The Hallucinated Future of Onchain Social and Beyond

Hallucinated servers, a cryptographic approach where distributed users collectively simulate an app with no physical host or central operator, could complement onchain social apps and other CROPS-aligned projects. The idea, outlined by gubsheep of 0xPARC in Programmable Cryptography (Part 1), uses fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and multiparty computation (MPC) so that each user holds private state plus an encrypted fragment of the app state. At Devcon SEA in 2024, gubsheep and collaborators demoed Frog Zone, a multiplayer game run entirely inside FHE, though 150 bytes of its game state required 9 machines at around $200 an hour and ran about 1 billion times slower than traditional computation.