Arcium - The Project That Every Solana Founder is Backing

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]There's a project on Solana that most of the crypto market is missing. The founder of Solana has personally invested in it and so are the core builders behind Jupiter, Jito, Helios, and Monad. And it is called Archium.

[00:00:13]Most people see privacy on a public chain as a niche retail feature, a thing for the paranoid or for people doing things they probably should not be doing. However, these top ecosystem founders see it as something else. They see it as a missing infrastructure for institutional capital on public chains and the encryption layer for the entire AI era. So, my team, we spent the last week reading their mainnet alpha post, Yuga Labs Breakpoint keynote, and the Messari ecosystem report. And here is what you actually need to know. But before that, let me bring your attention to Karxt. This is the best way to spend your crypto in the real world. It is by far my favorite debit card and I use it every day as my go-to card. So, sign up and use the code sebmonty. If you've already signed up before, but forgot to use my code, add your referral as sebmonty. It will help us make content and I generally do believe it is the best card out there. Now, in this video, we will cover where the team came from and the live ecosystem already running real volume. Then the money behind it, the architecture, and the bigger AI play under the surface. Last is the upgrade dropping on devnet potentially this week that changes Solana's token standard.

[00:01:26]The core team has been building privacy on Solana since 2022. I've been covering it since 2023. They first launched as Elusiv, a zero-knowledge privacy app for private transfers and swaps. Elusiv went live on Solana mainnet in March 2023 and processed real volume before they pivoted. While running Elusiv, they built a compliance tool called Zeus. It kept bad actors out of their privacy pool and could decrypt their transactions if the network voted to.

[00:01:54]That work changed how they thought about the space. Private token transfers were realistically small money. The real prize was generalized confidential computing. In early 2024, they wound down Elusiv and rebuilt as Arcium. The project is run by four co-founders.

[00:02:11]Yannick is CEO, Nico is CTO, Julian runs strategy, and Lucas runs operations.

[00:02:19]Then they did something most crypto projects never do, and they bought a Web2 company. Info was a confidential firm founded in 2015 and backed by JP Morgan and Swisscom. They had raised over $25 million.

[00:02:32]They also built the Manticore protocol, one of the most advanced encrypted compute systems for AI in the world.

[00:02:38]Arcium absorbed the team and open-sourced the patents. The combined team holds multiple PhDs in cryptography. They've published research across MPC, FHE, and privacy-preserving machine learning for years. That gave them the team. The ecosystem they built on top is where the demand actually shows up, and it is the part most of the market still has wrong. The first thing to fix is a timeline. A lot of people, even inside the Solana ecosystem, still think Arcium is on devnet. It is not.

[00:03:09]Arcium mainnet alpha has been live on Solana since February this year with real apps, real volume, and real production infrastructure running today.

[00:03:17]The second thing to fix is the framing.

[00:03:20]Arcium is not one privacy app. It is a generalized encrypted compute like AWS for confidential computation. Builders can ship thousands of different applications on top of it. The team told me directly that Arcium has the largest active privacy ecosystem in crypto right now. Over a dozen teams are building on it, and they've collectively raised more than $7.5 million in independent funding. So DeFi is a main vertical.

[00:03:46]Arcium unlocks on-chain dark pools, the same mechanism that already handles around 40% of US stock volume off exchange. Big trades stay hidden until execution so they don't get front run by MEV bots. Crypto has nothing close to that today. Dark Lake is a live example.

[00:04:04]They pair their ZK AMM with Arcium's MPC to create one of the first fully private DeFi execution layers on Solana. And to keep things simple, just think of a dark pool as a liquidity pool but you cannot see who is making the trades and how much they're going in with. Now, on the AI side, decentralized compute networks like io.net and Nisana are in the Arcium ecosystem. AI models can run on encrypted data from multiple sources without exposing the inputs. Zinc dot cash is currently the biggest transaction driver on the entire Arcium network. Zinc is a privacy-preserving proof-of-work mining token on Solana powered by Arcium. It uses Arcium's encrypted compute to run a hidden proof-of-work process on top of the chain. Mining rounds run every 30 seconds. The mining strategies and the winning number selection all stay encrypted. Zinc is going to launch soon, just so you know. For transparency, my team has helped with some of the branding and assets and I'm actually honestly extremely excited for its launch. It's not financial advice, but do not skip Zinc. Now, the biggest consumer signal is Umbra. Umbra is a native Solana privacy wallet built on Arcium. It works like incognito mode for the chain. Transfers are shielded, swaps are private, and the sender, receiver, and the amount, they all stay hidden.

[00:05:23]When Umbra did its token offering on Metadel last October, it had $750,000 as a minimum raise target. It got over $155 million in commitments from more than 10,500 participants. We covered it back then as well. And this was the largest raise in Metadel history and one of the largest fully on-chain ICOs ever conducted on Solana, possibly even the biggest. Ambra opened to the public in late March and is now processing real volume on Solana mainnet. There's two more flagship apps that have just shipped. Bench is a private opportunity market where scouts stake on hidden alpha. It already ran a real sentiment market on Coliseum hackathon projects.

