Overview of Automata

Automata is a modular attestation app-specific rollup where off-chain computations are performed on trusted execution environments (TEEs e.g. Intel SGX chips) and cryptographic attestations proving the integrity of such computations are submitted onchain to the Automata rollup. You can think of Automata as a play on TEE-based compute.

• Example use cases:

  • Secondary prover for zk-rollups (partnerships with Scroll and Taiko). ZK proofs for these rollups are also generated by Automata’s TEE-based provers. Automata has a multi-prover AVS secured by Eigenlayer (link)

  • Team has also tried using TEEs + Automata for AI training and inference (link) → this will make ATA a more direct proxy bet on Apple’s confidential computing announcement

  • Proof of machinehood

  • Confidential transactions

• Investors

  • Seed (March 2021) - raised $1m: KR1, Alameda Research, IOSG Ventures, Divergence Capital and Genesis Block Ventures.

  • Strategic (May 2021) - raised $2.4m: Jump Trading, KR1, IOSG

  • Strategic (Feb 2022) - raise size undisclosed: Binance Labs

  • Was also a Binance Launchpool project

  • → All seed and strategic sale investors have unlocked (link)

Trade thesis

• Apple is rumoured to be unveiling its chip-based confidential computing techniques during WWDC on 10 June (link and link).

  • See primer here on confidential computing. In summary, confidential computing isolates sensitive data in a protected hardware CPU enclave during processing. The contents of the enclave, which include the data being processed and the techniques that are used to process it, are accessible only to authorized programming codes. They are invisible and unknowable to anything or anyone else, including the cloud provider.

  • This is important for Apple because large-scale AI models can’t be run and hosted locally on consumer Apple devices. Confidential computing allows Apple to process sensitive customer data for AI applications scalably on Apple cloud servers in a data privacy protecting way.

• As with anything major that Apple does, market participants like to bid tokens that fall within the same narrative e.g. bidding $RNDR as a AR/VR play into the Apple Vision Pro launch

• As AI is a big priority on Apple’s roadmap, TEE-based confidential computing will be a key theme for Apple - to assure customers and regulators that customers’ data used for AI inference/training will only be accessible under very strict privacy parameters.

• $ATA is the most liquid TEE token bet relevant to this theme. It trades at $91m circ mcap / $178m FDV and is listed on Binance.

• This is also a very early narrative and the chart setup is pretty constructive.

Risks

• TEE-compute will not be a consumer facing Apple product (vs something like Vision Pro) and is technically complex → makes it harder to go viral as a narrative.