He started out in law school, curious about systems and structure. But the lectures didn’t stick. It was at a legal tech event that he encountered smart contracts for the first time, taught by a blockchain-obsessed lawyer. That moment did more than just change his path. It gave him a new one.
From there, the story moved quickly. He returned to programming, met his first co-founder at university, and later linked up with the rest of the team through crypto meetups and hacker houses. One of them he met at the entrance to a Solana Hacker House in Prague. Another joined during a shared Airbnb stay at a hacker house in Miami. That early time wasn’t about pitch decks. It was about seeing how they worked under pressure and whether they could live, code, and solve problems together. They could.
Arcium came later. But the early version of it was narrow. It focused on transactional privacy using limited cryptographic primitives. You could hide wallet balances or make private transfers. Useful, but constrained. They realised privacy alone wasn’t enough. The future needed computation over encrypted data, in real time, with no third-party access. And it needed to work without ever seeing the underlying data.
That pivot became the encrypted supercomputer.
Arcium is not a blockchain. It is a decentralised execution layer for encrypted computation. Developers can build privacy-preserving smart contracts that process encrypted data, train models, and generate outputs all without exposing a single byte. You can imagine 100 people encrypting private medical records, submitting them on-chain, and training an AI model without anyone, including Arcium, seeing the contents.
The technical lift is immense. The value proposition is simple: privacy should enable power, not just secrecy. This version of Arcium launched publicly just weeks ago, beginning with integration into Solana. Developers can now specify which parts of their smart contract should be public, private, or encrypted, without needing to understand the cryptography underneath. It works like toggling visibility in an interface. Behind the scenes, the cryptographic machinery does the rest.
That shift from limited privacy to composable encrypted compute wasn’t easy. It meant explaining a new vision to investors, revisiting architecture, and restructuring the roadmap. But the team believed the payoff was worth it. Privacy, they argue, needs to feel like a feature, not a barrier. Something that adds new use cases, not limits them.
Yannik leads with quiet clarity. Fairness and alignment are his anchors. His team works remotely and independently, but they are tied together by conviction. He believes leadership is less about control and more about communicating the vision clearly enough that people move on their own.
The long game? To become the encrypted fibre optic cable of the internet. Invisible, unassuming, but everywhere. Privacy not as ideology, but as infrastructure.
He didn’t come to crypto to belong to it. He came to rebuild the parts it left exposed.
