Arcium: Solana / FHE / Dark Pool Memories

“Fashion runs in cycles. Crypto moves in loops. The cycles may die—but clones are forever.”

Arcium, a cryptographic supercomputing project on Solana, chose Coinlist for its community round, instantly reminding me of the script battles for allocation on Coinlist from 2017 to 2021—a noob village for scientists and airdrop farmers.

The new generation surpasses the old, yet Arcium has changed its branding three times, struggling to carve out a path for itself. It narrowly escaped Solana’s meme season; whether it can realize its dream during the BSC meme season remains unknown.

Past Life: The Dark Pool Elusiv That Deleted Its Code and Vanished

Three sentences summarize why Elusiv became Arcium:

• “You must know that Arcium is not my real name—Elusiv is the original family name.”
• “MPC encryption based on data was a disguise; dark pools were the real business.”
• “Privacy 1.0 was about personal state; the 2.0 version emphasizes shared collaboration.”

Elusiv originated from a Solana hackathon. At first, it was essentially a fork of crypto privacy projects like Zcash, Monero, and Tornado Cash on Solana, focusing on building dark pool services using ZK, FHE, and MPC.

Dark pool services aren’t complicated—they’re similar to the dark web, referring to hidden behavior beneath the surface, akin to a “deep state.” Essentially, dark pools allow large institutions or individuals to trade anonymously off-market, avoiding volatility in public markets.

On blockchains, transparent ledgers make all transactions visible—that’s how MEV is born—so anonymous trading has specific demand.

However, as noted, privacy 1.0 had no real difference from mixers or Monero. After Tornado Cash came under heavy regulation, continuing down that path would be seen as directly challenging U.S. authorities. Thus, Elusiv’s codebase stopped updating two years ago.

Image Caption: Elusiv inactive
Image Source: @ArciumHQ

If you search “Dark Pool” and “FHE” on @ArciumHQ, you’ll find that they focus on two things:

• Discussing how MPC is superior to FHE, mainly in terms of computational efficiency and cost \

• Expressing long-term optimism about dark pools—though in the past under the name Elusiv, and now under Arcium

However, there is no absolute superiority between technologies like MPC, FHE, ZK, and TEE. Their differences are more about application scenarios:

• MPC focuses on trusted computation between multiple parties

• FHE focuses on computation over encrypted data

• ZK ensures the validity of data before encryption

Image Caption: Arcium’s take on privacy tech comparison
Image Source: @ArciumHQ

In fact, it’s fair to say that all privacy-focused projects are having a hard time right now—no need to compete with each other. Expanding the market together is a better path to success. But of course, that’s not as attention-grabbing. After Tornado Cash saw a possible comeback, Arcium started hyping dark pools again.

Building a project is hard. Building a known project is harder—you have to withstand the test of time and still feel like your first love. Being a retail trader is hard. Being a profitable retail trader is harder—especially when everyone in “Huanglongjiang faction has Bluetooth headsets” and you still need to decode every line.

Present Life: From Parallel FHE to Encrypted Supercomputing

Arcium has its own ideas about data-based privacy.

Simply put, Arcium is thinking about how to combine blockchain characteristics with MPC. The answer is straightforward: since MPC requires multi-party computation and blockchains require multi-node execution, combining the two gives you Multi-Party Execution Environments (MXEs).

Based on that concept, add in parallel execution technology along with FHE/ZK features, and you can build a blockchain encryption system that is both fast and secure.

If you’re interested in parallelization, you can check out this older (and still valid) piece: “ Parallelism Beyond the EVM—High-Performance L1 (Sui) vs Ethereum L2?”

But in the end, these technical feats aren’t the real issue. Just like Nillion, the real problem with privacy tech today is the lack of real-world use cases. Arcium has chosen AI, DePIN, and DeFi as its target sectors. The first two are often used as buzzwords to attract funding and justify token launches—but only DeFi, especially dark pools and private transactions (mixing), currently has real market demand.

Arcium claims its architecture is 10,000 times faster than FHE, but that’s functionally meaningless. Blockchains don’t need FHE today, so 10,000× zero is still zero.

This isn’t to deny Arcium or MPC/FHE technologies—but the truth is, their long-term demand is unclear, and with the pressure to issue tokens, projects often chase imaginary use cases. Just like how a buyback can’t make a worthless token valuable, overpromising doesn’t change the fundamentals.

Afterlife: The Wandering Solana Privacy 2.0

But things always have a twist. Helius, who once contributed the most straightforward technical article about Solana 2.0, is now redefining the concept of Solana Privacy 2.0. Although I don’t buy into it, it does sound logical.

At the core is just one point: Privacy 2.0 is multi-party privacy, typically referring to shared private states—in other words, MPC. More specifically, it aligns with Arcium’s concept suite:

1. arxOS: An encrypted operating system that aggregates the computing power of Arcium nodes
2. MXE: A multi-party execution environment that allows secure computation to occur on Arcium
3. Arcis: A Rust-derived programming language, similar to the relationship between Move and Rust

Here, I have to rant a bit: StarkNet, the Move language, Arcis—all are Rust variants. Project teams might think customizing these languages unleashes maximum potential, but in reality, all it does is increase developer burden without bringing much real benefit.

Image Caption: Difference between Privacy 1.0 and 2.0
Source: Helius

In fact, privacy-preserving AI probably won’t need MPC/FHE tech. If LLMs (Large Language Models) can shrink enough, MCP (Multi-Client Processing) could become the de facto standard—meeting personal users’ needs without overexposing their data.

Now, if “private AI” means a company, entity, or individual deploying their own LLMs, then yes—maybe you can justify adding MPC/FHE despite the latency and compute overhead. But even then, MPC is only “cheaper” relative to FHE—it still isn’t truly efficient.

On top of that, the real issues facing dark pools and private transactions (like mixers and anonymous micro-payments) are regulatory, not just cost-related. Dark pools are for whales. In TradFi, the battle between dark pools and the SEC has been ongoing. Same for mixers.

Sure, Trump’s grab-the-cash-before-the-flood attitude has inspired some—but if on-chain dark pools really do rise again, and we just follow Railgun’s semi-official privacy reporting path, it’ll be the retail users who get burned in whale-to-whale deals.

The U.S. may have backed off from its full-on crackdown on Tornado Cash, but even so, pure, classical privacy solutions won’t return to the mainstream. With companies like TRM Labs and semi-compliant protocols like Railgun, regulators now effectively control chain behavior.

The only area with real market demand is anonymous micro-payments. But even then, ordinary users rarely want to pay extra for privacy. You can treat it like a feature or service—but it’s hard to build an entire product-market fit on that alone.

Conclusion

Arcium entering the TGE process marks the end of the classical era of privacy projects—an event even more iconic than the reversal of Tornado Cash. From now on, project teams will proactively impose self-limitations, and boundaries will be clearly defined.

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