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Outlier: Why are we strongly betting on privacy enhancement technology?
Source: Outlier Ventures; Compiled by AIMan@Golden Finance
Privacy has not vanished; it is merely waiting for the right moment to arrive. And that moment is now.
For many years, privacy has been regarded as a compliance checkbox or a philosophical ideal, but now it has finally become a practical design choice.
Governments around the world are tightening AI surveillance. Major lawsuits are investigating how tech giants collect user data and monetize it. In the cryptocurrency space, the crackdown on KYC is conflicting with the ideals of decentralization. Meanwhile, we are witnessing a surge in the use of AI agents, which are increasingly acting on our behalf but often lack effective oversight or consent from users.
In this environment, trust is the new scalability bottleneck. And privacy is no longer optional.
Thanks to breakthroughs in zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP), trusted execution environments (TEE), fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), and multi-party computation (MPC), privacy has finally caught up with performance.
This is no longer just about protecting user data, but about achieving secure delegation, identity verification, and economic coordination in the world of proxies.
This is why privacy-enhancing technologies (PET) are coming out of the shadows, and why they are rapidly becoming the cornerstone of reliable technological infrastructure.
Trust Bottleneck
Web3 promised us self-sovereignty—but what we got was signature fatigue, interrupted consent flows, and a user experience pieced together from browser pop-ups and Discord FAQs.
Today's infrastructure may be decentralized by design, but it is not trustworthy by default.
Wallet metadata leakage. DApps rely on opaque backend logic. The login process offers a one-size-fits-all permission model, lacking granularity. Most users still do not know what they have signed or what will be tracked after signing.
Now independent agents have been added to the layering.
These systems are not just executing transactions. They learn, infer, and take actions—often in ways that users cannot fully see or control. In our eagerness to scale agent applications, we risk reconstructing Web2 surveillance patterns with smarter wrappers.
This is where trust breaks down. It's not because people don't care, but because the system hasn't provided a reliable alternative. To usher in the next era of smart applications, we need an infrastructure that allows users to delegate without disappearing. This means:
In short, we need PET as a core design primitive, rather than an additional component.
Without them, the proxy system will become fragile, permissionless applications will reach their adoption limits, and the promise of decentralization will collapse under its own weight.
PET is our way of establishing trust in autonomous systems at the protocol, application, and interaction levels.
Why is now the time to implement PET?
Until recently, PET mostly remained in the theoretical stage. It looked exciting on paper, but it was expensive, slow, and difficult to implement on a large scale. Today, that is no longer the case.
These are the cornerstones of today.
At the same time, use cases are rapidly evolving. From privacy coordination in DePIN, to sensitive data handling in SocialFi, to delegated permissions in proxy wallets, privacy is no longer just a defensive feature. It is becoming an enabler of new forms of interaction and trust.
It's not just the technology that has changed, but also the risks.
In a world where an agent can act on your behalf, privacy no longer merely means hiding data, but controlling the way data behaves. This is a shift from security to autonomy, requiring us to change the way we build.
Future Needs PET
If the future of the internet is modular, composable, and agent-based... then PET is the trust layer that makes it all possible.
In this future, your wallet is not just a key manager; it is the operating system of your digital self.
It includes your personality, your identity to anchor interactions, your data to inform decisions, your reputation to coordinate, your consent to authorize actions, and your privacy to protect boundaries.
These are not just refinements of user experience, but rather the foundation. PET is the key that enables them to function in practice:
This is not to make Web3 more private, but to make humans, agents, and the systems they build together more trustworthy.
Outlier Investment Thesis: Privacy-Enhancing Technologies in the Post-Network Era
Outlier Ventures' "Privacy-Enhancing Technologies for the Post-Network Era" paper
Authors: Jamie Burke, Founder and Chairman of Outlier Ventures; Jasper De Maere, Research Director at Outlier Ventures
Residual centralization based on specific needs
Even with the adoption of decentralized systems, certain wallet functions may still remain centralized due to unique performance requirements such as ultra-low latency or high throughput. While most infrastructure should be decentralized to protect key assets and interactions, retaining centralized components for specific use cases may be an acceptable trade-off to enhance usability.
Let us delve into the two core components that wallets will carry in the post-network era: "personality" and "assets."
