The lack of privacy and interoperability in on-chain finance continues to be a major barrier to institutional adoption of digital assets. Read our Cubist Confidential Cloud Functions (C2F) whitepaper to learn more about how we're solving this problem.
In practice, teams have had to choose:
- Put logic on-chain, and gain transparency and predictable behavior, but accept high costs, no privacy, limited integrations, and difficult cross-chain deployments.
- Keep logic off-chain, and gain flexibility, performance, and privacy—but lose the strong guarantees that make smart contracts compelling in the first place.
The institutional market simply cannot reveal proprietary strategies, deal terms, or sensitive client data in full public view.
Confidential compute is gaining traction in Web3
Confidential compute is gaining traction now because it gives institutions a path to adopt blockchain rails while meeting their privacy, control, and compliance requirements. It's the missing capability that finally aligns on-chain finance with how traditional financial systems work.
On-chain smart contracts are simply too public, too expensive, and too siloed to support the proprietary, compute-intensive, and highly interconnected workflows that regulated systems and high-growth ecosystems require. Today's confidential compute trend is about moving sensitive, compute-heavy logic off chain without losing the crucial guarantees that on-chain smart contracts provide, and about making that capability consumable as easily as serverless made traditional cloud compute.
What's in the whitepaper
The whitepaper covers:
- The limitations of on-chain-only design for institutional use cases (privacy, cost, integrations, interoperability).
- The trust problem with traditional off-chain systems—who controls the code, how it changes, and how little insight external parties have into what actually executed.
- How C2F uses trusted execution environments (TEEs), WebAssembly, and attestation to give off-chain code a clear, verifiable identity and execution story.
- How governance and upgrades work, so that code can evolve without turning into a black box.
- Example use cases: private smart contracts attached to signing keys, hardware-backed wallet policies, and audit-ready off-chain code in complex workflows.
Our perspective is not that “everything should move off-chain,” but to outline a model where on-chain and off-chain work together to do what they’re best at.
What's next
We launched C2F because we believe private smart contracts and verifiable off-chain compute are a key part of the answer to institutional adoption. If blockchains are going to carry meaningful volumes of institutional activity, the infrastructure around them needs a way to:
- Keep sensitive logic and data private
- Prove what code ran and under what rules
- Evolve that code in a controlled, auditable way
If you’re interested in how confidential compute, TEEs, and attestation can be used to make off-chain systems behave more like smart contracts, we invite you to dive in to our whitepaper.
Keep reading
- Review the C2F Press Release.
- Read the C2F for Private Smart Contracts and Verifiable Off-Chain Code blog post.
- Learn how Cubist customer Squid is using C2F to replace on-chain smart contracts and GMP protocols.
- Check out C2F tutorials on how to build Private Smart Accounts and Cross-Chain Atomic Swaps.
- Discover C2F for writing and enforcing cross-chain wallet policies.
