Zama Protocol Update: New SDK, Delegated Decryption, Developer Tooling, and Protocol Apps

May 7, 2026

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The Zama Team

Blockchains today are in their pre-HTTPS era. Like HTTPS turned the internet from read-only public plumbing into a place where real value could move safely. The Zama Protocol adds confidentiality to existing public chains using FHE.

Since mainnet launch, the full Zama Protocol stack is live and integrable. Here's what's available now.

For Builders

Introducing the Zama SDK: Build without complexity.

The barrier to building confidential applications has never been the cryptography itself, it has been the complexity of understanding powerful privacy-preserving technologies like FHE.

The Zama SDK gives blockchain developers a familiar, ERC-20-style interface for building with confidential tokens, hiding all FHE and protocol complexity behind clean abstractions.

Any wallet, exchange, or dApp that integrates it gets confidential token support without needing to understand the underlying cryptography.

The SDK ships in two packages:

@zama-fhe/sdk: The core TypeScript SDK. Handles interactions with confidential contracts and tokens, key management, and adapters for Wagmi, Viem, and Ethers. Design principle: clear-text in, clear-text out. Developers work with familiar primitives while the SDK handles all protocol-level complexity. Teams can adopt without significantly restructuring existing codebases.
@zama-fhe/react-sdk: React bindings for confidential contract and token applications in the browser. First-class hooks for encrypting inputs, decrypting outputs, and querying confidential state, backed by TanStack React Query. Includes drop-in wallet and provider adapter support, letting teams add confidential token functionality to existing React apps without rebuilding their stack.

The Zama SDK is also built for the AI-native development era. With support for agentic coding tools and LLM-friendly documentation, integrating confidential tokens is increasingly something an AI agent can handle end-to-end.

This is a beta release. We are actively looking for builders working on real use cases.

→ Follow the documentation to get started with Zama SDK.

Delegated Decryption: Programmable Auditability at the Smart Contract Level.

The core tension in institutional onchain finance has always been confidentiality versus auditability. Sensitive transaction data can't be visible on a public chain, but regulated parties still need to access it under defined conditions.

Delegated decryption resolves this. It lets a designated party, such as a custodian, compliance provider, or regulator decrypt specific encrypted values on behalf of a user, within a rules-based framework. Data stays encrypted onchain. Authorized parties can access exactly what they need, when they need it, without compromising confidentiality.

This is the primitive that makes institutional finance viable on public blockchains. See the delegated decryption documentation to build this into your confidential dApp.

Confidential Token Wrappers + Registry.

‍Official ERC-7984 wrappers are live on both mainnet and testnet, allowing standard ERC-20 tokens to be converted into confidential equivalents. Wrapping is the entry point to the confidential token ecosystem: balances and transfer amounts become encrypted onchain from the moment of conversion.

Currently supported: USDC, USDT, WETH, BRON, ZAMA, tGBP, XAUt.

The official wrappers in the Registry are the recommended starting point for any app that needs confidential token support so builders don’t have to deploy their own. All officially deployed wrapper addresses are listed in the Zama Protocol Registry:

Ethereum mainnet: mainnet/ethereum#wrappers-registry
Sepolia testnet: testnet/sepolia#wrappers-registry

Testnet Faucet for Self-Hosted Relayer.

The official Zama Testnet Faucet for Sepolia is now publicly available. For most developers building on the Zama Protocol, the relayer handles gas and operational costs transparently, but if you are self-hosting your own relayer, or want direct access to FHE operations on testnet without going through the managed infrastructure, you will need Sepolia $ZAMA tokens.

→ Get testnet tokens: faucet.testnet.zama.org

If you are looking to mint confidential tokens on testnet rather than acquire Sepolia $ZAMA, the testnet token documentation covers the available contracts and how to get started.

For Users

The mainnet launch shipped with a full suite of applications, available today across portfolio management, staking, and bridging.

Portfolio App.

The Zama Portfolio App is the primary interface for managing confidential tokens, covering portfolio overview, shielding, unshielding, and transfers across both Ethereum mainnet and Sepolia testnet.

Since the Zama Public Auction, the Portfolio App added a significant feature: the confidential onramp lets users buy cUSDT directly from within the app without exposing the transaction onchain, meaning users can now enter and operate entirely within the confidential layer from the moment of acquisition.

Staking.

