TEEs inherently require trust in operators and manufacturers, but it's also possible to use them in ways that strictly *improve* a system's security without introducing new trust bottlenecks. I wrote about two use cases where this is possible:

When considering cloud TEEs, it's easy to underappreciate the essential infra they require to minimise trust dependencies.

Code4rena will run audit contests for free, as public goods. 100% of funds from sponsors will go directly to auditors and judges. We won't take any cut. Why? 1. Competitions are commodities. They're CRUD apps. Why should builders pay premium for a website just to submit bugs? Especially smaller teams without VC funding. 2. Everyone deserves competitions. We tell all our clients to get a competition after their audit. That's because competitions simulate real world conditions, where there's thousands of eyes on a protocol. We want to make competitions as affordable as possible so everyone can get one. 3. It benefits our wardens. In 2021, we invented the competition format. We're still the platform with the largest auditor pool (10,000+ registered). Not only should builders have access to the best security talent, we believe auditors should have opportunities to work with great projects. Opening up our platform benefits our wardens. How will you afford this? Zellic is a profitable business. We make money doing traditional private audits through Zellic and Zenith. This benefits us because: (1) our clients are more secure after they run contests, and (2) Code4rena is a talent pipeline for Zenith. Will you stop maintaining the platform? Of course not. Since we acquired Code4rena, we've shipped several features and have several more already underway. C4 has a dedicated dev team that we're fully committed to. Besides, many of our clients at Zellic use C4. We're incentivized to make sure the platform works well. It's just that now we're allowing everyone to benefit from our investments in Code4rena. In conclusion: Run a contest on Code4rena! We won't take a cut, your prizes will go directly to wardens and judges. For full details, check out our blog post here:

1/ Earlier this year, @yuval_domb discovered Logjumps — a more efficient way to do large-prime field multiplication than Montgomery multiplication. So much modern crypto relies on modular multiplication — all the way from TLS sessions to elliptic-curve based ZK proofs.

Happy Curve25519 day to all who celebrate.