Wrapped zkAPI + Tor + extra cover traffic + local LLM prompt rewriting in an open-AI compatible daemon, and made a "paranoid mode" wrapper for my agent harness (pi): Each conversation gets assigned a separate Tor circuit, your requests are masked with random cover traffic, zkAPI ensures you don't leak your identity through payments, and all prompts are locally rewritten (bring-your-own-local-model; I'm using qwen3.8-flash-next) github.com/vbuterin/zkapi/tr… My agent harness is wrapped with a bwrap sandbox (also experimenting with MicroVM) and wrapped again with torsocks, so everything it does goes through Tor. Here's what me asking it to do a simple research task looks like. It's getting quite usable! Though you definitely still pay quite a bit in increased latency, especially when starting a new conversation. Also, Tor is far from optimal here for privacy; the cover traffic mechanism is okay against passive adversaries but much weaker if the LLM provider is colluding with the guard and actively manipulating timing. This kind of task really requires a more specialized mixnet, probably take the tradeoff of a higher bandwidth multiplier and built-in constant cover traffic. Also also, much cheaper zkAPI deposit and withdraw gas costs are coming to mainnet soon.

Doing a bit of a self-experiment. Goal: use my personal health and travel data to provide personalized diet and exercise recommendations for me, using frontier models but in a way that avoids leaking to them any private information. Strategy: use a local model (Qwen 3.8 Flash Next) to orchestrate, and use powerful remote models as a tool call to benefit from higher-level thinking and knowledge that the local model does not have. Three-layer approach to privacy: Avoid leaking personally identifiable information, or leaking my identity through writing style -> local model writes the queries to the frontier model, not me Avoid leaking who I am through the payment channel -> zkAPI Avoid leaking who I am through networking / IP -> Tor You need all three (and finally we have all three, at least to some extent) A skill file teaches the local model when and how to construct minimally-data-revealing requests to remote models. Use zkAPI-wrapped-with-Tor as a CLI tool. And everything works! I got the recommendations back, info from frontier models helped to improve them. Main deficiencies: * Tor is really not optimized for request-by-request de-linking, which is the only form of network-layer privacy that really makes sense in today's world (long-running identifiers are too fragile). Probably not private enough, and latency 10-100x higher than it could be, at the same time. * The skill file's request construction strategies are definitely far from optimal. * Qwen 3.8 Flash Next is still too slow for comfort. It's comfortably running at 20-30 TPS, but it would only really start to feel fast at 100+ * There is a tradeoff: the more careful you are about what data you give to a remote model, the less it can help you github.com/ethereum/zkapi/pu…