Zama
Zama is an open-source cryptography company that develops tools for Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). The company, which operates the largest research team dedicated to FHE, aims to make the technology accessible to developers for creating applications that can process data on untrusted domains without decryption. Zama's technology primarily focuses on bringing confidentiality to blockchain and artificial intelligence applications. Its main products include the fhEVM for creating confidential smart contracts, the Concrete library, and its native ZAMA token. In February 2026, the company launched its token and introduced a new privacy metric, Total Value Shielded (TVS), to measure encrypted value on-chain. [1] [2] [7]
History
Zama was founded in 2020 by Dr. Pascal Paillier, a cryptographer known for the Paillier cryptosystem, and Dr. Rand Hindi, an entrepreneur and expert in artificial intelligence. The company was established to advance the practical application of Fully Homomorphic Encryption. [1] [2]
After an initial seed funding round, Zama announced a $73 million Series A funding round in March 2024. The round was co-led by Multicoin Capital and Protocol Labs, with participation from investors including Metaplanet, Blockchange Ventures, Vsquared Ventures, and Stake Capital. [1] [2]
In December 2024, J.P. Morgan's blockchain division, Kinexys (formerly Onyx), revealed a collaboration with Zama as part of its 'Project EPIC'. The project was a proof-of-concept that successfully used Zama's FHE technology to enable privacy for tokenized financial assets within a J.P. Morgan sandbox environment. [6]
On July 1, 2025, after five years of development, the company announced the launch of the Zama Confidential Blockchain Protocol and the release of its public testnet. In October 2025, Zama began announcing the genesis operators for its protocol, which included infrastructure providers such as Figment, Conduit, and InfStones. [2]
Capping off the year, Zama launched its protocol on the Ethereum mainnet on December 30, 2025. The company announced that the first transaction on the live network was a confidential transfer of USDT, referred to as cUSDT. [4] Co-founder and CEO Rand Hindi confirmed the launch, stating, "WE ARE IN MAINNET! We just did the first confidential USDT transfer on Ethereum. Our team cooked really hard to ship in 2025 as promised." [5]
In January 2026, Zama conducted a public, FHE-powered sealed-bid Dutch auction for its native token. The event marked the first production-scale deployment of FHE on the Ethereum mainnet, attracting over 11,000 unique participants and shielding over $121 million in value. On the final day of the sale, the Zama application was the most-used on Ethereum by transaction volume. On February 2, 2026, the company officially launched its ZAMA token with announced listings on centralized exchanges like Coinbase and Binance. [7]
Core Technology: Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE)
Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is an advanced cryptographic method that allows for arbitrary computations to be performed directly on encrypted data. Often considered a "holy grail" of cryptography, FHE enables a third-party server to process encrypted data and produce an encrypted result. When the user decrypts this result, it is identical to the output that would have been achieved by performing the same computations on the original, unencrypted data. Throughout this process, the server or any other external party never gains access to the plaintext data, ensuring complete privacy and confidentiality. Zama's long-term vision is to establish an "HTTPZ" for blockchains, making encrypted computation a default, standard feature analogous to how HTTPS secured web traffic. [1] [2] [7]
Zama's implementation of FHE is packaged in its open-source library suite, Concrete. This toolkit is designed to abstract away the complexities of FHE, providing developers with a more accessible and performant way to build privacy-preserving applications. Concrete serves as the foundational cryptographic layer for all of Zama's products. The suite includes components such as TFHE-rs, a Rust implementation of the TFHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption over the Torus) scheme, which is optimized for performance and security. [1]
Products and Solutions
Zama's product stack is built on top of its core Concrete library, offering solutions for both blockchain and artificial intelligence. [1]
fhEVM (Fully Homomorphic EVM)
The fhEVM is Zama's solution for integrating confidentiality into Ethereum and other EVM-compatible blockchains. It extends the Ethereum Virtual Machine to allow smart contracts to operate on encrypted data inputs and manage encrypted states. Developers can write smart contracts in Solidity using special encrypted data types, such as euint, to designate which parts of a contract's logic or state should remain confidential. [1]
The system is designed to keep gas fees low by using a coprocessor model that offloads the intensive FHE computations from the main chain. This allows the network to process and verify transactions involving encrypted data without sacrificing scalability. Projects such as Fhenix and Inco are among the first to build blockchains utilizing Zama's fhEVM technology. The technology's potential in traditional finance was demonstrated in a 2024 proof-of-concept with J.P. Morgan's Kinexys, which used fhEVM to conduct confidential transactions with tokenized assets. [1] [6]
Zama Confidential Blockchain Protocol
The Zama Confidential Blockchain Protocol is the company's official implementation of its confidential blockchain solution, powered by the fhEVM. Following a public testnet that began in July 2025, the protocol went live on the Ethereum mainnet on December 30, 2025. [4] The mainnet's inaugural transaction was the first confidential transfer of a stablecoin (cUSDT) on Ethereum. [5] The protocol utilizes a Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus mechanism and is run by a set of 18 initial genesis operators, which include Key Management Service (KMS) nodes and FHE Coprocessors. Announced operators include Figment, Conduit, and InfStones. [2]
