The Zama Protocol made confidential tokens possible on Ethereum. The natural next step is giving them utility.

Every USDC position on a public blockchain is visible. Deposit into a Morpho vault today and anyone can see your wallet address, your deposit size, and when you moved in or out.

For institutions deploying meaningful capital, it exposes strategy, invites front-running, and surfaces sensitive information about the depositor.

Confidential USDC (cUSDC) is already live on the Ethereum mainnet to solve this. It is USDC whose amount and balance stay encrypted onchain using Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) powered by the Zama Protocol.

Until now, cUSDC has been used primarily for holding and transferring confidentially. Starting June 23, 2026, you can put it to work.

Steakhouse Confidential USDC Prime is the first DeFi yield product built for cUSDC, curated by Steakhouse Financial, deployed on Morpho, powered by Zama. Confidential USDC holders now have access to the same yield strategy as Steakhouse's flagship USDC Prime vault, with deposit sizes encrypted onchain.

DeFi is going confidential.

From USDC to confidential yield in three steps

1. Shield your USDC. Shielding wraps standard USDC into Confidential USDC (cUSDC). It takes one transaction in the Zama app. No bridging, no new chain, no new wallets.

2. Deposit. Use the Zama app to deposit cUSDC into the Steakhouse Confidential USDC Prime vault. Deposits are routed into Steakhouse's underlying USDC Prime vault on Morpho.

3. Earn. The vault accrues yield through Morpho's lending markets, against blue-chip crypto collateral (cbBTC, WBTC, wstETH). Yield is the yield of the underlying vault. Position size, direction, and entry timing stay encrypted.

Same vault strategy, same risk, with confidentiality on the asset

The Steakhouse Confidential USDC Prime vault is not a new product structure. It is the same Steakhouse Prime v2, the firm's flagship USDC vault on Morpho. The vault parameters are unchanged. The credit strategy is unchanged. The collateral basket (cbBTC, WBTC, wstETH via Morpho Blue markets) is unchanged.

The only difference is that users can deposit confidential assets: cUSDC instead of USDC. The architecture inherits Morpho's full security model and capital efficiency, plus Steakhouse's credit curation methodology.

This vault does not ask DeFi to rebuild itself around confidentiality. It adds a confidential deposit surface to infrastructure that already exists. The Steakhouse Prime vault is unchanged. Morpho is unchanged. The capital that flows through them can now be confidential.

Why this matters for institutions

For institutional desks, the blocker on public DeFi yield has not been the yields themselves. The yields exist. Morpho is the open credit network with over $11 billion in deposits. Steakhouse Financial manages over $4.5 billion in TVL across vaults that power earn products at Coinbase, Bitget, Crypto.com, Safe, Trust Wallet, and others.

The blocker has been signaling. Every deposit on a public lending vault broadcasts the institution's position size, direction, entry timing, and counterparty selection to the open market. For desks with size, that is an unacceptable competitive cost.

"One thing that we keep hearing from institutions is the demand for confidentiality onchain," said Merlin Egalite, Co-Founder of Morpho. "Zama's confidentiality stack built on top of Morpho allows institutions to allocate into Morpho Vaults just like any allocation onchain without compromising operational privacy."

Steakhouse Confidential USDC Prime gives institutional capital access to the same yield strategy through the same vault structure, with the position confidential and the underlying supply auditable.

"The economy is stablecoinizing fast," said Sébastien Derivaux, Co-Founder of Steakhouse Financial. "Steakhouse USDC Prime, our oldest vault on Morpho, is designed to be highly liquid and risk-conscious. Zama's confidentiality layer integrates directly into that framework, allowing institutions to access the same strategy without broadcasting their positions. Privacy where it is needed, with compliance and auditability intact."

A blueprint for what comes next

The Steakhouse Confidential USDC Prime vault is the first product in a broader integration between Zama's confidentiality infrastructure and Morpho's vault architecture. It establishes the pattern: take a top-tier existing vault, plug in a confidential deposit asset, and serve the institutional capital that needs the yield without the visibility.

"Until now, operating on a public blockchain meant exposing your entire financial playbook to your competitors," said Dr. Rand Hindi, Co-Founder and CEO of Zama. "By bringing Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) to core financial primitives like lending vaults, we are proving that confidentiality and decentralization are no longer mutually exclusive."

Join the launch: the shielding campaign

To kick off the launch, we are running a shielding campaign on the Zama app from June 17 to June 22, designed to introduce users to confidential tokens.

Shield at least 10 USDC into cUSDC during the campaign window, and you earn entries for the draw on June 23 using the Zama Protocol's randomness feature. 25 winners will each receive $1,000 in cUSDC ($25,000 total prize pool).

How it works

• Every 10 USDC shielded equals 1 entry into the draw.
• Capped at $500 per wallet.
• The draw will be conducted onchain on June 23 using FHE-powered randomness using the Zama Protocol.

Shielding campaign opens today on the Zama app, running until June 22 at 23:59PM CET. The vault opens for deposits the next day, June 23.

Get started

The Steakhouse Confidential USDC Prime vault opens for deposits on June 23, 2026. Until then:

• Try the Zama app: app.zama.org
• Follow Zama on X: @zama

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