Without data access controls, anyone who wants to keep data confidential currently has to use a centralized service or build a custom setup — which is not only time-consuming and expensive, but blocks traditional finance institutions and others from fully unlocking the features and benefits of onchain data management. And as begin browsing, transacting, and making decisions autonomously, both users and institutions across industries need cryptographic guarantees as opposed to “best-effort trust”. That’s why I believe we need secrets-as-a-service: New technologies that can provide programmable, native data access rules; client-side encryption; and decentralized key management enforcing who can decrypt what, under which conditions, and for how long... all enforced onchain. Combined with verifiable data systems, ==secrets could then become part of the internet’s fundamental public infrastructure — rather than an application-level patch, where privacy is bolted on after the fact — making privacy core infrastructure.==