Research

Explore how Shutter uses threshold encryption to fight MEV, its strengths and trade-offs.

Encrypted mempools dramatically reduce censorship and malicious MEV, but face limitations such as potential collusion, rigid setups, and added latency. In this article, we’ll explore advanced, deployable cryptographic primitives - beyond FHE and MPC - that can address these limitations.

Glamsterdam is Ethereum’s next big upgrade - and a chance to dramatically improve decentralization and censorship resistance. Shutter supports prioritizing EIP-7732 (ePBS) and EIP-7805 (FOCIL), with encrypted mempools and silent threshold encryption proposed as powerful future implementations.

DAO voters have long demanded permanent private voting. It’s now on Shutter’s roadmap. This post shares the architecture and a working POC showing how we’re extending threshold-encrypted voting with ElGamal-based homomorphic tallying - so votes are counted in the encrypted state and remain private.

We appreciate the thoughtful perspectives of the analysts at a16z Crypto on the limitations and potential of encrypted mempools in addressing MEV (Maximal Extractable Value). Their recent blog post raises valid points and highlights genuine challenges. That said, we see several key issues differently and offer a perspective informed by

On-chain governance has gone mainstream - but every public vote is a signal that can be bought and coerced. There remains a huge privacy gap in how decisions are made. Shutter aims to help close it with on-chain Shielded Voting.

Censorship resistance and decentralization are core to public blockchains, ensuring open, permissionless access. But in today’s world of bots, AI, and memecoin mania, these founding principles are too often forgotten.

Privacy-preserving computation is key to Web3’s future. This post explores cryptographic tools like FHE, MPC, and iO—and why trust in distributed committees, like Shutter’s Keypers, is essential for keeping data private and systems decentralized.

Is iO the holy grail of blockchain privacy? This article looks at the limitations of indistinguishability obfuscation, what it could unlock, why it matters, and if it could be a true alternative to trusted hardware.