The Zama Protocol is a confidentiality layer that deploys on any L1 or L2, not a new blockchain. That design lets confidentiality sit on top of the venues and liquidity institutional capital already uses.
In June, Zama launched the first confidential yield venue on Ethereum: a Morpho vault curated by Steakhouse Financial, accepting Confidential USDC (cUSDC). It grew from zero to $40+ million in shielded TVL within 7 weeks.
Today's launch expands that model into a category: confidential access to 16 curated yield vaults across five institutional curators (Steakhouse, Armitage by Wintermute, Flowdesk, RockawayX, Bitwise) and five asset classes (USDC, USDT, WBTC, AUSD, TGBP), all deployed on Morpho. Alongside the vaults, the Zama Confidential Swap Protocol goes live, allowing confidential swaps between confidential assets on Ethereum.
The single-vault proof point becomes a full ecosystem.
Zama's mission is a confidential alternative to every financial primitive people use onchain. The Steakhouse Confidential Prime USDC vault, launched in June with Morpho, was the first brick: proof that a top-tier DeFi yield strategy could accept confidential deposits without changing anything else about the vault.
Today's launch is the next brick, and it delivers on the vision in two ways:
The second point is the bigger unlock. The pattern is a migration, not a fork: every public rail already used at scale can be extended with a confidential deposit path. Sixteen vaults, five curators, five asset classes are live today. The rest of onchain finance, from RWA to payments to trading, is on the same path from fully transparent to confidential.
16 vaults, 5 curators, 5 asset classes.
The 16 vaults live at launch cover five asset classes:
They are curated by 5 of the leading DeFi credit curators:
All 16 vaults are deployed on Morpho and available today through the Zama App. Additional entry points, including Utila, Zerion Wallet, and Yield.xyz, will roll out in the weeks following launch.
The goal is simple: give confidential tokens the same utility and distribution as regular tokens. Users should be able to hold, deposit, and use their confidential tokens on the infrastructure they already rely on, with the same utility they expect, without the exposure risk of public balances.
Confidential tokens preserve public verifiability while keeping amounts and balances encrypted. For them to become the default rather than the exception, they need to plug into the same tooling regular tokens rely on today: wallets, explorers, indexers, aggregators, market makers, incentive engines. That is a big lift, and it is happening now.
Zama is onboarding that stack, piece by piece. Explorers are indexing confidential transfers with encrypted amounts. Wallets are adding native shielding. Custodians are integrating confidential flows. Aggregators are surfacing confidential yield alongside public opportunities. Market makers are providing liquidity to confidential venues. And with today's launch, two more essential pieces come online.
The Zama Confidential Swap Protocol closes the loop.
The Zama Confidential Swap Protocol launches alongside the vault suite. It allows depositors to swap between confidential assets without exposing intent or size. Combined with the vaults, this closes the full deposit-earn-swap loop entirely inside a confidential envelope.
Confidential deposit. Confidential yield. Confidential swap. All powered by the Zama Protocol.
First confidential incentive campaigns, live with Merkl.
Alongside the vault launch, the first confidential incentive campaigns go live on Merkl. Select vaults, starting with the Steakhouse Confidential Prime USDC vault on Morpho, will run incentive programs computed on encrypted balances. Positions, reward amounts, and the leaderboard never appear publicly: no one can look up what another depositor holds or earns.
Merkl now supports ERC7984, Zama's confidential token standard. Depositors authorize Merkl to decrypt their balance for reward computation, and rewards are distributed through confidential ERC7984 transfers directly to their wallets. The opportunity surfaces with a visible APR, like any Merkl campaign, but everything else stays private.
Deposits start earning from day one, and users can follow their accrued rewards in the Merkl app immediately. Claim functionality opens in the weeks following launch, but every day in a qualifying vault counts from now.
This closes the last gap in confidential DeFi. Until now, incentives meant exposure: public leaderboards, visible reward amounts, block-explorer-readable balances. Confidential assets and public incentive rails were structurally incompatible. With ERC7984 support on Merkl, any team building on the Zama Protocol can launch targeted campaigns without compromising the confidentiality their users came for.
The pattern established in June carries into this launch: existing curator vaults on Morpho, the same strategies and risk parameters, now with a confidential deposit asset. Institutional capital can access the same yield opportunities while keeping positions private from competitors, front-runners, and other observers.
