Every business should embrace privacy and make strong encryption a regular part of its product offerings if it wants to gain a greater market share in 2025, according to Arcium co-founder and CEO Yannik Schrade. Arcium, which describes itself as “the encrypted supercomputer,” seeks to decentralize and encrypt computing power, which Schrade says is critical for providing a safe and secure internet and ultimately benefits businesses as much as it does privacy-conscious individuals.
On Episode 53 of Cointelegraph’s podcast, hosts Jonathan DeYoung and Ray Salmond speak with Schrade, who explains what Arcium is and how it works, why everything should be encrypted, and how everybody benefits when everything is encrypted.
What is an encrypted supercomputer?
Schrade described Arcium as a “set of globally distributed computers” forming a supercomputer to which users can send encrypted data. The supercomputer runs computations on that data without actually seeing it and then sends the results back, effectively allowing users to “run any kind of computation in a fully encrypted and trustless way.” As a use case for an encrypted supercomputer, Schrade pointed to training AI models. He said developers could train models with extremely sensitive information that would typically be too private for people to feel comfortable offering, such as personal health data tracked by one’s Apple Watch.
“All of this data could be pooled together, and we could train powerful models — but we can’t because there’s no single party on Earth that we could trust our data [with],” he said. “With confidential computing, it’s now possible to have isolated, sensitive, encrypted data that is being pulled together, and computations are being executed, like training an AI model, without anyone who owns any bit of data having to share it with any of the other participants.”
“AI and blockchain require privacy. It makes those applications more powerful. And also I think for human advancement, in general, I think we need this kind of privacy technology.
Businesses and individuals alike benefit from privacy
Encryption is often talked about in the context of it being a tool to help protect individual people’s right to privacy or prevent sensitive communication networks from being spied on by governments or foreign adversaries. However, according to Schrade, encryption actually offers a compelling profit incentive as well.
In an era where people are increasingly concerned about how Big Tech collects and uses data, many consumers are demanding more privacy protection. This represents an opportunity for businesses to grow their revenue by implementing privacy-preserving technologies that allow them to process sensitive data securely, according to Schrade. “They can make use of this kind of data with the consent of the user, without any risk of the data being leaked, without any risk of the individual having to fear negative consequences of them providing the data,” he said.
“At some point, it’s logical to use this kind of more powerful encryption because no data is being leaked, no hacker steals data, no penalties have to be paid. At the same time, customers are more happy and the applications can be made more powerful because they can safely take more data. […] And again, I think there’s win-win situations across sectors.”
To hear more from Schrade’s conversation with — including whether crypto and memecoin traders can benefit from encrypted computing — listen to the full episode on Cointelegraph’s Podcasts page, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And don’t forget to check out Cointelegraph’s full lineup of other shows!
This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.