Introduction
Confide is a confidential-computing network on Base. It lets smart contracts commission computations over encrypted inputs, run them on an off-chain multi-party-computation (MPC) network, and receive threshold-signed results that are verified back on-chain — all without any single party (or the chain itself) ever seeing the plaintext.
It brings confidential computing to the EVM — encrypted inputs, multi-party computation, and threshold-verified results — and is deployed today on Base Sepolia.
Confide is a working end-to-end system, not a production network. The MPC engine is a faithful single-process simulation of a cluster, and threshold signatures use ECDSA as a stand-in for BLS aggregation. See the security model for exactly what is and isn't trust-minimized today.
The problem
Public blockchains are radically transparent — every input to every contract is visible to everyone, forever. That makes whole classes of applications impossible to build honestly on-chain: dark pools leak order flow, auctions leak bids, votes leak ballots, and any scoring or matching logic leaks its inputs.
Confide closes that gap. Inputs are encrypted on the client, computed on while still encrypted, and only the result is revealed — and even then, only to whoever the result was sealed for.
How it fits together
Confide spans three layers that share one encryption stack:
- Smart contracts (Base) — eight UUPS-upgradeable contracts orchestrate node registration, staking, cluster formation, MPC environments, fees, and the computation lifecycle.
- arxOS node network (Rust) — operators stake
CONFIDE, form clusters, watch for commissioned computations, decrypt inputs inside the cluster, run a compiled circuit, re-seal the result, and threshold-sign it. - Client SDK (TypeScript) — encrypts typed inputs to a cluster key, reads the cluster's public key from chain, and decrypts sealed results.
What you can build
Anything whose inputs must stay secret but whose result must be verifiable:
- Dark pools — match orders without leaking size or price.
- Sealed-bid auctions — reveal only the winner and clearing price.
- Private voting — publish a tally, never the ballots.
- Confidential scoring — credit, risk, or reputation over private data.
Next steps
- Quickstart — encrypt and commission your first computation.
- Core concepts — nodes, clusters, MXEs, and computations.
- Architecture — the contracts and the data flow.
- Deployments — live Base Sepolia addresses.