"When we launched the first confidential USDC vault with Morpho and Steakhouse in June, we proved that confidentiality and DeFi are not mutually exclusive," said Dr. Rand Hindi, Co-founder and CEO of Zama. "Today's expansion is proof of the model at scale. Sixteen vaults, five curators, five asset classes, all built on the same DeFi infrastructure that sophisticated capital already uses. Same vaults, same curators, same liquidity, now with confidential entry. This is how confidential DeFi becomes a category and not an experiment."
The venue.
"Institutions have increasingly been exploring how onchain capital allocation can be made more confidential to fit their requirements. Adding these confidential vaults on Morpho was an important step for us. It'll scale confidential DeFi efficiently and open new possibilities for allocators onchain, without changing the strategy, the liquidity, or the risk profile." — Merlin Egalite, Co-founder of Morpho
The curators.
"We were happy to work with Zama on its first confidential vault, and the market response makes it clear that depositors value confidentiality. The natural next step was to extend that access to a five-vault suite across USDC, USDT, and tGBP. Depositors now have more choice in how they use stablecoins across Morpho, while keeping their positions private." — Sébastien Derivaux, Co-founder of Steakhouse Financial
"BTC has mostly sat onchain as collateral because there has rarely been meaningful yield to earn on it. The Wintermute Confidential WBTC vault gives WBTC holders a way to actually put it to work, pairing Armitage's active risk curation with a confidential-only design that has no public equivalent, so positions stay off the public record," — Igor Igamberdiev, Armitage Lead
"Confidentiality is the condition onchain capital markets have to satisfy before they can carry institutional-scale volume. Through our work with Zama, we're opening up confidential access to our AUSD RWA Strategy Vault, giving institutional allocators a compliant path onchain." — Guilhem Chaumont, Co-founder and CEO of Flowdesk
"Institutions can be hesitant to lend onchain for two reasons. They can't tell exactly what they're exposed to, and anyone with a block explorer can see what they hold. RockawayX's RWA vault handles predictable returns and collateral you can check onchain, underwritten the same way we've run CeFi and DeFi lending since 2022 with zero defaults. Zama handles the second with its confidentiality platform." — Nassim Alexandre, Head of Onchain Asset Management and Curation at RockawayX
The asset issuers.
"Zama's confidential product suite is unlocking institutional adoption opportunities globally including in the UK where stablecoin adoption with large institutions is a greenfield opportunity. The combination of confidentiality with bluechip protocols like Morpho provides a clear entry point for any institutional player integrating stablecoins into their business." — Benoit Marzouk, CEO of BCP Technologies (issuer of tGBP)
The distribution partners.
"Every position a self-custodial wallet user holds is public by default. That's one of the reasons people are reluctant to keep large amounts onchain. Zama's confidentiality layer plugs into vaults people already use rather than asking them to move to a new chain. A wallet can support this natively with minimum friction, and why these vaults are coming to Zerion in the weeks ahead." — Evgeny Yurtaev, Co-founder and CEO of Zerion
"Confidentiality should not require institutions to abandon the platforms they already use. Yield.xyz makes Zama's confidential Morpho Vaults accessible through the same integration layer that wallets and financial platforms use to offer onchain yield. That gives platforms a practical path to support confidential positions while preserving the underlying strategy, liquidity, and risk profile." — Serafin Lion Engel, Co-Founder and CEO of Yield.xyz
"Institutions need to protect their investment strategies while maintaining clear control over how capital is deployed. Through our work with Zama, we're bringing confidential access to Morpho vaults into Utila's MPC wallet infrastructure, so treasury and investment teams can access onchain yield with the policy controls and approval workflows they rely on across their digital asset operations." — Bentzi Rabi, Co-founder and CEO of Utila
"Incentives were the one thing confidential assets could not have, because rewarding a balance meant reading it. It was a real pleasure working with the Zama team to change that, extending Merkl's engine to ERC7984 so campaigns run on encrypted balances. Depositors see an APR and earn, while no position, reward, or leaderboard entry ever becomes public." — Pablo Veyrat, CEO of Merkl.
For institutional allocators, corporate treasuries, and active market participants, this launch changes the practical question. It stops being "which single confidential vault can I access" and starts being "which of the confidential vaults matches my mandate."
That is what a category looks like.
The 16 confidential vaults and the Zama Confidential Swap Protocol are live today.
Confidential DeFi is now a category.
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