Arcium Blackthorn vs Venice: private AI inference without the Intel TDX chip
Quote498 words
Bullish call$ARX−7.6%since this piece, moved against the callHow it played out ↓Venice's encrypted mode relies on Intel TDX, which TEE.fail and DDRop attacks undermined; Arcium's Blackthorn removes the CPU TEE and splits session keys across MPC nodes. ARX trades at $49M mcap vs VVV at $1.3B, a gap he bets will close.
Key claims
ARX $49M mcap / $234M FDV vs VVV $1.3B / $2.2B
DDRop forged TDX attestation with a $159 interposer in Sept 2026
ARX trades at a 4x FDV premium to Phala
Venice is a $1.3B bet that people will pay for private AI.
What many don't talk about: its privacy still runs through an Intel chip, and that chip got broken twice in the last 12 months.
@Arcium just shipped the version without that chip, at $49M mcap.
Why does the chip matter?
Venice's encrypted mode runs the model on NVIDIA GPUs with an Intel TDX enclave in front of them (per its own docs), which makes TDX the weak link. TEE(.)fail pulled attestation keys straight off the DDR5 bus in October 2025, and DDRop forged TDX attestation with a $159 interposer in September 2026. The NVIDIA side of things survived both, bc GPU memory sits inside the package where you can't clip a board onto it.
Blackthorn is basically the same stack with the Intel part cut out, shipped as infra: an API, rented GPUs, or self-install on your own Hopper/Blackwell boxes. It's not a consumer-facing chat app in itself.
On a more technical level: The model runs in plaintext inside confidential GPU memory, the session keys that unlock it get split across MPC nodes, and MPC never touches the per-token path. Arcium says near-native speed, no public benchmark yet tho.
So what's it priced at?
- $ARX: $49M mcap, $234M FDV
- $VVV: $1.3B mcap, $2.2B FDV
27x on mcap, 9x on FDV, for the stack with one less party to trust.
Which imo btw also means the obvious move for Arcium is sitting right there: a Venice-style front end on Arcium's own API once the infra is proven.
Without that app layer, Venice isn't the cleanest comp yet tho. The more congruent ones are the TEE infra Venice actually runs on: @NEARProtocol's NEAR AI Cloud and @PhalaNetwork, both announced as Venice's confidential inference providers on the 19th of March 2026, both TEE-based, which is where the Intel TDX enclave from above lives. Also: NEAR is listed for completeness only tho, a $7B L1 where private AI is a rounding error isn’t a comp. Phala is.
- $PHA: $50M mcap, $59M FDV
- $NEAR: $7B, with private AI a rounding error inside an L1
So infra vs pure infra, $ARX already trades at a 4x FDV premium to Phala. A sign that the market doesn't price Blackthorn like cheap TEE infra. It's already starting to price it as a shot at the app layer.
Which brings us back to Venice.
The valuation gap there exists for a reason today. Blackthorn is still a gated alpha with no fees. Venice is a real product with users and revenue.
But that's the whole point of buying the alpha instead of the product: you get the better trust model before the market prices it in. If Blackthorn (and a Venice-style product, in-house or not, built on it) attracts real users, this gap will close. And that's my bet.
NFA ofc. DYOR.
For more on Arcium (incl. C-SPL and other stuff they're building), also make sure to check my post below.
QUOTING @Arcium
Today we're releasing Blackthorn in Private Alpha: The first Private AI inferencing stack that removes the CPU TEE from the trust chain. Blackthorn can load and run any AI model privately with little performance overhead compared to plaintext inference. t.co/5avAouhgWA
Today we're releasing Blackthorn in Private Alpha: The first Private AI inferencing stack that removes the CPU TEE from the trust chain. Blackthorn can load and run any AI model privately with little performance overhead compared to plaintext inference. t.co/5avAouhgWA
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How the call played out · since 21 Oct 2026
Prices as of 23 Oct 2026This piece takes a view on $ARX, so that move is read against the call. Other assets it covers are shown as context, not as calls.
Venice's private AI relies on a broken Intel TDX enclave, while Arcium's Blackthorn splits keys across MPC nodes and ARX trades far below VVV.
−7.6%
Moved against the call · over 2 days
- At publication
- $0.23
- Now
- $0.212
- vs BTC
- −6.0%
Show market context for 3 other assets
Covered, no call
Since then
Zero has written 1 more piece on Arcium and Venice and $ARX and $VVV since this one.
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