Trust fuels economic growth: when we know a message, a transaction, or even a vial of cells is exactly what it claims to be, we feel safe enough to build on top of it. Today that confidence is encoded in mathematics: cryptography quietly secures a £24 trillion digital economy, but the physical world is rushing online, and malicious AIs are learning new tricks. The ARIA “Trust Everything, Everywhere” opportunity asks a bracing question: how do we extend rock-solid, formal security from bits to atoms so tomorrow’s cyber-physical markets can bloom ![[Screenshot 2025-07-13 at 23.57.22.png]] See: [[Cryptography MOC]] ### What I'm excited about 1. **Quantum money proves ownership by being uncopyable.** Thanks to the [[no-cloning theorem]], a banknote made of quantum states cannot be duplicated without collapsing its wave-function. That gives us a _physically_ impossible-to-forge asset, the ultimate anti-counterfeit technology, and a glimpse of financial rails where fraud is mathematically ruled out rather than merely discouraged. 2. **DNA cryptography hides secrets in life’s own code.** Imagine encrypting a contract inside a strand of DNA, then mixing it with billions of innocuous bases. Without the right primer the attacker must brute-sequence the whole soup - orders of magnitude pricier than cracking a conventional cipher. Nature offers storage densities of 215 PB per gram and half-lives measured in centuries, giving “cold storage” a literal meaning. See: [[TechBio MoC]] | [[Digitalisation of Biology]] | [[Lessons from the Titans - Key Principles for Progress]] 3. **Nature-inspired trust blocks are getting cheap and programmable.** The cost curves of [[zero-knowledge proofs]], [[MPC]], and fully-[[Homomorphic Encryption]] have been dropping by roughly an order of magnitude since 2015, while laboratory tools for editing quantum states or CRISPR strands follow similar downward trends. Couple that with AI agents that can synthesise bespoke protocols on demand, and you have a recipe for _on-the-fly_ security across robots, bioreactors, and satellites. ![[Screenshot 2025-07-13 at 23.57.03.png]] > Digital trust building blocks such as encryption and cryptographic signatures made communication over the internet secure enough to enable trillion pound industries and our digital civilization. ### So what? Nicola Greco and team are lining up a £10-100 million programme to turn these sketches into deployable primitives, investors and researchers who jump in early will shape a foundation as pivotal as public-key cryptography was for the web. Product leads should treat “quantum-safe”, “DNA-signed”, and “PUF-verified” as requirements, not science projects, so their platforms remain trustworthy when algorithms grow teeth. Every redundant audit, extra insurance premium, or forced on-site inspection is a metric begging to be crushed by better cryptography; track it, then use new primitives to drive it toward zero. Reference source [here](https://www.aria.org.uk/opportunity-spaces/trust-everything-everywhere) Related: [[Why businesses pay for cybersecurity]]