$ZAMA holders can stake on the Zama Protocol via staking.zama.org. So far, more than 50% of the circulating supply has been staked, a strong signal of early conviction from the community.

Staking works through a two-level delegation model: token holders delegate $ZAMA to operator pools, which stake on the protocol on their behalf. Operators run the core infrastructure (KMS nodes and coprocessors) and earn commission fees; delegators earn staking rewards in $ZAMA.

Note that this is standard ERC-20 $ZAMA staking. Confidential staking where staking activity itself is private is also on the roadmap. Learn more about staking mechanisms in the staking documentation.

Token Bridging.

$ZAMA token bridging is now live via bridge.zama.org, enabling transfers across Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, Hyperliquid, and Solana.

HyperLiquid is worth calling out specifically. Bridging is supported via Stargate, which opens a ZAMA/USDC trading market on one of the fastest-growing onchain trading venues. For $ZAMA holders who want to trade, the market is live now.

What's Next

The infrastructure is in place. What comes next is what gets built on top of it: confidential yield, agentic payments, and use cases that onchain confidentiality makes possible for the first time. If you’re building something with confidential finance, we want to hear about it.

Additional Links

Latest Blog Posts

Zama Protocol Update: New SDK, Delegated Decryption, Developer Tooling, and Protocol Apps

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This post covers everything that has shipped since launch: what developers can integrate now and what users can access today.

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The winners from Zama Developer Program, Patricia Ortuño Otero and Joaquin Trujillo, sharing their builder journey.

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Out of 880 projects submitted to the Protocol Labs Genesis Hackathon, 51 were built using Zama Protocol.

Read more →

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Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.If two parties have some sort of dealings, then each has a memory of their interaction. Each party can speak about their own memory of this; how could anyone prevent it? One could pass laws against it, but the freedom of speech, even more than privacy, is fundamental to an open society; we seek not to restrict any speech at all. If many parties speak together in the same forum, each can speak to all the others and aggregate together knowledge about individuals and other parties. The power of electronic communications has enabled such group speech, and it will not go away merely because we might want it to.Since we desire privacy, we must ensure that each party to a transaction have knowledge only of that which is directly necessary for that transaction. Since any information can be spoken of, we must ensure that we reveal as little as possible. In most cases personal identity is not salient. When I purchase a magazine at a store and hand cash to the clerk, there is no need to know who I am. When I ask my electronic mail provider to send and receive messages, my provider need not know to whom I am speaking or what I am saying or what others are saying to me; my provider only need know how to get the message there and how much I owe them in fees. When my identity is revealed by the underlying mechanism of the transaction, I have no privacy. I cannot here selectively reveal myself; I must always reveal myself.Therefore, privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems. Until now, cash has been the primary such system. An anonymous transaction system is not a secret transaction system. An anonymous system empowers individuals to reveal their identity when desired and only when desired; this is the essence of privacy.Privacy in an open society also requires cryptography. If I say something, I want it heard only by those for whom I intend it. If the content of my speech is available to the world, I have no privacy. To encrypt is to indicate the desire for privacy, and to encrypt with weak cryptography is to indicate not too much desire for privacy. Furthermore, to reveal one's identity with assurance when the default is anonymity requires the cryptographic signature.We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence. It is to their advantage to speak of us, and we should expect that they will speak. To try to prevent their speech is to fight against the realities of information. Information does not just want to be free, it longs to be free. Information expands to fill the available storage space. Information is Rumor's younger, stronger cousin; Information is fleeter of foot, has more eyes, knows more, and understands less than Rumor.We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do.We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to write it. We publish our code so that our fellow Cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Our code is free for all to use, worldwide. We don't much care if you don't approve of the software we write. We know that software can't be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can't be shut down.Cypherpunks deplore regulations on cryptography, for encryption is fundamentally a private act. The act of encryption, in fact, removes information from the public realm. Even laws against cryptography reach only so far as a nation's border and the arm of its violence. Cryptography will ineluctably spread over the whole globe, and with it the anonymous transactions systems that it makes possible.For privacy to be widespread it must be part of a social contract. People must come and together deploy these systems for the common good. Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one's fellows in society. We the Cypherpunks seek your questions and your concerns and hope we may engage you so that we do not deceive ourselves. We will not, however, be moved out of our course because some may disagree with our goals.The Cypherpunks are actively engaged in making the networks safer for privacy. Let us proceed together apace.Onward.Eric Hughes9 March 1993