by Bryan Ji – March 24, 2025

Arcium, the encrypted supercomputer on Solana, is marching toward public testnet (aiming launch end of April) full speed and their long-awaited community round is about to kickstart, it’s time to unveil their full journey and reiterate our thesis behind.

With the “Building” series, we pay tribute to Greenfield portfolio companies recently achieving a significant milestone or breakthrough, contributing to an open, decentralized, and more robust architecture for tomorrow’s web.

Our thesis

A truly functional ledger must offer both verifiability and privacy ensuring users can interact with confidence, without exposing their intentions or data. As institutions increasingly adopt distributed systems (e.g., JPMorgan’s Onyx, which settles $1.3B annually), privacy remains a key blocker preventing them from moving trading activities on public blockchains. Without it, proprietary client data and trading intentions risk exposure.

This is where Arcium comes into play. Arcium enables arbitrary computation to be encrypted while still benefiting from the public verifiability of Solana and others in the future. Trading is one of the most common use cases in blockchain where privacy is needed. Using Arcium, one can build a confidential orderbook, namely darkpool, to enable bidders and askers to come to settlement in a way that is privacy-preserving, meaning no frontrunning and no trading intention leaked. In TradFi, off exchange trading, including darkpools, takes up over 50% of US stock trading activities, the opportunity set is significant.

The vision is compelling, but there are nuances to consider. Various Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) can be used to build dark pools, each with its own trade-offs—something we explored in detail in an earlier research piece.

Beyond darkpool and DeFi, Arcium’s technology unlocks privacy-preserving applications in AI, DeSci, and gaming.

The Journey so far

Acrium started out with Elusiv (their first iterated privacy protocol), which during its peak, was the biggest transaction privacy protocol on Solana. After a successful $5.5M strategic founding round led by Greenfield, the team realized Elusiv was just the tip of the iceberg—privacy could enable so much more. Instead of just focusing on transaction privacy, they expanded to building a privacy-first MPC engine. Arcium in its current form allows various types of computations to be encrypted.

With this shift, Arcium has made massive strides:

• Acquired their largest Web2 competitor, Inpher, which raised from the likes of credible investors such as JP Morgan, CPP Investments and BNY Mellon. Arcium was able to acquire the key privacy IP that Inpher has developed for years. 
• Built the brand and narrative from ground up, including a new website, logo, and community. 
• Launched private testnets I & II, received 50,000+ of applications.
• Closely working with a number of Solana projects to bring confidentiality to their products. 

What’s Next?

Arcium is gearing up for its public testnet, which is scheduled to be April 30th, and it will be opened to any builder in the space to build on Acrium. We expect many more builders will join the public testnet and build use cases that have privacy embedded. We also highly encourage you to check out the darkpool demo and get familiar with Arcium docs. 

Meanwhile, Arcium’s community round on coinlist commences today. Stay tuned!