Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) offers the promise of computation on encrypted data without decryption which has long captured the imagination of the cryptographic community. This approach has advanced important aspects of privacy in computing. However, when it comes to live, high-throughput blockchain environments, a different technology is emerging that is more practical for production use: Garbled Circuits.
Garbled Circuits (GC), a cryptographic protocol first theorized in the 1980s, and recently implemented on blockchain by COTI, is demonstrating compelling advantages for real-world Web3 applications. COTI’s implementation shows that GC operations can be up to 3,000 times faster than the latest FHE implementations, marking a significant milestone in what kind of privacy technology is viable for enterprise-grade blockchain applications.
Speed and Performance Comparison of Garbled Circuits
For developers building real-time decentralized applications (dApps), latency is a fundamental consideration. COTI’s Garbled Circuits framework demonstrates sub-millisecond latency for encryption and computation operations. In contrast, FHE environments often require multi-second delays for similar operations.
This performance differential has tangible implications for scalability and user experience, rendering equivalent operations unfeasible with FHE:
- •Garbled Circuits on COTI: Up to 3,000x faster than FHE for comparable operations.
- •Minimal computational overhead enables near-instant interactions suitable for real-time applications.
- •250x lighter weight than alternative privacy solutions, reducing infrastructure requirements.
The Efficiency of Garbled Circuits
Beyond speed, it’s computational efficiency that determines whether privacy-enhanced protocols can operate within the practical constraints of blockchain systems. While FHE is mathematically elegant and secure it requires extensive algebraic manipulation and substantial computing power, that makes it energy intensive and challenging to scale in production environments. Garbled Circuits present a different profile.
COTI leverages cryptographic primitives engineered for parallel execution, dramatically reducing both energy consumption and the memory footprint required to process data sets. This lightweight design means Garbled Circuits can run on standard devices without specialized hardware, making privacy accessible across a broader range of deployment scenarios, even on mobile.
Real-World Applications: Private DeFi, Confidential Payments, and Beyond
In industries where milliseconds matter, such as decentralized finance, payment infrastructures, trade finance, and on-chain gaming, every computational delay translates directly into user friction and operational cost. Applications like private DeFi pools, confidential settlement layers, and verifiable gaming logic require low-latency cryptography to maintain fairness, liquidity, and usability. COTI’s Garbled Circuits implementation, secured by Ethereum, enables developers to integrate privacy features into production-grade ecosystems today using familiar environments.
The Role of FHE in the Privacy Landscape
FHE continues to represent important innovation in cryptographic research, particularly for cloud computation models and specific zero-trust architectures. Its theoretical capabilities have advanced the field’s understanding of what’s mathematically possible in secure computation.
As the blockchain privacy landscape evolves, different approaches, from FHE to zero-knowledge proofs to Trusted Execution Environments, will likely serve complementary use cases. However, for applications requiring production blockchain environments that combine speed, lightweight computation, and multi-party computation capabilities, Garbled Circuits provide the answer.
Garbled Circuits aren’t just faster in theory, COTI’s partners are deploying privacy live in the market today.
Summary of Privacy Technologies for Blockchain
As blockchain networks evolve toward mainstream adoption, performance and cost-effectiveness will determine which privacy technologies enable real-world applications.
FHE will continue as a valuable research frontier, influencing future cryptographic standards and serving specific use cases. Meanwhile, COTI’s Garbled Circuits implementation, the first-ever blockchain deployment of this decades-old cryptographic protocol, presents an immediate pathway to private, scalable, and efficient Web3 applications. With benchmarks demonstrating clear advantages in both speed and resource utilization, and with the practical benefits of EVM compatibility and Ethereum security, Garbled Circuits are positioned to unlock enterprise applications that require privacy without performance compromise. The future of usable on-chain privacy may not be a distant prospect, it’s being built today.
About COTI
COTI is the programmable privacy layer for Web3. Powered by high-performance Garbled Circuits, COTI brings fast, low-cost, flexible, and compliant privacy to any blockchain. With privacy that’s programmable by design, COTI enables the next generation of DeFi, payments, identity, governance, and AI.