Fangorn

Mission

At a high level, Fangorn aims to address the problem of data access and ownership for the next generation of the internet. This not only includes self-sovereign data for humans, but also extends to AI agents' abilities to safely produce and consume data. Fangorn wishes to accomplish all of this while simultaneously preserving the privacy, where reasonable, of all parties involved. Fangorn is open source and a public good.

About

Fangorn solves the aforementioned issues by implementing a practical witness encryption scheme with a state-of-the-art threshold encryption network. The foundations of the network are described in the paper Threshold Encryption with Silent Setup. The witness encryption scheme + the Threshold Encryption network implementation won first place across all categories, out of 2.7k participants, in the Polkadot Build Resilient Apps with Polkadot Cloud hackathon, which can be seen here.

Afterwards, the same scheme was taken and applied to the emerging agentic economy for the Arbitrum NYC Open House Buildathon. There, it was used to extend the x402 protocol enabling a trust-minimized implementation. Unfortunately, this version of the scheme did not include the STE network implementation, but instead used LIT Protocol as a stand in for the threshold encryption network. Fangorn won second place in the buildathon with over 800 participants across 130+ projects. Fangorn does not require a blockchain and can be used in private, trusted, environments where organizations would like to take advantage of cheap public storage solutions with data replication guarantees.

Applications

Fangorn's applications are numerous and would require an article (or three) all on their own to properly list and describe! Here is a tiny subset of examples:

• Agentic data markets
  • By extending x402 agents can discover, purchase, publish, and consume data from other agents without humans in the loop.
• Regulated-data access control
  • Fangorn can be used with other tools and protocols, such as ZK Passport, for accessing data that is subject to regulatory compliance.
• Two-layered compute and decrypt controls
  • Fangorn can be used in conjunction with Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) to give two layers of access control. That is, plaintexts are gated by encrypting via FHE + the user's specified conditions. The FHE ciphertext (CT) is then re-encrypted with Fangorn which gates the private FHE CT behind a separate set of conditions (such as direct payment). Therefore, someone can pay to compute over another's private data, but never access the underlying plaintext unless they can further prove that they meet the additional requirements for decryption. In the future, this would look like: patient (data owner with universal medical profile) + pharmaceutical researcher (can pay patient directly for computations over private data, but never access plaintext) + primary doctor (can access both the FHE CT and patient plaintext).
• Streaming Services
  • Content encrypted by Fangorn is encrypt once, decrypt forever as well as non-interactive making it a great contender for decentralized streaming services.

Milestones

There are high level milestones which require funding in order to properly address. It is worth noting that the Silent Threshold Encryption network is not Ethereum compatible at the moment.

Milestone	Milestone Description	When
STE Ethereum Compatibility (optional)	Make the STE Network Ethereum Compatible	TBD
STE prod readiness	Take the STE PoC and make it production ready	TBD
Fangorn SDK	Finalize the Fangorn SDK for use with the STE network	TBD
Technical Whitepaper	Write the technical whitepaper for the Fangorn Witness Encryption implementation	TBD
Technical Litepaper	Write the technical litepaper for less technical developers	TBD

Contributing Members

Member Name	Member Role	GH Handle	Telegram
Tony Riemer	Co-Founder	driemworks	@driemworks
Coleman Irby	Co-Founder	colemanirby	@colemanirby

Desired Advisors

We want to ensure that Fangorn becomes the industry disruptor that we know it will be. Therefore, we would like to have world leading experts, whose work we have based this network off of, as advisors. This includes, but is not limited to, Dr. Sanjam Garg as well as his student Guru-Vamsi Policharla (the person who introduced us to this breakthrough).

Reference Documents

• Deep architecture document for Arbitrum Buildathon submission.
• Repo for the Rust STE Implementation/Polkadot hackathon submission
• Repo for the Ethereum Compatible Fangorn SDK (uses LIT and its ACCs for encryption/decryption)
• Repo for the x402 extension using Fangorn
• Fangorn website