Web3 privacy is not “one chain to rule them all”, it's a race to solve a nuanced problem from different angles. With institutional interest rising and regulatory clarity tightening, several projects are stepping up with their own visions of privacy infrastructure.

Mind Network is one of them. It’s earned a fair amount of attention lately, especially with its recent announcement about integrating Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) with Chainlink’s CCIP to secure cross-chain messaging. That’s no small deal and it speaks to how serious the demand for privacy has become at the infrastructure level.

But some in the community are asking the inevitable: is this a threat to COTI?

The short answer is no. And the longer answer is that COTI and Mind aren’t just building differently, they’re solving different classes of problems with very different tools.

Let’s break that down.

What Mind Network Is Building

Mind Network positions itself as a privacy layer using FHE, a type of encryption that allows data to be processed without ever decrypting it. Their pitch? Protect user data during transmission, computation, and storage.

They recently announced the first institutional FHE interface built on Chainlink’s CCIP. This adds privacy to cross-chain communication, and could be useful for things like secure oracle feeds or enterprise-level data pipelines. It’s promising. But FHE comes with a known tradeoff: performance. Even the most optimized FHE operations are still thousands of times slower than plaintext computation and it's a reality, even the best cryptographers will tell you that.

— Yehuda Lindell, Head of Cryptography at Coinbase Source

This is where the gap between theory and practice starts to show.

COTI’s Approach: Practical Encrypted Computation

COTI, on the other hand, uses a combination of Garbled Circuits and Multi-Party Computation (MPC) to enable private smart contract execution on its Ethereum-compatible Layer 2. Garbled Circuits might not be the buzzword FHE is today, but they’re time-tested, efficient, and as Vitalik himself once put it - simple enough to wrap your head around:

— Vitalik Buterin, Source - Hackernon

COTI’s implementation of Garbled Circuits is already live on mainnet. It supports encrypted smart contracts, enabling developers to build apps where input, output, and execution logic are all private by default.

• Up to 1000 TPS for native transactions

• Around 40 TPS for encrypted ones (currently unmatched in its category)

• Built-in compliance logic

• EVM compatibility

FHE vs Garbled Circuits: Two Paths, Two Philosophies

Let’s be clear: FHE is one of the most exciting areas of cryptographic research. It could open up massive possibilities in sectors like cloud computing and encrypted AI inference. But today? It’s slow. Very slow. And requires highly specialized tooling to work. You don’t just fork Solidity and slap FHE into your EVM. That’s why most FHE-based projects are building data layers or oracles, not full execution environments.

Garbled Circuits, on the other hand, are leaner. They don’t encrypt everything forever. They encrypt what needs to be kept secret, and they do it in a way that still supports efficient computation. This makes them a better fit for smart contracts where speed and user interaction actually matter.

Mind and COTI Aren’t Solving the Same Problem

It’s important to understand that these projects operate at different layers of Web3 privacy.

Mind focuses on secure messaging and private data transfer across chains and handling privacy around how data moves.

COTI, on the other hand, provides programmable privacy for apps and smart contracts and protects the privacy of the actual execution.

They don’t compete but complement each other as parts of a broader privacy toolkit. For developers who need fast, private, and compliant execution right now, COTI’s technology is the production-ready choice.

Final Thought: Scaling Private Computation Starts Here

We don’t need to crown a winner in privacy. But we do need to be honest about tradeoffs.

FHE is still years away from real-time general-purpose use. Garbled Circuits, paired with COTI’s L2 and Privacy-on-Demand system, offer something that actually works now without making you give up EVM compatibility or chain-agnostic tooling.

So no, Mind Network isn’t a threat. If anything, it proves the rising urgency for what COTI’s already shipping.
Let the cryptographers argue about what’s “theoretically best.” The builders? They’ll go with what works.