This episode delivers a high-density technical session with Auryn Macmillan, founder of Gnosis Guild, moving from on-chain access control to fully encrypted execution. The first half dissects Zodiac, a modular suite for managing permissions for DAOs and multisigs. Auryn provides a concrete post-mortem of the Bybit hack, explaining how Zodiac's architecture—specifically its ability to enforce granular, programmable policies—could have prevented the exploit by decoupling execution logic from asset custody. The discussion then shifts to The Interfold, a system designed for private computation on public blockchains. Auryn details its co-processor model, which spins off off-chain compute while using a combination of FHE for computation over encrypted data, ZK proofs for verifiability, and MPC for decentralized key management. Listeners will learn the specific mechanisms for key generation, encrypted input publication, and the decryption request flow. The conversation covers concrete use cases like secret ballot voting, sealed-bid auctions, and private AI training, with a clear deployment roadmap including a mid-June testnet and the audit pipeline. This is actionable protocol design knowledge for engineers building the next generation of on-chain applications.
Key Insights
- Zodiac's modular access control architecture decouples execution logic from asset custody, a design that could have directly prevented the Bybit multisig hack by enforcing programmable transaction policies.
- The Interfold uses a co-processor model to handle off-chain compute, returning results on-chain verified by ZK proofs, while FHE ensures data remains encrypted during computation.
- MPC is used for decentralized key generation and management within The Interfold, avoiding a single point of failure for decryption.
- The system's decryption request flow is a specific mechanism where users must explicitly request and justify decryption, adding a layer of governance to data access.
- Concrete deployment milestones include a mid-June testnet launch for The Interfold, with an audit pipeline already in progress, signaling a near-term production reality.
- The combination of FHE, ZK, and MPC is not theoretical; it is being engineered to enable practical applications like secret ballot voting, sealed-bid auctions, and private AI model training directly on public blockchains.
Who should listen: Protocol architects and security engineers evaluating modular access control patterns or designing systems that require private, verifiable computation on public ledgers.
Why This Matters
This episode connects two critical frontiers: the move from rigid, monolithic smart contract security to programmable, modular access control, and the practical convergence of FHE, ZK, and MPC into a single execution environment. We track this as the maturation of on-chain privacy from a theoretical ideal to an engineered, composable primitive.
