The mathematical foundations: signatures, commitments, MPC, FHE, and beyond.
Cross-chain bridges have lost $2.5B to hacks because receiving contracts accept messages they cannot cryptographically verify. AI agents operating across chains inherit this exact problem. Here are the four trust models, their real security parameters, and a principled agent policy.
MORPH shows that a TPU v6e8 pod runs NTT at 40× CPU — 10× faster than an H100. The same silicon that accelerates AI inference now accelerates ZK proof generation, and the math that explains it is the same in both cases.
On-chain data markets promise to pay you for your data's value AND protect your privacy. Differential privacy is the only rigorous knob for the second — and one budget ε can't serve both. The utility collapse, the composition trap, and why no chain can verify the ε you were promised.
An AI inference that runs inside a TEE proves it with an attestation quote. A smart contract can check that quote — for ~4-5M gas naively, down to a flat ~290k once a zkVM compresses it. But every gas unit buys a chip vendor's signature, and in 2025 a $1,000 interposer forged one.
Secure multi-party computation runs a transformer without any party seeing your prompt — at minutes per query and gigabytes per token. BumbleBee's BERT-base: 6.4 GB, 2.55 min; LLaMA-7B: ~8 min/token. The bytes don't go where you'd think, and it's why 'blind' networks fall back to TEEs.
An AI agent that retrieves from an untrusted vector DB can't tell the true top-k from a cherry-picked or fabricated one. Re-running the search needs the whole corpus. The 2026 fix: commit the snapshot, then prove the k-th distance is a boundary, not the sort. V3DB proves it 22x faster.
A DataDAO sold your data; you invoke the right to be forgotten. Deleting the file is easy, but the model already learned and the ledger can't be rewritten. ZK-APEX proves the unlearning ran in ~2h; UMA still pulls the 'forgotten' data back at MIA 0.97. Certified isn't forgotten.
You can copy open model weights bit-for-bit, so on-chain ownership can't be cryptographically enforced — only proven. Sentient's answer: fine-tune 24,576 secret key-response fingerprints into the weights and make scale the security parameter.
An AI agent that acts on your bank balance has to prove it saw that balance — without a trusted API. zkTLS turns any HTTPS session into a portable proof. We dissect MPC-TLS vs proxy vs TEE, the real TLSNotary benchmarks, and read Reclaim's on-chain verifier on Base down to its single attestor.
FHE left the lab: confidential ERC-7984 tokens settle on Ethereum for ~$0.09 in gas, with 48,000 transfers since December. We dissect a live encrypted transaction, the 13-node MPC committee underneath, and why encrypted inference is still 11 seconds per token.
Zero-knowledge proofs promised to make machine learning trustless. A field survey of where zkML actually stands — proving systems, quantization tradeoffs, and what's deployable today.