Building confidentiality into capital markets standards: CMTAT Confidential launches on the Zama Protocol

The Capital Markets and Technology Association (CMTA) has launched CMTAT Confidential, bringing confidential balances and transfers to one of the industry’s leading security token standards, powered by the Zama Protocol.

Public blockchains have transformed how assets can be issued, transferred, and settled. Yet for regulated financial institutions, one challenge has remained: every balance and every transaction is visible to anyone.

CMTAT Confidential addresses that challenge by enabling confidential transactions and balances while preserving the compliance controls regulated markets require.

Bringing confidentiality to an established capital markets standard

The Capital Markets and Technology Association (CMTA) develops open standards for issuing and managing tokenized financial instruments. Its CMTAT framework is already used internationally to tokenize equities, debt instruments, stablecoins, and other regulated financial assets while providing the governance and compliance capabilities financial institutions expect.

CMTAT Confidential builds on that foundation by introducing confidential balances and transfers, powered by the Zama Protocol.

For issuers, existing governance and compliance workflows remain unchanged. Controls such as allowlisting, freeze, forced transfer, and administration continue to operate as they do today.

For investors and institutions, balances and transfer amounts remain confidential instead of being exposed by default on public blockchains, helping protect client positions, trading activity, and commercially sensitive information.

Rather than introducing a new token standard, CMTAT Confidential brings confidentiality to a framework already trusted by regulated financial markets.

Powered by the Zama Protocol

The Zama Protocol provides the confidentiality layer underneath CMTAT Confidential.

Built on OpenZeppelin’s Confidential Contracts and powered by Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), confidential smart contracts can compute directly on encrypted balances and transfer amounts without decrypting them. Sensitive financial data remains encrypted throughout execution while the application continues to enforce its business logic.

The protocol combines FHE, Multi-Party Computation (MPC) for threshold decryption, and Zero-Knowledge Proofs of Knowledge (ZKPoKs) for input validation. Together, these technologies enable confidential computation while allowing authorized parties to maintain the oversight required in regulated financial markets.

For developers, confidentiality becomes part of the underlying infrastructure rather than an application-level feature, making it easier to build regulated financial applications with confidentiality by design.

Built and validated by industry leaders

CMTAT Confidential is the result of a collaboration across regulated finance and blockchain infrastructure.

The code was developed by Taurus based on the OpenZeppelin library, reviewed by CMTA's Technical Committee and with contributions from Zama, and submitted to CMTA members for consultation.

A formal security audit was conducted by OpenZeppelin and the Nethermind AuditAgent tool was used in preparation for the audit.

The architecture has also been validated in a real settlement workflow.

In a proof of concept, Seturion (Boerse Stuttgart Group), the pan-European settlement platform for tokenized assets, through its subsidiary BX Digital, has designed and validated confidential Delivery-versus-Payment (DvP) settlement architectures for tokenized assets using CMTAT on EVM test blockchains. The architecture, leveraging the Zama Protocol to enable confidential onchain settlement using tGBP (by BCP Technologies) while preserving regulatory oversight. The demonstration included both Mode A: Cash Confidential DvP and Mode B: Fully Confidential DvP, showing how regulated institutions can settle tokenized assets while keeping transaction amounts confidential. See the CMTA announcement for more details.

Together, these contributions demonstrate that confidentiality is no longer an experimental capability. It is production-ready infrastructure built, audited, and validated by organizations across the regulated financial ecosystem.

Another milestone for institutional onchain finance

Institutional adoption of public blockchains depends on more than tokenization. It requires infrastructure that meets the operational, confidentiality, and regulatory requirements of financial markets.

CMTAT Confidential demonstrates how confidentiality can be integrated into an established capital markets standard without changing the governance and compliance framework institutions already trust.

Powered by the Zama Protocol, it brings confidential balances and transfers to regulated financial assets, enabling institutions to build on public blockchains while protecting the sensitive information their businesses depend on.

As more financial infrastructure moves onchain, confidentiality will become a standard expectation rather than a specialized capability. CMTAT Confidential is another step toward making confidential onchain finance the default for regulated markets.