Privacy isn’t dead, it’s just been waiting for its moment. That moment is now.
After years of being treated like a compliance checkbox or a philosophical ideal, privacy is finally becoming a practical design choice.
Governments are ramping up AI surveillance. Major lawsuits are probing how tech giants collect and monetize user data. And in crypto, KYC crackdowns are colliding with the ethos of decentralization. In parallel, we’re seeing a surge in the use of AI agents that increasingly act for us, but often without meaningful user oversight or consent.
In this climate, trust is the new scalability bottleneck. And privacy is no longer optional.
Thanks to breakthroughs in zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), trusted execution environments (TEEs), fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), and multi-party computation (MPC), privacy is finally catching up to performance.
This is no longer just about protecting user data, it’s about enabling secure delegation, verified identity, and economic coordination in an agentic world.
That’s why Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) are stepping out of the shadows, and why they’re quickly becoming the cornerstone of credible tech infrastructure.
The Trust Bottleneck
Web3 promised us self-sovereignty — but what we got was signature fatigue, broken consent flows, and a UX held together by browser popups and Discord FAQs.
Today’s infrastructure may be decentralized by design, but it’s not trustworthy by default.
Wallets leak metadata. Dapps rely on opaque backend logic. Sign-in flows give blanket permissions with no granularity. Most users still don’t know what they’re signing, or what gets tracked when they do.
Now layer in autonomous agents.
These systems don’t just execute transactions. They learn, infer, and act — often in ways the user doesn’t fully see or control. In the rush to scale agentic applications, we risk rebuilding the surveillance patterns of Web2 with smarter wrappers.
This is where trust breaks. Not because people don’t care, but because the system doesn’t offer credible alternatives. To unlock the next era of intelligent apps, we need infrastructure that lets users delegate without disappearing. That means:
- Verifiable identity that doesn’t compromise privacy
- Dynamic consent that adapts to context
- Selective disclosure that proves without exposing
- Reputation systems that are portable and pseudonymous
In short, we need PETs as core design primitives, not add-ons.
Without them, agentic systems will be brittle, permissionless apps will hit adoption ceilings, and the promise of decentralization will collapse under its own weight.
PETs are how we build trust into autonomous systems at the protocol, application, and interaction level.
Why Now for PETs?
Until recently, PETs were mostly theoretical. Exciting on paper, but too expensive, slow, or hard to implement at scale. That’s no longer the case.
- ZKPs are becoming production-ready, with recursive proofs and hardware acceleration dramatically reducing costs.
- FHE is finding its footing in privacy-preserving machine learning and finance.
- TEEs are already used in everything from biometric hardware to on-chain order execution.
- MPC has matured into a staple for key management, custody, and collaborative signing.
These are present-day building blocks.
Meanwhile, the use cases are catching up fast. From private coordination in DePIN to sensitive data handling in SocialFi, to delegated permissions in agentic wallets, privacy isn’t just a defensive feature. It’s becoming an enabler of new forms of interaction and trust.
What’s changed isn’t just the technology. It’s the stakes.
In a world where agents can act on your behalf, privacy is no longer just about keeping data hidden. It’s about controlling how that data acts. That’s a shift from security to autonomy, and it demands a shift in how we build.
The Future Needs PETs
If the future of the internet is modular, composable, and agentic…then PETs are the trust layer that makes it all viable.
In this future, your wallet isn’t just a key manager, it’s the operating system of your digital self.
It holds your personhood; your identity to anchor interactions, your data to inform decisions, your reputation to enable coordination, your consent to authorize action, and your privacy to protect boundaries.
These aren’t a UX polish. They’re foundational. And PETs are what make them functional in practice:
- Private verifiability ensures agents can prove credentials or behavior without exposing raw data.
- Context-aware consent allows users to delegate actions with nuance, not blanket permissions.
- Portable, pseudonymous reputation enables trust in new economic environments, without surveillance.
This isn’t about making Web3 more private. It’s about making it credible for humans, agents, and the systems they build together.
Dive Deeper: The PETs Thesis
Want to learn more? This report builds on privacy-enhancing technologies and personhood in The Post Web. You can read or download the full PDF below.
Why We Launched a PETs Accelerator Track
The future of the internet will be agentic, context-aware, and increasingly autonomous. But that future only works if trust is built in from the start.
That’s why we’re backing founders working at the intersection of privacy, identity, and intelligent systems.
Through The Post Web Accelerator and in partnership with the Midnight Foundation, we’ve launched a dedicated track for teams building with PETs.
Because we believe PETs are no longer too early. In fact, they’re right on time.