Personality
Persona is a comprehensive representation and management of user identity, reputation, data, and privacy.
Key Points:
Personality: Covers identity, reputation, personal data, and privacy, constituting the user's unique personality traits.
Dynamic Management: Wallets must dynamically manage the elements of personality, balancing control rights, consent rights, and secure interactions.
Privacy Protection: Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) such as Zero-Knowledge Proofs support secure and private interactions, but will be selectively applied due to cost considerations.
Human intervention: Before the establishment of a universal regulatory framework, human oversight is still crucial for ensuring accountability and managing personal identity in wallets.
Personal data: serving as the foundation for supporting automation and agent-driven services, while addressing risks such as algorithmic bias.
The personality in the post-web wallet encompasses the user's identity, reputation, personal data, and privacy, forming the basis of their digital presence and interactions. This enables users to control their digital footprint, manage consents and permissions, and interact securely and privately with AI agents and decentralized services. In order for personality to have a meaningful impact and be considered in economic and on-chain activities, a comprehensive, universally accepted regulatory framework is needed to regulate identity, data, and privacy across the ecosystem. Prior to this, we believe that human intervention (human intervention approach) is needed to ensure oversight and accountability in their respective jurisdictions, to manage personality and to teach roles and social functioning to better represent individuals. Nonetheless, this is essential to enable agents to operate with a high degree of autonomy on behalf of individual users or entities.
The personal level in post-network wallets
The above image shows the dynamic personality hierarchy in the post-network wallet.
At its core is Personal Data, which is the foundation that drives all the other elements.
Its periphery is Identity & Reputation, extracting and synthesizing actionable metrics from data, forming the foundation of post-network trust.
Consent & Permission act as gatekeepers, dynamically controlling access to personal data and identity based on user preferences.
Covering everything is Privacy, a protective layer that regulates the flow of information and ensures the security of sensitive data. These layers together form a coherent framework that enables secure, controllable, and trustworthy interactions in the post-network ecosystem.
Let's delve into the different elements of personality within the wallet.
Personal Data
Today, personal data is often stored in silos on Web2 platforms, out of user control. Much of the information is duplicated and outdated. Furthermore, this data is inaccessible to users, undermining their sovereignty.
As mentioned above, personal background, that is, data, serves as the foundation for personality in post-network wallets. In this vision, personal data will be regarded as a form of anonymous asset, securely stored in the wallet. As more economic activities move on-chain, wallets will increasingly accommodate transaction and behavior data, evolving from basic information to complex user profiles. This rich data will support highly personalized services while being protected through robust privacy measures and finely-tuned automated consent mechanisms.
In the post-network era, managed by layers of consent and privacy, agents will be able to use dynamically portable data enriched by contextual information to optimize information distribution in real-time based on changing user preferences, locations, and environments. At the same time, agents will unlock privacy verifiability by using Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs), thereby retaining the necessary level of privacy.
Identity & Reputation
Identity and Reputation (I&R) are built on personal data, extracted and synthesized into actionable metrics that form the foundation of post-network trust. Identity provides static verification, serving as a reliable anchor, while reputation acts as a dynamic cumulative credibility indicator, evolving over time with user behavior and interactions. However, the interaction between static identity and dynamic reputation presents challenges, especially in decentralized systems that aim to balance verifiability with anonymity, ensuring that both can coexist seamlessly.
As identity and reputation are facilitating factors in trust-based economic transactions, their economic significance in the post-network era cannot be overstated. Identity is a static layer of trust, while reputation reflects real-time reliability in a specific socio-economic context. Together, identity and reputation enable users to leverage their digital presence for economic gains, fostering a more equitable and trust-filled internet. However, the reliance on anonymity in many Web3 environments creates a contradiction with the growing demand for verifiable identities, especially in regulated industries and agent-based systems.
In the post-network era, identity and reputation will transcend individual users. As social dynamics increasingly migrate to distributed ledger technology (DLT) through trends like SocialFi, contextual associations will form within their social graphs. By incorporating relationships and interactions within user networks, these systems can create more nuanced and context-specific trust metrics, enhancing credibility and fostering trust in social and economic interactions.
