Everything you ever wanted to know about Sunscreen, FHE, and why privacy no longer has to sit on the Web3 wish‑list.
Blockchains were invented to be radically transparent ledgers. That superpower also means every bid, balance, and piece of business logic is hanging out in broad daylight. Front‑running bots and “alpha” snipers thrive; normal users lose. For years, the message to builders was: “suck it up, privacy and decentralisation don’t mix.”
Sunscreen was founded to break that trade‑off. We take a moon‑shot branch of cryptography, Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), and wrap it in everyday developer tools so any smart‑contract can think in secret while proving the answers in public.
Sunscreen is a privacy-focused cryptography company that translates frontier Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) research into production-ready products and tooling for Web3 applications. Our open-source tooling and libraries work with all mainstream languages and are forward-compatible with all existing and future blockchains. Developers, privacy-focused founders, and institutions choosed Sunscreen to ship trust-preserving features fast, with 15x lower cost and up to 3.6x faster performance than other solutions in the market.
Traditional encryption locks data at rest (on disk) and in transit (over the wire). FHE adds the missing piece: encryption of data while it’s in use. FHE lets you do math on ciphertexts and get an encrypted answer that only the key-holder can open. Think of it as asking a chef to cook your sealed-up ingredients and somehow plating a fully cooked meal without ever unwrapping them.
| Technique | What it does |
|---|---|
| FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption) | Math that lets you compute on encrypted data and get an encrypted answer. |
| MPC (Multi-Party Computation) | Parties split data into secret pieces, chat a lot, and jointly compute a result. Great locally, but slows down with distance. |
| TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) | Hardware “fortress” on a CPU that runs code in secret. Fast but can break if there is a vulnerability in the hardware - typically hard to debug. |
| ZKP (Zero-Knowledge Proof) | A proof you did the math right without showing the math itself - like proving you solved Wordle without revealing the word. |
FHE isn’t new; IBM demoed the first working prototype back in 2009 and researchers have been polishing schemes ever since. The catch? Raw FHE is slow, brittle, and usually glued to a single chain (hello, EVM lock‑in). Sunscreen’s founding team of PhD cryptographers asked a simple question: what if FHE felt like running normal code? Our answer became the Secure Processing Framework (SPF).
What’s inside the SPF:
Parasol Compiler – the translator
Lets you tag the pieces of your program you want to keep secret, and automatically turns them into a universal encrypted language. No special coding tricks needed.
Virtual Processor – the privacy engine
Heavy encryption math can be slow. Our processor spreads the work across graphics-card chips (GPUs), so it races through the calculations instead of crawling.