Documentation
Vision
Privacy as Base infrastructure — not a wrapped product.
Thesis
Privacy should be a property of the base layer, not a feature locked inside a single application. Cipher exists to make confidential value transfer and confidential compute available to anyone building on Base — without trusted operators, without a founder cut on fees, and without depending on hardware most people don't own.
Principles
- Verification runs on commodity hardware. No GPUs, no co-location.
- Settlement is on Base. The on-chain contract is the source of truth.
- The trusted setup is public and verifiable end-to-end.
- Fees flow to validators, not a treasury.
- Everything ships under MIT, with signed releases and an SBOM.
Non-goals
- A wrapped privacy product gated by a single operator.
- Optional privacy as a UX checkbox on top of a transparent ledger.
- Validator economics that require institutional infrastructure.