Currently, efforts to establish on-chain reputation in Web3 are still ongoing, but not much progress has been made, primarily due to the lack of viable on-chain economic use cases that are crucial for reputation. The dynamic nature of reputation and the demand for real-time updates further restrict its development, leaving users with little motivation to build this dataset. Furthermore, due to the high context-specificity of reputation, designing systems that can accurately reflect credibility across various socioeconomic interactions remains a significant challenge. In contrast, identity has achieved greater success, especially in regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, and insurance, where DLT is adopted and subsequently AI agents are utilized. Although identity challenges the anonymity spirit of early Web3, it will become increasingly important in enabling agents to operate in these regulated environments, provided that measures to ensure user privacy and control are in place.
In the post-network era, as users empower agents, identity and reputation will become key components that require robust management to unlock the full potential of trust-based interactions and economic activities. Reputation systems will need to address existing limitations by integrating real-time updates and incentivizing users to contribute to a dynamic trust framework. At the same time, identity will need to evolve in a way that balances the demands of regulated systems with the decentralized principles of Web3, ensuring that both identity and reputation support a trustworthy, fair, and adaptive internet.
Consent & Permission
Currently, wallets mainly focus on authorization. By clicking "Sign", users are essentially agreeing to execute the specified transaction. This core aspect of wallets will remain crucial in the post-network era, although the nature of consent will be much more complex than transaction signatures in Web3. Authorization of consent and permissions is vital, as it represents the almost irreversible final step in empowering agents to act on behalf of users.
Humans need to improve their ability to manage consent, which is evident from people's reluctance to participate in Cookie consent forms or browse GDPR toggle menus. In recent years, we have also seen a rapid increase in consent fatigue, with repeated consent requests leading to user disengagement and high abandonment rates. Although we believe there is an opportunity to eliminate many of these poor user experiences in the post-network era, we anticipate that consent and permission management involving human intervention will face similar challenges when delegating activities to agents, unless regulators embrace their innovations.
Highly automated and sophisticated consent solutions will be essential in the post-network era to ensure that users authorize their intended actions. As more and more economic and meaningful activities are outsourced to agents, consent will become increasingly complex and critical. When agents act on behalf of users, they must also be able to identify themselves as authorized representatives to ensure the trust and verifiability of their actions.
Today, consent fatigue is managed through an intuitive consent user experience/interface and simple language. Considering how much activity will be delegated in the post-network era, we do not believe this is a sustainable solution. Instead, we believe that highly refined user profiles created from a large compilation of individual data and preferences will release the necessary level of automation by enabling the system to act based on these preferences. However, if the algorithms managing these profiles are centrally controlled, this approach carries the risk of bias, which is a challenge that must be carefully managed.
Therefore, as wallets evolve to carry users' reputations, identities, sensitive personal data, and more, founders have a huge, untapped opportunity to abstract and simplify consent and permission management. This is a bottleneck that needs to be overcome before we can delegate a large amount of commoditized economic activity to agents.
Privacy
Privacy, like consent and permissions, relates to the governance of information and the ability to conceal sensitive or proprietary information. However, it is often mistaken for anonymity, which is a separate concept.
Zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption, trusted execution environments, and secure multi-party computation are not unique to cryptocurrency and blockchain. However, today, they are making rapid advancements in areas such as cost, throughput, and capacity, making many of these technologies economically viable for the first time.
Privacy verifiability, which is the ability to prove the authenticity and accuracy of information without revealing the underlying data, is expected to change the types of economic activities that can be conducted on-chain. In various use cases where competitors operate on the same permissionless blockchain, the ability to specify the degree of information asymmetry between economic participants is crucial.
Nevertheless, PETs are one of the most underrated innovations in today's Web3 and are crucial for realizing the post-network and computable economy. This is why we have a dedicated chapter on privacy in Chapter 4 of the post-network paper.
Launch of PETs Accelerator
The future of the Internet will be more agentic, context-aware, and increasingly autonomous. However, such a future can only be achieved by building trust from the very beginning.
This is the reason why Outlier supports founders working at the intersection of privacy, identity, and intelligent systems.
Outlier Ventures has launched a dedicated accelerator for the use of PET technology through Post Web Accelerator, in collaboration with the Midnight Foundation.
Because we believe that PET is no longer premature. In fact, it has arrived just in time.