Announcing our FHE grants program

Sunscreen is launching a grants program to encourage further research and development into fully homomorphic encryption (FHE).

We're excited to get developers thinking about how to build private applications using FHE. We also aim to promote broader research into FHE (especially in the context of web3); thus, we're offering a variety of grants to further both of our goals.

We plan to launch a larger grants program once integration with a complementary zero knowledge proof library is complete. FHE combined with zero knowledge proofs will enable exciting new use cases for web3.

We have 4 main categories for our grants program–walkthroughs, new applications, deployment/integrations, and cryptography. We've included suggested amounts for each category but, if your proposal is particularly involved or complex, we can offer a higher amount. Selected contributions will be made available to the entire community.

Don't feel limited by what we have here! If you have an idea that doesn't quite fit one of these categories, we'd love to hear from you.

Walkthroughs

Provide a walkthrough of your own simple FHE program using Sunscreen's FHE compiler or demonstrate interesting capabilities of our compiler. For the former, take a look at our private information retrieval and private token swap walkthroughs. Some additional suggestions are:

• chaining FHE programs together (so that the output of one FHE program is used as the input to another FHE program)
• demonstrating how to change the plaintext modulus and/or noise margin for better performance
• fun with fractions and rationals

New applications

Create your own web2 or web3 application that makes use of Sunscreen's FHE compiler to provide data privacy. Some suggestions are:

• private data analysis or private inference (e.g. privacy-preserving machine learning applications)
• private database lookup
• games with privacy
• identity management
• apps in browser/targeting WASM
• linear algebra-related applications

Deployment and Integrations

We're excited to support FHE in web3 applications. However, doing so requires additional R&D. Some suggestions for this category include:

• creating bindings
• investigating compatibility of the BFV scheme (and/or Sunscreen's compiler) with Ethereum, Cosmos, Polkadot, Solana, Avalanche, etc.

Cryptography

This category is quite broad. On the engineering side, we're particularly interested in improvements to the BFV scheme/Sunscreen's compiler and integrations with efficient ZKP libraries. On the research side, we're interested in further work on efficient ZKP constructions compatible with the BFV scheme.

Some suggestions are:

• Research into efficient ZKP constructions compatible with the BFV scheme
• Research and development into the multi-key BFV scheme
• Working on ZKP library integrations for Sunscreen's FHE compiler
• Working on further compiler optimizations
• Extending compiler support to the CKKS scheme
• Adding support for bootstrapping (for SEAL's implementation of the BFV scheme)
• Adding support for homomorphic comparisons (for SEAL's implementation of the BFV scheme)
• More extensive benchmarking against other FHE compilers

Applications for the program are available here.

We aim to review applications within 2 weeks of submission. If we think it's a good fit, we will schedule a call to discuss your proposal in further detail.

If you have any questions or want help brainstorming ideas, feel free to chat with us on Discord!