The PL Genesis: Frontiers of Collaboration Hackathon brought together 880 projects from builders around the world. 51 of them were built on Zama, spanning confidential payments, onchain finance, governance, decentralized networking, and much more.
Out of 880 projects, 51 were built on Zama.
Here are the 5 winning projects.
Disclaimer: The winning projects mentioned below are unaudited community projects. Research before connecting your wallet. Third-party apps carry risks.
DripPay: Confidential Onchain Payroll.
Every salary on a public blockchain is visible to anyone who looks such as CTO compensation, intern raises, contractor rates, all of it. DripPay closes that gap. It provides a private payroll system on blockchain, built using Zama's FHE. Salaries are encrypted before they touch the chain, and the smart contract performs all the math, adding payouts, checking budgets, running disbursements, without ever seeing a single number.
null402: Agentic Confidential Lending.
Most DeFi lending protocols store positions in plaintext, which means liquidation bots can read your exact collateral-to-debt ratio in real time and liquidate you the moment you slip below the threshold. null402 addresses this by combining an LLM-based agent with FHE-native integers on Zama Protocol. Users interact entirely in natural language while solvency checks happen in encrypted space. Only the final boolean, healthy or not, is ever decrypted via the Zama Protocol. Position size, debt, and collateral remain confidential throughout. Your position is not hidden. It is null.
ZDrive: Trustless Encrypted File Sharing.
ZDrive is a self-sovereign cloud drive that relies on nothing more than Ethereum, Filecoin, and cryptography. Owners create hierarchical encrypted folders and upload documents through Storacha; each room generates a unique onchain FHE key with Zama, derives an AES-256-GCM key for file encryption, and stores encrypted CIDs and wrapping keys onchain. Access control, grants and revocations, and key rotation are all enforced onchain, with batch operations that roll back on failure. The use cases run from everyday document sharing to confidential fundraising data rooms, M&A due diligence, and investor updates.
Polaris: Private Credit for Web3.
Polaris brings Buy Now, Pay Later to onchain finance without putting user balances, credit scores, or collateral on display. Built on the Zama Protocol, it lets users borrow, spend, and repay against encrypted onchain reputation, with credit scoring, risk evaluation, and repayment tracking performed entirely on encrypted data. Merchants get paid instantly. Users get flexible, confidential credit lines, either undercollateralized or collateral-backed depending on their reputation. The result is a category of consumer lending that has not been viable onchain until now: private by default, verifiable in aggregate.
Polaris won Protocol Labs' "Crypto" challenge, alongside null402.
Confidential X4PN dVPN: Private-by-Default Decentralized VPN.
VPN infrastructure has historically traded one form of trust for another. Confidential X4PN dVPN removes the trust requirement by encrypting session metadata with Zama's FHE and settling pay-per-second usage on Flow. Users onboard wallet-less through Flow passkey login. Relayer nodes forward encrypted timestamps to FHEVM contracts for confidential computation. Earnings, session lifecycles, and recurring budgets are all visible to the user and invisible to the network.
Confidential X4PN dVPN won Protocol Labs' "Fresh Code" challenge.
51 projects across payroll, lending, file sharing, consumer credit, and networking infrastructure. The quality of submissions was strong, with serious teams building things people will actually use.
The range of applications is the signal we were looking for. Confidentiality is not a niche feature for a narrow set of use cases. It is a foundational requirement for the vast majority of real-world finance that has yet to move onchain.
Congratulations to every team that shipped on Zama during this hackathon, and a big thanks to Protocol Labs for organising it.
The future of blockchain is confidential.
Need help? developer@zama.org
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