TEEs in Crypto: The Useful Middle Ground Between Pure Trust and Pure Math
There’s a pattern showing up across crypto infrastructure right now for anyone building wallets, MEV (maximal extractable value) pipelines, or agent payment systems: Vitalik frames TEEs as a pragmatic near-term privacy layer (especially around RPC / read-path privacy), Coinbase uses enclave-backed architecture for programmable wallets, policy-controlled signing, and agent-ready payment workflows, Flashbots uses SGX for confidential block building in the MEV pipeline. Different use cases, same design instinct: use hardware-backed isolation to reduce trust now, while more advanced cryptographic systems mature in the background. ...