encryption – Earlybirds Invest https://earlybirdsinvest.com Latest Crypto News Sun, 07 Sep 2025 03:04:43 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.8 https://i0.wp.com/earlybirdsinvest.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/cropped-New-Project-2024-12-17T235703.455.png?fit=32%2C32&ssl=1 encryption – Earlybirds Invest https://earlybirdsinvest.com 32 32 240146708 SEC Briefed on Quantum Threat That Could Break Crypto Encryption https://earlybirdsinvest.com/sec-briefed-on-quantum-threat-that-could-break-crypto-encryption/ https://earlybirdsinvest.com/sec-briefed-on-quantum-threat-that-could-break-crypto-encryption/#respond Sun, 07 Sep 2025 03:04:43 +0000 https://earlybirdsinvest.com/sec-briefed-on-quantum-threat-that-could-break-crypto-encryption/

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has received a proposal warning that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin
BTC


$110,440.83

and Ethereum
ETH


$4,292.40

 could be vulnerable to future quantum computing attacks.

The submission came from Daniel Bruno Corvelo Costa and was addressed to the SEC’s Crypto Assets Task Force.

The document, titled the Post-Quantum Financial Infrastructure Framework (PQFIF), outlines how digital asset systems might defend themselves from quantum computers that could one day crack the encryption methods used to secure crypto assets.

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At the core of the concern is the possibility that quantum machines, once powerful enough, could break the cryptographic tools that keep crypto funds secure.

The proposal noted that current encryption methods protect a huge amount of value, and failure could result in investor losses and disruptions to exchanges and wallet providers.

A concern raised is the strategy known as “Harvest Now, Decrypt Later“. In this scenario, attackers store encrypted data today and wait for future quantum breakthroughs to access it. The PQFIF urged early action before that window of opportunity opens.

The framework recommends regular checks to identify weaknesses in platforms that hold or manage crypto assets. High-value systems, such as centralized exchanges and institutional wallets, should be prioritized.

Once weak areas are found, platforms could begin shifting to quantum-safe algorithms. This would include a mix of current encryption methods and new approaches designed to resist quantum attacks.

Recently, Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, introduced a proposal called “Lean Ethereum”. What did it say? Read the full story.

]]> https://earlybirdsinvest.com/sec-briefed-on-quantum-threat-that-could-break-crypto-encryption/feed/ 0 57152 Zama Raises $57M in Series B to Bring End-to-End Encryption to Public Blockchains https://earlybirdsinvest.com/zama-raises-57m-in-series-b-to-bring-end-to-end-encryption-to-public-blockchains/ https://earlybirdsinvest.com/zama-raises-57m-in-series-b-to-bring-end-to-end-encryption-to-public-blockchains/#respond Wed, 25 Jun 2025 22:02:00 +0000 https://earlybirdsinvest.com/zama-raises-57m-in-series-b-to-bring-end-to-end-encryption-to-public-blockchains/

[PRESS RELEASE – Paris, Zug, France/Switzerland, June 25th, 2025]

Zama Raises $57M in Series B to Bring End-to-End Encryption to Public Blockchains

  • With new backing by leading U.S. blockchain investors, Zama becomes the world’s first Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) unicorn.
  • Funding coincides with the announcement of the Zama Protocol, which enables confidential applications on any blockchain.
  • From July 2025, developers can start building FHE applications on Zama’s public testnet.

Zama, the open-source cryptography company building state-of-the-art Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) solutions for blockchain, announced a $57 million Series B funding round co-led by U.S.-based investment firms Blockchange Ventures and Pantera Capital, bringing Zama’s total funding to over $150 million, and its valuation to north of a billion USD. The new funding will support Zama’s mainnet launch, ecosystem adoption, and research efforts to make financial applications built with FHE scale to thousands of transactions per second.

The timing of Zama’s announcement reflects the accelerating demand within the finance ecosystem for technologies that enable confidential, scalable, and compliant onchain financial applications.

“With this latest raise, Zama becomes the world’s first unicorn in the FHE space, which is a major milestone for the industry. Reaching a $1 billion valuation represents a significant increase that reflects the market’s confidence in our FHE technology and our team’s ability to deliver confidentiality to financial applications onchain” said Dr Rand Hindi, CEO and co-founder of Zama.

The funding coincides with the announcement of Zama’s Confidential Blockchain Protocol and its public testnet in July 2025, enabling developers to build confidential applications through Zama’s FHEVM, with support for other EVM chains and Solana to follow.

Ken Seiff, Co-Managing Partner of Blockchange Ventures, said: “Not since I first saw Ethereum in 2014, have I seen a company commercializing an entirely new technology that could be as foundational to our global technology infrastructure. As finance moves onchain and regulations tighten globally, public blockchains are likely to be the first beneficiaries of what Zama is building. But the opportunity goes well beyond that, as industries such as health care, defense, and virtually all others that use cloud computing could massively benefit from the stepchange in confidentiality and compliance pioneered by FHE, and in particular, Zama.”

“Zama’s FHE protocol launch is a cryptography milestone. By enabling efficient, developer-friendly FHE, Zama unlocks secure, compliant, and verifiable dApps for AI, crypto, and cloud,” said Paul Veradittakit, Managing Partner at Pantera. “The protocol paves the way for onchain identity, financial, and consumer applications—previously out of reach for developers.”

