No.326
Zama ZAMA
privacy for public chains, where the numbers stay sealed until you open them
🎭 a masked guardian from Paris, born to make encrypted math practical
💬 “Public chains write everything in the open, so I hand each one a cloak. Your balance still moves, your contract still runs the math, but the chain only ever sees scrambled numbers. The plain truth stays hidden until you lift the veil yourself.”
- The idea: a privacy layer that lets a smart contract work on encrypted data without ever decrypting it.
- 2020, Paris: founded by two cryptographers, building on a hard math trick called Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE).
- Not its own chain: it sits on top of existing chains like Ethereum, like an 'HTTPS' for blockchains.
- The token: 11 billion ZAMA, uncapped. Fees are burned, new tokens are minted to reward operators, at a reported ~5% a year.
📖 The Story
Public blockchains have a strange flaw for a thing built on cryptography: they are see-through. Every balance, every transfer, every contract call is written out in plain view for anyone to read. Zama set out to fix exactly that.
2020, in Paris. Two cryptographers, Dr. Rand Hindi and Dr. Pascal Paillier, started the company. Paillier is a familiar name in the field, an encryption system used around the world carries it. Their bet was on a famously difficult technique called Fully Homomorphic Encryption, or FHE: a way for a computer to do math directly on locked data and get a correct, still-locked answer back. For decades FHE was considered too slow to be useful. Zama's work was to make it fast enough to ship.
June 2025. The bet started paying off. Zama raised a $57M round co-led by Pantera Capital and Blockchange Ventures and was reported as the first FHE company to cross a billion-dollar valuation, with total funding past $150M. Encrypted computation had gone from a lab curiosity to a venture-backed business.
December 30, 2025. The protocol's mainnet went live, and the first confidential stablecoin transfer, a private send of dollar-pegged tokens, moved on Ethereum without revealing the amount. A few weeks later, on February 2, 2026, the ZAMA token launched. The cloak was no longer a demo.
📊 Stats
🧩 How it works
Normally a computer has to unlock data before it can do anything with it, and the moment it unlocks, the data is exposed. FHE skips that step. The data stays encrypted the whole time, the network crunches the numbers blind, and the answer comes back still encrypted. Only the owner's key can read it. On Zama, independent operators run this work and must stake ZAMA to take part, and users spend ZAMA to pay for each confidential operation.
🌗 Light & Shadow
- Solves a real problem: it adds private balances and transfers to chains that are otherwise fully public
- Serious cryptography behind it, with a co-founder whose name is on a well-known encryption system (the Paillier cryptosystem)
- It is a layer, not a walled garden, so it can attach to several chains like Ethereum and Solana instead of competing as yet another network
- Very young. Mainnet only went live at the end of 2025, so real-world use and security still have to be proven over time
- FHE is heavy math and slower than ordinary computation, which can make confidential operations costly
- The token supply is uncapped. New ZAMA is minted each year for operator rewards at a reported ~5%, so holders face dilution (fees are burned, but emissions still flow)
- Strong on-chain privacy can draw regulatory scrutiny, since the same shield that protects users can also hide misuse
🧬 Evolution lineage
Zama is not a fork and was not spun out of another coin. It is an independent FHE protocol, founded in Paris in 2020. It has no parent chain, only peers in the same privacy family.
Those peers share the goal, not the code. What sets Zama apart is that it is a cross-chain layer you bolt onto existing chains, rather than a standalone privacy network of its own.
🧭 Meet other friends
❓ FAQ
- What is Zama?
- An open-source cryptography project that adds privacy to public blockchains. It uses a method called Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) so that smart contracts can do their math on encrypted data without ever unlocking it. Think of it as an encryption layer that sits on top of chains like Ethereum.
- Is Zama its own blockchain?
- No. Zama is a confidentiality layer, not a standalone chain. It plugs into existing chains such as Ethereum and Solana, which is why people describe it as an 'HTTPS for blockchain', a privacy wrapper rather than a new network of its own.
- How many ZAMA tokens are there?
- The total supply is 11 billion ZAMA, and it is uncapped. Every fee paid to the protocol is burned, while new tokens are minted to reward the operators who run the network, at a reported rate of about 5% a year. The token is used to pay fees, to stake, and to vote on governance.
- Who built Zama?
- It was founded in Paris in 2020 by Dr. Rand Hindi and Dr. Pascal Paillier. Paillier is well known in cryptography for the Paillier encryption system that carries his name. In 2025 Zama raised a $57M round and became the first FHE company reported to pass a $1 billion valuation.
⚠️ Not investment advice. All figures are for information only