When it comes to performance trade-offs, ZK and FHE take different approaches. Zero-knowledge proofs shine here—verification happens in milliseconds right on-chain. The proving phase demands serious computational resources, though recent breakthroughs have made this way more practical than before.

Fully homomorphic encryption? It's the opposite story. You can absolutely compute directly on encrypted data, which is powerful stuff. But there's a catch: bootstrapping operations that refresh the noise accumulating in your ciphertexts are brutally expensive. That overhead is the real bottleneck keeping FHE from wide adoption despite its theoretical elegance.