Zama ZAMA

The Zama Protocol enables confidential smart contracts on existing blockchains by allowing computation directly on encrypted data through Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). It addresses the lack of privacy in public blockchains, where transaction inputs and contract state must normally be disclosed. With FHE, all data remains encrypted end-to-end while still being publicly verifiable. The protocol combines FHE with multi-party computation for decentralized key management and zero-knowledge proofs to verify encrypted inputs. Developers use the Solidity-compatible FHEVM library to write contracts that define their own decryption permissions, enabling programmable confidentiality for payments, DeFi, tokenization, identity and governance use cases. Encrypted operations are not executed on the host chain. Instead, the chain emits events, and off-chain coprocessors compute the encrypted results and commit them back to the protocol through the Gateway. This design preserves host-chain performance and allows encrypted computation to scale horizontally. Key features include encrypted smart contracts, private state transitions, threshold decryption, encrypted bridging, compatibility with existing EVM ecosystems and public verifiability of all operations. The $ZAMA token is used for protocol fees, operator staking and governance.