Zama’s FHEVM makes it possible to run confidential smart contracts on encrypted data, guaranteeing both confidentiality and composability. Blockchain-native confidentiality unlocks several use cases:

  • Onchain Finance: Zama enables financial institutions to securely use public blockchains for a range of applications, including confidential stablecoin issuance and payments, asset tokenization, compliance, and more.
  • Confidential Tokens: The ability to keep balances and amounts encrypted onchain enables blockchain companies to distribute tokens confidentially. Investors, team members and other token holders no longer have to publicly disclose their ownership, allowing them to better manage their portfolio and reduce the risk of being targeted by hackers.
  • Identity and Proof of Humanity: The ability to distinguish between humans and AI in onchain applications is essential to the security of onchain finance. With the Zama Protocol, application developers can verify whether a user is human, without disclosing their identity publicly.
  • Network States: Zama enables onchain communities and network states to operate confidentially. From currency to identity, governance and registries, it now becomes feasible to run key infrastructure on public blockchains.

Zama will use the fresh funding to advance the field of FHE and further commercialize its accessibility to blockchain applications and beyond. Zama is actively addressing the core challenges that have historically held back FHE adoption:

  • Speed: At current benchmarks, Zama’s FHE technology is 100x faster than when the company was founded, and is now capable of supporting most onchain payment use cases. Zama is expecting its technology to be 100x more scalable within the next five years, allowing it to address the most demanding onchain applications.
  • Hardware integration: Using GPUs enables Zama to scale to hundreds of transactions per second. Zama is working towards a dedicated hardware-accelerated chip to advance FHE performance, with the ultimate goal of reaching tens of thousands of transactions per second.
  • Developer usability: Using Zama doesn’t require learning new programming languages. Instead, developers can use Solidity and other existing languages, and deploy their applications on their preferred chain.

“This round also underscores a broader shift: confidentiality is no longer a niche concern—it’s a foundational requirement. The broad adoption of blockchain in finance is driving demand for secure, confidential computing technologies,” said Hindi.

About Zama

Zama is an open-source cryptography company building state-of-the-art FHE solutions for blockchain. Its technology enables a broad range of use cases, from confidential finance to Web3 and network states. Zama was founded by Dr. Pascal Paillier and Dr. Rand Hindi, and has the largest research team in homomorphic encryption.

To learn more about Zama, users can visit https://www.zama.ai/.

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]]> https://earlybirdsinvest.com/zama-raises-57m-in-series-b-to-bring-end-to-end-encryption-to-public-blockchains/feed/ 0 44115 US indicts 8Base ransomware operators for Phobos encryption attacks https://earlybirdsinvest.com/us-indicts-8base-ransomware-operators-for-phobos-encryption-attacks/ https://earlybirdsinvest.com/us-indicts-8base-ransomware-operators-for-phobos-encryption-attacks/#respond Tue, 11 Feb 2025 15:48:24 +0000 https://earlybirdsinvest.com/us-indicts-8base-ransomware-operators-for-phobos-encryption-attacks/

US indicts 8Base ransomware operators for Phobos encryption attacks

The U.S. Justice Department announced the names of two Phobos ransomware affiliates arrested yesterday in Thailand, charging them on 11 counts due to their involvement in more than a thousand cyberattacks.

The two men, Roman Berezhnoy (33) and Egor Nikolaevich Glebov (39) are both Russian citizens, active in the ransomware space between May 2019 and at least October 2024.

The DoJ says Berezhnoy and Glebov were the operators of the “8Base” and “Affiliate 2803” platforms, both deploying the Phobos ransomware strain in attacks.

“As part of the scheme, Berezhnoy, Glebov, and others allegedly hacked into victim computer networks, copied and stole files and programs on the victims’ network, and encrypted the original versions of the stolen data with Phobos ransomware,” reads the U.S. DoJ announcement.

“The conspirators then allegedly extorted the victims for ransom payments in exchange for the decryption keys to regain access to the encrypted data by, among other things, leaving a ransom note on compromised victim computers and separately reaching out to victims to initiate ransom payment negotiations.”

“As alleged, the conspirators also threatened to expose victims’ stolen files to the public or to the victims’ clients, customers, or constituents if the ransoms were not paid.”

The two cybercriminals were arrested in separate locations in Phuket yesterday and now face a long list of charges that include:

  • Wire fraud conspiracy (1 count)
  • Wire fraud (1 count)
  • Conspiracy to commit computer fraud and abuse (1 count)
  • Intentional damage to protected computers (3 counts)
  • Extortion related to damage to a protected computer (3 counts)
  • Transmitting a threat to impair the confidentiality of stolen data (1 count)
  • Unauthorized access and obtaining information from a protected computer (1 count)

If convicted, they could receive a penalty of up to 20 years for wire fraud-related charges, 10 years for computer damage charges, and 5 years for the other counts.

The arrest and charging of the two Russian cybercriminals follows a similar action against Evgenii Ptitsyn, also a Russian national believed to have held an administrative role in the Phobos operation.

Europol infiltrated Phobos

In a separate announcement from Europol today, it was revealed that law enforcement authorities took down 27 servers associated with the 8Base ransomware group, ending its operations.

Yesterday’s news of the arrests in Thailand was directly linked to the appearance of seizure banners on 8Base’s extortion portals, but official confirmation of the action came earlier today.

Europol has also disclosed a key arrest of a Phobos affiliate in Italy in 2023, allowing its investigators to infiltrate the operation and gain intelligence that helped protect hundreds of targets.

“As a result of this operation, law enforcement was also able to warn more than 400 companies worldwide of ongoing or imminent ransomware attacks,” explains Europol.

Phobos has been active since December 2018, and while these law enforcement operations have somewhat disrupted it, the level of their impact is unclear at this time.

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