Last year fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) felt like a moon-shot; this year it’s a power tool. ISO has a draft standard on the street, Zama’s Rust stack screams on GPUs, and bootstraps run an order of magnitude faster than they did in 2023. That’s enough lift for production pilots in banking, healthcare, and AdTech. Lucenor’s take: when the math finally bends to operational reality, you ship—secure-by-design, zero-trust baked in. Below is the state-of-play and a hands-on demo that manipulates encrypted ASCII strings instead of the usual “8 + 5” cliche. But first..