Zama: The FHE Infrastructure Enabling Confidential Chains

Zama is building a Confidential Blockchain Protocol that uses Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) to make confidentiality a native property of public blockchains. An encrypted computation layer runs on top of any L1 and L2 like Ethereum, keeping data confidential while reusing existing consensus and liquidity. InfStones is proud to be a genesis operator and infrastructure partner, securing and operating Zama so builders can ship privacy-, compliance-, and composability‑first applications.

The Core Challenge: Radical Transparency Meets Sensitive Data

Public blockchains are designed for radical transparency: every transaction, balance, and state change is visible to anyone. That’s powerful for auditability but risky for use cases involving sensitive data. Trading strategies, treasury flows, salaries, lending positions, identity attributes, and governance choices can all be tracked on an open ledger, turning valuable information into permanent exposure.
For institutions subject to confidentiality and data‑protection rules, publishing granular positions or identities on a public chain is often impossible, pushing them toward private or permissioned deployments that sacrifice shared liquidity, composability, and open‑network effects.

Zama’s Answer: Confidential Computation Through FHE

Zama keeps data encrypted end‑to‑end while blockchains remain open and verifiable. With FHE, computations run directly on ciphertext, letting validators process transactions and update state without seeing underlying values.

Instead of a new L1, Zama is a cross‑chain confidentiality layer for existing EVM networks: developers use Solidity with the FHEVM library, users encrypt inputs client‑side, and contract state lives onchain as ciphertext while the host chain provides consensus and settlement. A decentralized network of FHE coprocessors monitors onchain events, performs encrypted computation off‑chain, and writes new ciphertexts back, while a threshold MPC‑based KMS distributes decryption authority so no single operator can decrypt user data.

Fig 1: FHEVM, Zama's core technology

Zama’s Unique Approach

Zama’s design stands out for balancing privacy, composability, and verifiability better than pure MPC, ZK‑only systems, TEEs, or fully private chains. FHE keeps inputs and state encrypted yet still lets anyone recompute operations on ciphertext to verify correctness, preserving open auditability. MPC is used narrowly for distributed key generation and threshold decryption, avoiding high‑latency multiparty execution, while zero‑knowledge proofs simply ensure user ciphertexts are well‑formed. With a clear performance roadmap, from CPUs to GPUs to FHE‑specific ASICs, and growing community backing, Zama positions confidential chains as a practical next step for blockchain infrastructure.

InfStones’ Role: Infrastructure for Confidential Chains at Scale

For a protocol like Zama, infrastructure is an essential part of the security model, and this is where InfStones adds value as a genesis operator and partner. We bring years of experience running large validator and node fleets across many networks, operating FHE coprocessors and MPC/KMS nodes with hardened key management, redundancy, and 24/7 monitoring. This lets the confidential layer scale smoothly from pilots to institutional workloads. InfStones also provides dedicated Zama infrastructure to meet the requirements of FHE. Together, Zama’s FHE‑powered confidentiality and InfStones’ infrastructure enable privacy‑preserving, compliant, composable applications on public blockchains.