In the past two days, two AI agents have used a relatively early but not very popular technology: TEE.
TEE stands for Trusted Execution Environment.
This is a hardware security-based solution.
It refers to an execution environment built by a combination of hardware and software in a computing device. This environment is usually used to protect sensitive data and perform critical operations, and it can prevent unauthorized access and malicious operations.
In simple terms, if we run a software in a reliable TEE environment, the outside world cannot crack and obtain the data and information in the running process.
In the past, this technology was usually mentioned in the context of IoT devices, cloud computing, and in recent years, some encryption projects have also mentioned using this technology, such as wallets.
But overall, I always feel that it is facing the enterprise market, and I don't see much potential for its application scenarios for individual consumers, so I basically don't care about it.
The encryption ecosystem also has a project using this technology, Phala Network. It provides a cloud computing platform based on TEE technology. In its whitepaper, it depicts a way to utilize distributed computing power to provide this execution environment.
I saw this project quite early on. I remember that after reading its whitepaper, I was reminded of Filecoin's model, so I felt that this so-called way of using distributed computing power to achieve TEE is just an "imaginary" application, and using blockchain is simply a forced fit.
But recently, two new emerging AI agents, Spore (Spore.fun) and aiPool (@aipool_tee), have both used the technology of this project.
In the previous article, when introducing the currently widespread AI agents, I wrote: Most of these AI agents need humans to apply for the encryption wallets they use. After the human applies, the wallet is then handed over to the AI agent to use.
In this case, since the human has the wallet private key, the human can completely intervene in the operation of the AI agent - the simplest and most brutal way is to directly transfer the assets in the wallet.
So these AI agents cannot be called "autonomous", at least not financially autonomous.
But Spore and aiPool are running completely in the TEE environment of the Phala Network, and their wallets and keys are completely in their own hands, so humans cannot control their wallets or transfer their assets.
Therefore, in terms of the degree of control over cryptocurrency assets, AI agents have now achieved complete autonomy of cryptocurrency assets through TEE technology, free from human control.
In my view, this is an unexpected surprise in the application of TEE technology in the field of AI agents.
If this path of development continues, every fully autonomous AI agent will need to run in a TEE environment and generate its own private key for the encryption wallet, then the use cases of TEE technology will be far beyond what I had imagined, which was mainly for traditional business and enterprise users, and it will also find huge application space in the quite broad market of AI agents.
As for the Phala Network project itself, although I still believe that the model described in its whitepaper is far-fetched, nevertheless, it has found its application scenarios in these two typical cases. This is a remarkable event, which has truly brought the TEE technology into a very promising encryption track.
A few days ago, I was lamenting in an article: Sometimes the development of technology is really unexpected, the use case we envisioned is A, but the use case it really excels in turns out to be B.
TEE can be considered as a case in point.
Going back to AI agents, their recent development can be described as "a day's progress is like a year's". Their development is not just a dream in our minds, but a step-by-step realization of what I once imagined.
