Network Alpha: The Interfold on Mainnet

Network Alpha is live.

The Interfold lets competing companies or complete strangers compute together on sensitive data without revealing it to one another or relying on trusted hardware: private inputs, verifiable outputs, no trusted hardware.

Earlier today, tge() was successfully called, enabling general FOLD transferability. FOLD now enters its network phase as well: it serves as the bond for ciphernode operators and can be locked for participation in Interfold governance.

Official FOLD token contract: 0xE172e9B6cfBeeB5593bDcE3f077356FDb33af904

Network Alpha establishes the production environment for E3s, the Interfold’s Encrypted Execution Environments, with publicly verifiable distributed key generation and threshold decryption at the center of the network design.

Private inputs remain encrypted, while no individual ciphernode holds the complete decryption key or independently controls the result.

This is where the Interfold moves from building the protocol to operating the network.

What’s Live

Network Alpha brings the core parts of the Interfold together on mainnet:

• E3s, or Encrypted Execution Environments, provide the execution environment for confidential coordination.
• Ciphernode committees collectively perform distributed key generation and threshold decryption.
• Compute providers execute E3 programs over encrypted inputs.
• End-to-end verifiability makes the relevant process and resulting outcome publicly verifiable.
• Onchain coordination records and coordinates the E3 lifecycle.
• E3 creation is permissionless for supported computations.

For each confidential coordination process, an E3 provides an ephemeral execution environment through which that process runs.

An E3 is requested, a ciphernode committee forms and establishes a shared encryption key, participants contribute encrypted inputs, a compute provider executes the defined program, and the permitted result is verified and decrypted once the required threshold is reached. The E3 then closes.

The important part is not any one component in isolation. Together, they allow independent parties to produce a shared outcome without giving one operator custody of their underlying information or unilateral control over decryption.

For a broader look at the system, see How Interfold Works.

No Single Machine Holds the Key

Every encrypted computation needs a key. The more consequential question is who controls it.

Many confidential-computing systems place some part of that responsibility inside a protected machine or trusted dealer. The Interfold instead distributes it across a ciphernode committee.

When an E3 begins, the committee performs Distributed Key Generation, or DKG, collectively establishing an encryption key without any individual operator ever possessing the complete secret.

The same structure governs decryption. Once the permitted encrypted output is ready, ciphernodes produce decryption shares. A protocol-defined threshold must be reached before the result can be recovered.

No single ciphernode can decrypt the output alone.

In Network Alpha, distributed key generation and threshold decryption for the homomorphic encryption scheme are designed to be publicly verifiable.

This matters because encryption alone does not solve the problem of who controls decryption. Encrypting information while leaving one machine in control of the key simply relocates the trust boundary.

The Interfold makes key generation and decryption network processes instead. No single operator establishes the secret, controls decryption, or independently determines the result.

Confidential Coordination - The Interfold

A series on confidential coordination: how private inputs can produce shared outcomes without data exposure or centralized control.

The Interfold

The Network in Use

The usefulness of this architecture becomes clearer when applied to an actual coordination problem.

One of the first processes being brought onto Network Alpha is Interfold governance.

The Interfold is integrating its confidential voting system with Aragon so votes can remain encrypted while the network produces a publicly verifiable result. The system is also receipt-free, meaning participants cannot reliably prove how they voted, an important property for reducing coercion and vote-buying.

Governance therefore becomes more than an administrative layer around the network. It is itself an early application of confidential coordination.

As Network Alpha comes online, these early processes provide something more meaningful to inspect than an architecture diagram or deployed contract. Participants will be able to follow confidential coordination processes through the network and verify the resulting outcomes without the private information that produced them becoming public.

Verifiable Secret Ballots with Interfold and Aragon

CRISP is now available through an implementation built on Interfold and Aragon, making verifiable secret ballots private, while the result can be publicly verified without relying on a single tallying authority.

The Interfoldgnosis guild

5 Ways to Participate in Network Alpha

A network becomes useful through the parties who use it, operate it, govern it, build systems around it, and observe its operation.

1. Use the Network

Applications can use E3s wherever multiple parties need to derive a shared result from information they cannot make public. They can collect encrypted inputs, execute a defined computation, and use the resulting output without taking custody of participants’ plaintext data. E3 creation is permissionless for supported computations. How Interfold Works

2. Operate the Network

Public ciphernode participation is coming soon. Ciphernode operators run the software that supports distributed key generation, threshold decryption, and other protocol-defined duties. By bonding FOLD and registering a node, operators become eligible for selection into computation-specific committees.

Network Alpha begins with an initial operator set while the production operator experience is finalized under mainnet conditions. Public registration will open after this initial stage. Ciphernode operator docs

3. Govern the Network

FOLD holders can participate in Interfold governance by locking FOLD for governance weight or, once public ciphernode participation opens, through FOLD bonded to operate the network. Governance is being brought onchain alongside Network Alpha. Confidential, receipt-free voting through the Interfold and Aragon integration comes next. That makes governance itself an early use case for the network: votes can remain private while the resulting outcome remains publicly verifiable. Learn about Interfold governance with Aragon

4. Build With E3s

Builders can create E3 programs that define how encrypted inputs are processed and which result the computation is permitted to reveal. The Interfold provides the surrounding network for confidential coordination, including distributed key generation, threshold decryption, and verifiable lifecycle coordination, so each application does not need to recreate that infrastructure independently. Getting Started

5. Observe the Network

The Network Alpha dashboard provides a public view into mainnet network activity. As E3s, committees, and operators accumulate, the dashboard will provide an increasingly useful view into how the network is forming and operating. Explore the Network Alpha dashboard

Why Alpha?

Network Alpha is the first production stage of the Interfold network, but its initial configuration is deliberately bounded.

Early committees support up to 19 ciphernodes with a threshold of 9, and Distributed Key Generation remains one of the more communication- and computation-intensive stages of the E3 lifecycle, currently taking on the order of hours. The operator set itself is also young.

These constraints define the environment in which the first production network can be observed, measured, and expanded.

That is what “Alpha” describes here.

It is not simply a software label. It marks a stage of network formation in which the protocol is operating on mainnet while operator diversity, performance, tooling, and application demand develop under real conditions.

A protocol can be deployed at a moment in time. A network gains its properties through operation: independent participants join, infrastructure is exercised, failures become observable, and applications begin depending on the guarantees it provides.

Network Alpha is the first production stage of that process.

A Network You Can Verify

Before Network Alpha, the Interfold could primarily be evaluated through its research, architecture, code, and testnet operation.

Mainnet changes that.

Ciphernode committees can establish encryption keys collectively. Independent parties can contribute private information without exposing it as plaintext. Compute providers can execute E3 programs over those encrypted inputs. Permitted outputs can then be decrypted through a threshold process rather than by a single trusted machine.

The result is a different structure for multiparty computation: private inputs can contribute to shared outcomes without requiring the parties involved to hand their sensitive information or decryption control to one intermediary.

Network Alpha puts that structure into operation.

What comes next is network formation: bringing more operators online, opening public ciphernode participation, bringing confidential governance online, running more applications through E3s, and producing more shared outcomes without requiring the private information behind them to become public.

Private inputs. Verifiable outputs. No trusted hardware.

Participate in the Interfold network
A distributed network for confidential coordination.