[00:06:05]As an example, you may want to bring on a new employee and people can go and put USDC behind who they think should get that position. Nobody can see who is receiving that vote until after is resolved. This has a major use case and we won't dive into it right now, but I assure you voting or putting your money where your mouth is in a private way is massive. The other application is Crafts and that's a sealed bid token launchpad where bids stay encrypted until the auction window closes. Think of it like you want to do your token generation event and your VCs think you're worth somewhere between 50 million and 100 million FDV. If you go too low, then you leave money on the table in a sense. And if you go too high, then airdrop sellers just sell, sell, sell. The sealed bid thing has once again a tremendous amount of product market fit. Their first mainnet raise with Reefai Hub is coming up in the next couple of weeks. A live ecosystem this size does not happen without serious money behind it. The investor list is where some real alpha sits. Alchemy has raised over 50 million dollars across all rounds. The 5.5 million strategic round was led by Greenfield Capital with Coinbase Ventures, Hardcore, Long Hash, and Everstake also coming in. The Angel list is the part most people miss. It reads a little bit like a directory of Solana's core infrastructure. You've got Anatoly from Solana, Keone from Monad, Mert from Helios, and Lucas from Jito. Santiago Santos and Balaji came in alongside Jupiter co-founders Meow and Sion. Jump Crypto has also backed it. So, the actual builders running Solana's biggest layers are personally invested. And this $15 million total also includes a coin list public sale which you could have entered and they raised $4 million at $200 million FDV. By the way, the public test net went live in May 2025. By the end of its network, they had over 3,000 distributed nodes, 30 deployed apps, and 300 plus hackathon submissions. So that's the money side and the reason all these people backed it is the tech itself and the choice they made is more interesting than people realize. There are four ways to handle data privacy in crypto right now and each has its trade-offs. Fully homomorphic encryption is the most secure, but it is thousands of times slower than normal computing and that makes it way too slow for high throughput DeFi today. Trusted execution environments rely on secure hardware chips. They work, but you have to trust Intel or whoever made the chip. They also have been hacked with a method too technical for this video, but TLDR, they've been hacked to reveal the sensitive data. Zero knowledge proofs, this is commonly known. They are great for verifying private data. They break down when multiple parties need to share and update a private state at the same time. An Arcium picked multi-party computation, specifically what they call MXEs or multi-party execution environments. So MPC splits sensitive data into unreadable pieces and spreads them across nodes. The nodes run the computation on the fragments together.

[00:09:10]No single node ever sees the full data.

[00:09:12]An Arcium runs two protocols on top of this. Cerberus is a general one. Most MPC systems need a majority of nodes to be honest, but Cerberus only needs one.

[00:09:23]Even if every other node in the cluster turns malicious, the data stays encrypted. Manticore is the second protocol built specifically for high-speed AI workloads and it came from the Inpher acquisition. Private AI is one of the leading use cases and future directions for Archium. Right now, every prompt you send to chat GPT, Claude, or any other model is fully visible to that company. Enterprise giants can't run sensitive operational data through these tools because the IP, the security risk, is just too high. And the enterprise software market is multi-trillion dollar, and most of it is still locked out of the frontier AI for exactly this reason. The bigger picture is that AI looks like the largest commercial market this stack can address over time.

[00:10:09]Crypto-native DeFi is a proving ground, but enterprise AI is a real prize, and Archium is building toward it. The biggest catalyst on the immediate roadmap is CSPL, or confidential SPL.

[00:10:21]CSPL extends Solana's native standard.

[00:10:24]Any existing token can opt into private balances and hidden transfer amounts, including USDC, JUP, and any liquid staking token, and it's not a separate privacy chain. There is also a deeper unlock that most people are missing.

[00:10:38]Solana's existing confidential token standard, token 2022, it only lets regular wallets hold confidential tokens, not smart contracts. So, CSPL it fixes this. Programs can manage confidential token accounts directly, so a lending protocol can take encrypted deposits, and a DEX can match encrypted orders. Confidentiality, it becomes programmable. If CSPL gets picked up by institutional issuers, Archium becomes the default routing layer, and every private token interaction on Solana would likely flow through their network.

[00:11:11]The native token is ARX, ARX, with a 1 billion supply on the SPL standard. It is built for node staking, delegation, resource pricing, and governance. Every fee generated on the network, including from CSPL, accrues to ARX. During periods of high network demand, a portion of fees is used to buy back and burn ARX. The network is currently permissioned with four nodes. These are run by Arcium and its trusted validators. At TGE, the network becomes permissionless, so anyone can spin up a node, stake ARX, and start executing computations. The full code base is also getting open source ahead of TGE or around TGE, and the team expects to lock in a fixed TGE date very, very soon. In 2026, it's safe to say that the whole industry of crypto knows total transparency is a wall blocking institutional crypto and serious enterprise AI. The fight is about which cryptography wins. Zama is pushing FHE, Aztec is building a privacy-first ZK roll-up on Ethereum, Aleo built its own ZK layer one, and other teams are building on TEEs. And this is all highly technical stuff, but Arcium is shipping decentralized MPC on Solana. As mentioned, mainnet launched and went live February 2026, real apps already moving real money, and the AI angle is the biggest story that nobody in the market is pricing in yet. At least, in my opinion, not in retail. So, whether MPC wins the privacy race is the open question, but Arcium has a tech, the team, and the cap table that makes the bet worth tracking closely. If you want the CSBL deep dive once it ships to mainnet, subscribe. If you want to hear about their TGE and any opportunity there, like Al Ping it, or the