Encrypted Compute Hackathon
Learn to build apps that compute on encrypted data, with the Niobium and Redapt teams alongside you and your own AI coding agent handling the cryptography.
Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) lets a program process data while it stays encrypted. The end user (client) encrypts the data with a secret key and sends it to the service provider (server) to be processed. The server uses public keys to process the encrypted data without decrypting it, and then sends it back to the client, who decrypts and views the answer.
The client never reveals their inputs or the output to the server, allowing for fully-private processing of sensitive data like healthcare, financial, or proprietary information.
FHE has traditionally struggled with two barriers: performance and usability. Encrypted computation uses a different set of data structures that are not performant of CPUs and GPUs, and that have traditionally required an advanced cryptography degree in order to write and develop applications.
In this event, you will build programs using Niobium’s FHE Application Design Skill that works with any standard AI agent (claude, gemini, codex) to handle the advanced cryptography. And you will run your programs on Niobium’s encrypted cloud platform, the Fog™, running on infrastructure sourced and value-engineered by Redapt, that makes running FHE applications practical.
Practical info
Thursday, December 10, 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM
Thinkspace, Seattle; the address goes to approved participants
Registration is an application. Everyone hears back by November 25.
Teams of 1 to 4 (come solo and we'll match you if you want)
Lunch provided, and join us for happy hour after the event.
Niobium and Redapt staff on site as mentors all day
What you'll leave with
Hands-on experience with FHE: what it can compute, where it can provide value to your organization, and how to design for it
A working encrypted app and its source code
The design document and threat model the skill writes alongside it: who holds the keys, what the server sees, and what the result reveals
A read from Niobium and Redapt mentors on whether a workload from your own organization could run encrypted, and what it would take to deploy.
What you could build
Health analytics that score bloodwork or fitness data while it stays encrypted
Fraud or credit scoring on encrypted transactions
Encrypted matching for hiring or marketplaces
Survey or salary statistics without seeing any single response
A feature in your own product where your customers keep the key
Or bring your own idea
The day
10:00 AM: Sign-in, coffee, kickoff, and rules
10:20 AM: Team formation and a live demo
10:40 AM: Team brainstorming
11:00 AM: Morning build
12:30 PM: Working lunch
1:30 PM: Afternoon build
2:30 PM: Feature freeze and demo prep
2:50 PM: Submissions due
3:00 PM: Demos
3:45 PM: Judging and awards
4:00 PM: Happy hour
Executive booth
Niobium and Redapt are running a booth all day demo-ing encrypted computation. Stop by to see demos like “Encrypted Semantic Search” and “Private Fraud Detection”, along with the infrastructure the Fog runs on, value-engineered by Redapt.
Prizes
1st place: $2,500 in Fog credits
2nd place: $1,250 in Fog credits
3rd place: $600 in Fog credits
Judging
Teams will give a 3-minute demo and explanation of their application. Judges from Niobium, Redapt, and Seattle's startup and investor community (to be announced) will score each demo on the following criteria:
Does it run successfully on the Fog, and do the encrypted results match the results from the plaintext twin that the Design Skill also creates
How efficient and performant is the application, as measured by total wall time (data transfer + encrypted computation)
Clear value provided by the application to a real business or organization (your own or some other industry)
A clear and compelling privacy model
Who is protected?
What is protected, from whom?
And why does that matter?
Before event day
Set these up ahead of time so you can start building as soon as teams form.
Request a Fog account at console.niobium.co/request-account.
Clone the Niobium client and DSL from NiobiumInc/niobium-client and run the first build. It compiles Niobium’s Fog-compatible fork of OpenFHE once and takes a while.
Add Niobium's FHE skill to your coding agent from NiobiumInc/niobium-skills.
Co-Hosts
Niobium builds FHE-acceleration hardware and the Fog, an encrypted cloud for computing on encrypted data.
Redapt is Niobium’s technology solutions partner for the Fog. Redapt designs, builds, and manages cloud, AI, cybersecurity, and data center infrastructure for enterprises.
Venue
Thinkspace is a coworking and event space for founders and early-stage teams in Seattle and Redmond.