Scrolling through the Crypto tab in your Revolut app today, somewhere between familiar tickers, you may have come across four letters you’ve never seen before:
ZAMA.
Behind those four letters is a technology that solves one of blockchain’s biggest limitations: making transactions confidential while keeping public blockchains open, verifiable, and secure. The cryptography that makes it possible is older than blockchains themselves. It took researchers more than thirty years to make it work.
Here's the story.
Blockchains are transparent by design. Every balance, every payment, every trade can be viewed by anyone. That transparency is valuable because it lets anyone verify that the network is operating correctly. But it also means your financial activity is visible forever. Imagine if your salary, savings, or every bank transfer you’ve ever made were permanently public. That’s the reality of most blockchains today.
For years, it looked like an unavoidable trade-off: either transactions stay transparent so the network can verify them, or they stay confidential. Not both. Zama was founded on a different belief: Confidentiality should become the default for blockchains.
Making that possible required solving one of cryptography’s longest-standing challenges. Fully Homomorphic Encryption, or FHE, allows computers to perform computations directly on encrypted data, without ever decrypting it. That means a blockchain can verify and execute transactions without exposing the balances, amounts, or financial information behind them.
Think of it this way: HTTPS made it possible to browse the internet without exposing everything you sent across the network. The Zama Protocol does the same for blockchains. It brings confidentiality to blockchain infrastructure without sacrificing transparency where it matters: verification, security, and interoperability.
A problem that took decades to solve.
The idea behind FHE was first proposed in 1978. For more than thirty years, nobody knew how to make it work. In 2009, IBM researcher Craig Gentry published the first working construction. It proved the idea was possible, but it was roughly a trillion times slower than normal computation.
FHE became known as one of cryptography’s “holy grails”: theoretically possible, practically unusable. One of the pioneers of this field, Pascal Paillier, is now Zama’s CTO.
Turning research into infrastructure.
In 2020, Pascal Paillier and entrepreneur Rand Hindi founded Zama with a simple conviction. The remaining challenge wasn’t scientific. It was engineering.
Over the following years, Zama assembled one of the world’s largest teams dedicated to Fully Homomorphic Encryption. They hired cryptographers to design the schemes, and engineers to make them run. Performance improved year after year. What was once impossibly slow became fast enough to support real-world applications.
From research to the Zama Protocol: Zama is the fastest growing confidentiality protocol for onchain finance.
As the technology matured, so did the company. In 2024, Zama raised a $73 million Series A, co-led by Multicoin Capital and Protocol Labs.
In 2025, a $57 million Series B, co-led by Pantera Capital and Blockchange Ventures, made Zama the world’s first Fully Homomorphic Encryption unicorn.
Today, that research powers the Zama Protocol, the confidentiality protocol for blockchains.
Rather than creating a separate private blockchain, the Zama Protocol adds confidentiality to existing public networks, starting with Ethereum. Applications remain composable. Transactions remain verifiable. Balances and transfers remain confidential. Today, confidential financial products are already running in production with institutional partners on the Zama Protocol.
Most financial activity still happens away from blockchains. Large trades are negotiated privately. Institutions rely on confidential financial information.Individuals expect their balances and payments to remain personal. Without confidentiality, many financial use cases simply cannot move onchain.
The Zama Protocol changes that. It allows developers and institutions to build applications where sensitive information remains encrypted throughout execution while benefiting from the openness and composability of public blockchain infrastructure.
The internet wasn’t always encrypted. In its early days, information travelled across the web in plain text. HTTPS changed that. Encryption became the default, enabling online banking, ecommerce, and many of the services people rely on today. Most people never think about HTTPS anymore. It simply works.
Blockchains are at a similar moment. The next generation of blockchain infrastructure requires confidentiality to become just as seamless.The Zama Protocol is building that foundation.
Network operators stake $ZAMA to run and secure the infrastructure behind confidential transactions, while 100% of protocol fees paid in $ZAMA are burned. Today, $ZAMA is available directly in the Revolut app, making it easier than ever to access the technology powering confidential onchain finance.
Later this year, Zama will launch a Learn & Earn campaign inside Revolut, helping millions of users understand why confidentiality onchain matters for mass adoption.
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