BITE Protocol 2.0: On-Chain Decryption via Precompiled Contracts

General
1

Hey folks

In addition to provably eliminating MEV, one compelling direction for BITE is enabling smart contracts to perform on-chain decryption via a precompiled contract.

This would allow Threshold Encryption (TE) to become a native primitive in the EVM, making advanced coordination, privacy, and game-theoretic mechanisms not just possible—but practical.

:package: Use Case 1: Multiplayer Rock-Paper-Scissors (RPS)

In a 3-player RPS game, each player submits an encrypted move (Rock, Paper, or Scissors). Once all encrypted moves are collected:

  • The contract calls a decryption precompile to simultaneously decrypt all inputs.
  • This guarantees a fair reveal—no player can adjust their move after seeing others.

Today, this would require an off-chain commit-reveal protocol, which is more complex and less trustless.

:hammer_and_wrench: Use Case 2: Sealed-Bid Auctions

Participants submit encrypted bids on-chain.

  • After the smart contract collects all submissions, a precompiled decryption function is invoked.
  • All bids are decrypted at once, enabling a trustless, fair reveal.

This eliminates the need for off-chain reveal phases and complex timeout logic.

:gear: Why a Precompiled Contract?

  • Security: Deterministic, on-chain decryption avoids front-running and malicious reveals.
  • Simplicity: Reduces reliance on off-chain coordination or multi-transaction workflows.
bytes plaintext = DecryptPrecompile.decrypt(bytes ciphertext);

The ciphertext would be encrypted using the current TE committee public key and decrypted using the current TE committee

:rocket: Impact

If implemented, this would unlock a wide range of privacy-preserving, game-theoretic, and multi-party coordination applications on-chain—many of which are currently impractical due to the lack of synchronous, verifiable secret handling in Solidity.

Would love to hear thoughts on:

  • Precompile feasibility and gas cost targets
  • Threshold decryption protocols best suited for this use
  • Real-world dApps this would enable

Looking forward to feedback from the community!

2

Hey @kladkogex

I really like this idea, a few thoughts and questions.

Thoughts

  1. I think this has to be and makes sense as a precompile. I think the feasibility for integrating BITE into any TE based network is going to depend on the technical stack.
  2. Gas cost targets, I think it depends on the operational overhead of the underlying decryption call. Is it very heavy? For a network that is purely gas based (i.e standalone) it would make sense to charge more for this operation. For a network like SKALE, I think it would make more sense to see this as a Economic Feature i.e something that chain owners could pay to opt into as part of their monthly payment. For chains that have gas fees, it could also optionally be something the chains pay excess fees for this operation to the validator set on the fly (increasing gross revenue).
  3. I feel like in some cases a blockchain that enables an innovation like this, it may make sense to explore building out the Virtual Machine into a more different form. I.e can keep the EVM base, but turn into BiteVM for example which would be based on this concept of TE at the core
  4. I think this is a great step in the next direction to allow more real world use cases to come onchain with much greater flexiblity
  5. I think this is also a step in the right direction towards exploring onchain privacy with full functionality

Other Usecases

  1. Oracles – allow oracle providers to all submit data and then reveal it on the fly. This way bad actors can be immediately penalized and can’t cheat by “following the crowd”
  2. Private NFT Metadata – actually a really interesting one that comes back to what feels like the early days of NFTs. I remember a ton of collections used to drop and they had this toggle in the contract where they would have the “before launch metadata” and then they could flip it into the “after launch metadata”. There was 0 guarantees for the user that the metadata would be changed. In this case a developer could submit the transaction with the new metadata in advance and have it decrypted and set after the launch or enough NFTs are sold
  3. Onchain voting for DAOs/governments/etc would be big I think. Allow people to vote privately and have the votes decrypted after
  4. Prediction Markets – this would allow the predictions to remain private and reduce the change of people “just following”

Questions

  1. Would this allow some execution to be done during addition to chain while some data remains encrypted
  2. Does this enable fully encrypted transactions that could never be decrypted but could be executed?

Really excited to explore this further!