Zama Developer Program Mainnet Season 4: From Infrastructure to Applications

Confidential finance has entered production. Now it’s time to grow the application ecosystem.

Over the past month, the Zama team has shipped two major applications.

  • On June 23, Steakhouse Confidential Prime USDC, a confidential vault on Morpho curated by Steakhouse Financial, opened for deposits of confidential USDC (cUSDC). Since launch, more than $26 million has been deposited, enabling users to earn yield from a leading DeFi strategy without exposing balances or positions.
  • One month later, on July 23, Zama Confidential RFQ went live in private beta as the first fully onchain confidential swap venue. Trade size and direction remain encrypted throughout execution, eliminating the information leakage that enables MEV extraction.

These launches demonstrate that confidential assets and confidential execution are no longer concepts. They are operating in production on public blockchains.

As every new primitive that ever changed paradigm: first comes the technology and infrastructure, then come the applications that make it valuable for users.

The foundations of confidential finance are now in place. The next generation of savings products, payment applications, trading experiences, capital markets infrastructure, and entirely new financial products are waiting to be built by developers.

That’s the purpose of the Zama Developer Program.

What’s New in Season 4

For this season, we’re starting with one production-oriented bounty that explores a practical application of confidential assets. As the Zama Protocol expands across new use cases and ecosystems, additional bounty challenges may be introduced later this quarter.

The Bounty Challenge

Build a confidential version of PoolTogether where users deposit assets into a shared pool, the generated yield is distributed through periodic prize draws, and users can withdraw their principal at any time. Deposits, balances, and winnings remain encrypted while winner selection stays verifiable onchain.

Today, every deposit, every balance, every participant’s odds of winning, and every prize distribution are visible onchain. Confidentiality preserves verifiable fairness without exposing participants’ financial positions.

Using the Zama Protocol, winner selection should execute over encrypted balances, allowing only winners to decrypt their prizes while keeping the draw publicly verifiable.

We’re looking for production-quality demonstrations that showcase what confidential applications can look like in the real world. Strong submissions should go beyond a proof of concept and demonstrate polished UX, robust engineering, and production-ready architecture.

Deployments should target Sepolia.

Rewards

  • Total reward: 5,000 cUSDT
  • Winners: up to 3 to split the prize
  • Submission deadline: September 5, 2026 (23:59 AOE)

The prize pool is not fixed by placement. Rewards will be allocated based on the quality of submissions, and an exceptional project may receive the full prize pool.

The strongest submission may also be selected for further development. If it meets production-quality standards, Zama intends to support a professional smart contract audit by OpenZeppelin, with the goal of bringing the application to production.

All rewards will continue to be distributed in confidential USDT (cUSDT).

Participants are encouraged to share their project on X by tagging @zama and using #ZamaDeveloperProgram.

Submit your bounty solution ↗

Ready to Build?

Confidential finance is live in production.

The next chapter is building the applications that will bring confidential assets into everyday use.

Season 4 starts today.

Learn more about Zama Developer program ↗

Additional Links

Need help? developer@zama.org

News, research and product releases

Latest Blog Posts