Builder Stories is a Zama series profiling the developers building confidential applications on the Zama Protocol.
Chris Wilder is one of the most prolific builders in the Zama ecosystem: a repeat Developer Program winner across the builder and bounty tracks, with more than 12 confidential applications shipped on the Zama Protocol from Ghana. His path did not start on an engineering team. It started in community channels.
Chris spent nearly three years as a community manager for a metaverse and decentralised exchange before writing his first contract, leaving him with a map of the problems people actually have. A mechanical engineer by training, he taught himself Solidity, and today he builds by directing AI rather than typing every line himself. "AI writes everything. I guide it, I give the features, I read the code, and if it is correct, I proceed.", said Chris Wilder
He had shipped over 30 applications across EVM chains when, in July 2025, the Zama public testnet announcement crossed his X feed. "Computing on encrypted data without revealing it, and granting access with your own rules. That was the click for me."
Since then, Chris has built on Zama daily, shipping more than 12 confidential applications: voting, payments, wallet extensions, developer education. Among them, Legacy Vault stands out: the app he came to Zama to build, the most personal of his projects, and the clearest answer to a problem every crypto holder eventually faces.
Crypto has an inheritance problem: when keys and seed phrases are never passed on, assets become permanently inaccessible. Sharing keys early creates risk today, plaintext instructions can be acted on by anyone, and custodians reintroduce the third party self-custody was meant to remove.
Legacy Vault is Chris's answer: a digital vault on the Zama Protocol that passes assets, keys, and documents to beneficiaries, with time-locked access for heirs. A passphrase can be encrypted and split between beneficiaries, so no one can reconstruct the wallet alone; access flows through the protocol's ACL and can be revoked at any time; any file format can be stored as ciphertext onchain.
Trying Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) First.
The first Legacy Vault was not built on FHE but on a TEE-based L2, and the more Chris researched TEEs, the less comfortable he became. "Search online and you will see multiple sources explaining how TEEs can be prone to hacks: the enclaves you are trusting," he says. "And this thing I'm building is something that will hold funds."
FHE removed the assumptions that worried him: data stays encrypted throughout computation, and decryption rights go only to authorized parties. "The technology is post-quantum secure. The code I'm writing now can't be broken even in the next ten years."
He presented the rebuilt Legacy Vault at the Zama Ecosystem Builder Demo in December 2025, and is building it "silently" until the security work meets the stakes. His own family is already covered.
Chris's method is consistent: "It's not about how much you can code. It's about solving pain points: finding issues and fixing them."
He started small with a confidential voting app, where every vote remains encrypted until the final tally. He then applied the same idea to payments with zPayy: a non-custodial payments app built on ERC-7984 confidential tokens.
From there, the strategy stayed the same: bring confidentiality to where users already are.
Rather than asking users to switch apps, Chris integrated ERC-7984 into Safe and built wallet extensions inspired by Rabby and MetaMask with zWallet.
“If you try to tell people to come to a new app, it’s very hard. Bring the technology to where they already are, and they’ll use it.”
Beyond wallets, he also built a protocol dashboard with 13+ tabs of metrics that Zama’s CEO regularly shares, alongside many more confidential applications available at chriswilder.xyz.
After winning the first two months of the testnet season, his DMs filled with one question: how do I win? There is no formula, he says: "Find your idea and build it. I built something that had value." The help he gives is hands-on: "I will clone your codebase, fix it, and push it to your own repo, so that you learn from it." His community page lets builders submit apps for others to discover and build on.
Start small: a confidential voting app before advanced systems. Treat the docs as the source of truth and feed them to your coding agent. When stuck, don't grind alone: "If there's something bothering you, ask. A simple question can save you from days of wondering whether you are able to be a dev at all."
Asked to describe his journey with Zama in one sentence, Chris doesn't hesitate: "My journey so far is exceptional." And the part he wants other builders to hear: "It took me eight months before I got a bigger recognition. Do not quit."
Explore Chris's work:
Disclaimer: The projects listed are unaudited community contributions. Research before connecting your wallet. Third-party apps carry risks.
The Zama Developer Program is designed to support builders at every stage, from experimentation to production-ready projects. Each season, we reward builders who demonstrate real-world use cases with the Zama Protocol.
Need help? developer@zama.org
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