Surprisingly, homomorphic encryption is now practical enough to run a Kaggle-like data science competition, but without disclosing data. At least one such competition is known to run with real money prize.

https://medium.com/@Numerai/encrypted-data-for-efficient-mar...

This reads like fake smoke and mirrors to trick investors/data providers/participants instead of anything that's real cryptographically.

Very true. I was just making a tongue-in-cheek conjecture about the justification/rationalization that might be employed.