DeCC sector, bringing secure and powerful infrastructure and decentralized AI services to prospective applications.

How Will Inpher’s Tech Be Implemented in the Arcium Protocol?

At a more granular level, Inpher’s existing infrastructure will bolster and reinforce the Arcium stack. Upcoming integrations are expected to accelerate Arcium’s MPC eXecution Environment (MXE), as well as enhancing and diversifying the arxOS.

• Improved Cerberus Protocol - Inpher’s Manticore backend will be implemented to Arcium’s existing Cerberus protocol, adding boolean capabilities and allowing for more flexible encrypted computations and on-chain inference.

• Enhanced Arcis Compiler - Inpher’s XOR compiler integrates with the Arcis compiler, expanding confidential computing support for Rust and LLVM, with Python SDK for machine learning tasks.

• Better Data Handling - Inpher’s oblivious data structures will be added to the arxOS, improving performance with large, complex datasets and algorithmic sorting.

• Scalable Confidential AI - Leveraging Inpher’s Manticore Falkor protocol, Arcium supports privacy-preserving machine learning across millions of devices at an unprecedented scale.

What Does This Mean for DeCC on Solana?

Arcium’s acquisition is a victory not only for the protocol itself but also for the Solana ecosystem at large. Solana Foundation President Lily Liu echoed this sentiment, championing Arcium’s commitment to scaling encrypted data processing in decentralized networks.

“The acquisition of Inpher’s confidential computing technology marks a significant milestone for Arcium, enabling them to offer one of the most advanced solutions for encrypted data processing. This move puts Arcium at the forefront of innovation, with the ability to support large-scale, AI and machine learning workloads across decentralized networks.” - Lily Liu, President of the Solana Foundation

Decentralized AI and confidential computing are some of the crypto industry’s biggest emerging narratives. By leveraging Inpher’s sophisticated and high-performance tech stack and adding decades of experience from its existing team members, Arcium further accelerates its potential to spearhead the growth of the DeCC sector, making the Solana network a fundamental cornerstone of privacy-focused blockchains.

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