ZAMA Token
The ZAMA token is the native token of the Zama ecosystem, launched on February 2, 2026. A token sale conducted with CoinList prior to the public launch set a $55 million fully diluted valuation (FDV) floor for the project. The token's public launch was managed through an on-chain, sealed-bid Dutch auction that utilized the company's own FHE technology to ensure participant privacy. This auction represented the first large-scale use of FHE on the Ethereum mainnet. The mechanism allowed participants to submit encrypted bids, hiding their financial strategies and wallet connections, while keeping the allocation logic publicly verifiable. The token was subsequently listed on centralized exchanges including Coinbase and Binance. [7]
Concrete ML
Concrete ML is a toolset that facilitates the conversion of machine learning models into their FHE equivalents. It allows developers to compile models from standard frameworks like PyTorch and scikit-learn into a privacy-preserving format. This enables AI applications to perform predictions on encrypted user data. A user can send their sensitive data in an encrypted format to a service running a Concrete ML model, and the service can return an encrypted prediction without ever accessing the underlying plaintext information. This capability is particularly relevant for regulated industries such as healthcare and finance. [1]
Concrete Library
The Concrete library is the core, open-source cryptographic engine that underpins all of Zama's products. It provides the low-level cryptographic primitives and FHE schemes necessary for building custom privacy-preserving applications. It is designed for performance and security, serving as the foundation of the Zama ecosystem. [1] [2]
Use Cases
Confidential Blockchain
Zama's technology addresses the inherent transparency of public blockchains, where all transaction data and smart contract states are publicly visible. By enabling on-chain confidentiality, Zama unlocks use cases that require privacy.
- Confidential DeFi: Applications such as private token swaps, confidential lending protocols, and front-running-resistant order books where user balances and transaction amounts are hidden.
- Private On-Chain Voting: Encrypted voting systems for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) that prevent voter coercion and protect voter privacy.
- Blind Auctions: Sealed-bid auctions where bids remain confidential until the auction concludes. Zama demonstrated this with its own FHE-powered token auction in January 2026, which allowed over 11,000 participants to submit encrypted bids without revealing their financial strategies. Zama CEO Rand Hindi noted, "we’ve shown that you can run a fully public, globally accessible token sale without forcing participants to expose their financial strategies or intentions." [7]
- On-Chain Gaming: Games that incorporate hidden information, such as private card hands in a poker game or secret character attributes.
- Institutional Finance: In late 2024, J.P. Morgan's Kinexys division reported on 'Project EPIC', a proof-of-concept that used Zama's fhEVM to create and transact with encrypted fund tokens. The project successfully demonstrated confidential settlement (Delivery vs. Payment) and private, on-chain identity checks, highlighting a path for institutions to adopt blockchain while preserving transaction privacy. [6]
Andrew Huang, CEO of Conduit, commented on the technology's potential, stating, "Financial institutions and Web2 firms need privacy to move onchain. Zama's tech makes it possible." [2]
Privacy-Preserving AI
In the field of artificial intelligence, Zama's tools allow services to leverage sensitive user data without compromising privacy. This is critical in sectors with strict data protection regulations.
- Healthcare: Analyzing encrypted patient data for medical diagnostics while maintaining compliance with regulations like HIPAA.
- Finance: Building credit scoring or fraud detection models using personal financial information without exposing the raw data.
- Cloud Services: Offering confidential cloud computing where the provider can process a user's data without having access to it. [1]
Key Metrics
Total Value Shielded (TVS)
In February 2026, Zama introduced Total Value Shielded (TVS) as a new metric to measure privacy in blockchain ecosystems. It is defined as "the total economic value actively encrypted and kept confidential onchain." Unlike Total Value Locked (TVL), which measures the total value of assets deposited in a DeFi protocol, TVS specifically quantifies the economic activity processed under cryptographic confidentiality. The first major application of this metric was during Zama's token auction in January 2026, where over $121 million in value was shielded on Ethereum. [7]
Funding and Investors
In March 2024, Zama announced that it had raised $73 million in a Series A funding round. The round was co-led by Multicoin Capital and Protocol Labs. Other participating investors included Metaplanet, Blockchange Ventures, Vsquared Ventures, and Stake Capital. [1] [2]
In June 2025, Zama announced it had raised $57 million in a Series B funding round. The funding was raised to support the company's mainnet launch, ecosystem adoption, and research efforts to make financial applications built with FHE scale to thousands of transactions per second. [3]
Founders
Dr. Pascal Paillier
Dr. Pascal Paillier is the co-founder and President of Zama. He is a renowned cryptographer with over two decades of experience in hardware security and cryptography. He is best known as the inventor of the Paillier cryptosystem (1999), a widely used partial homomorphic encryption scheme that forms the basis for many privacy-preserving technologies. [1] [2]
Dr. Rand Hindi
Dr. Rand Hindi is the co-founder and CEO of Zama. He is a serial entrepreneur and an expert in AI. Before co-founding Zama, he founded Snips, an AI voice platform that was acquired by Sonos. He holds a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from University College London. On the role of FHE in blockchain, Hindi has stated, "FHE is the only technology that offers security + verifiability + composability. It simply adds a layer of confidentiality to existing chains." [1] [2]