Full Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) Case Study 1: Mind Network
At the time of writing Mind Network has just announced the release of its Zero Trust Layer Testnet for full homomorphic encryption transactions. Mind claims to make possible untraceable yet verifiable transactions through the combination of quantum resistant FHE with Stealth Address Protocol (SAP). This is referred to as MindSAP. The only link to a presentation about Mindsap was in the Mind Network blog from 2 days ago and it appears to be broken at the time of writing. MindSAP together with MindLake form Mind’s Zero Trust Layer. In June 2023 Mind raised $2.5M from Binance Labs and other prominent VCs.
My Experience with Mind Network, Not Very Genuine
It could be that this is a project still in a very early stage where information is gatekept but I came across several red flags. First and foremost their marketing is very bot oriented and their community is non existent. QR FHE is a big deal, so if legit there would have definitely been some nerds around to answer questions. So I joined their Discord hoping to get in touch with some real people but the best I could get out of mods, in a Discord flooded with bots, was general information on FHE and adaptive FHE and nothing specific about how Mind supposedly employs FHE. Here are screenshots of the full interaction:
Mind Network’s tweets seem also heavily botted. I still have to find a single genuine homomorphic encryption enthusiast that follows this project and is capable of answering simple questions.
FHE versus HE
The reason why I asked my question is that as a follower of Homomorphic Encryption L1s there is another project (Dero) that has homomorphic encryption already on mainnet since February 2022 and with untraceable but verifiable transactions. Dero uses the El Gamal encryption scheme because it is the minimum necessary required to bring full homomorphic encryption grade privacy to blockchains as in a blockchain we don’t use multiplications or division but only additions/subtractions. I explored that in depth in my previous article. So I was really curious to learn from someone in the Mind Network team about the benefits of using FHE for transactions when FHEwill still be used only for additions and subtractions and unfortunately I wasn’t able to get any specific answer. As I said, maybe information is being gatekept for some incomprehensible reason but as far as my direct experience with Mind Network goes everything seems to point at Hackathon Vaporware.
Team
I was able to identify only 2 team members behind Mind Network, their head of marketing Christian Pusateri and their head of research Ashley Yan. I couldn’t find anything about coders or engineers behind it, for something as ambitious as Mind claiming employ even Quantum Resistant code, engineers would have to be seriously top tier talent. For comparison, in Dero even though the team is anonymous it has a long history of producing top tier code.
Final Thoughts
Considering the qualifications of their team and the quality of their community at the time of writing I can’t find a shred of evidence to validate any of Mind Network’s claims. What makes me even more suspicious is that among their purported use cases theylist CBDCs and banks. Banks and CBDCs aren’t really fans of user privacy so that makes me question their real motives again. So, as far as I’m concerned, this is a buzzword scam/money grab. I pass and warn others about it.
