زاما ZAMA / Zama

The Zama Confidential Blockchain Protocol (or simply the Zama Protocol) enables issuing, managing and trading assets confidentially on existing public blockchains. It is the most advanced confidentiality protocol to date, offering:

* End-to-end encryption of transaction inputs and state: no-one can see the data, not even node operators.

* Composability between confidential contracts, as well as with non-confidential ones. Developers can build on top of other contracts, tokens and dapps.

* Programmable confidentiality: smart contracts define who can decrypt what, meaning developers have full control over confidentiality rules in their applications.

The Zama Protocol is not a new L1 or L2, but rather a cross-chain confidentiality layer sitting on top of existing chains. As such, users don’t need to bridge to a new chain and can interact with confidential dapps from wherever they choose.

It leverages Zama’s state-of-the-art Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) technology, which enables computing directly on encrypted data. FHE has long been considered the “holy grail” of cryptography, as it allows end-to-end encryption for any application, onchain or offchain. We believe that just like the internet went from zero encryption with HTTP to encrypting data in transit with HTTPS, the next natural step will be to use FHE to enable end-to-end encryption by default in every application, something we call HTTPZ.

The $ZAMA token

The $ZAMA token is the native token of the Zama Protocol. It is used for protocol fees and staking. It follows a burn and mint model, where 100% of the fees are burnt and tokens are minted to reward operators.

Fee model

Deploying a confidential app on a supported chain is free and permissionless. Furthermore, the Zama Protocol does not charge for the FHE computation, instead charging for:

Verifying ZKPoKs. Each time a user includes encrypted inputs in a transaction, they need to pay a fee to the Zama Protocol to verify it.

Decrypting ciphertexts. When a user wants to decrypt a ciphertext, they need to pay a fee to the Zama Protocol.

Bridging ciphertexts. When a user wants to bridge an encrypted value from one chain to another, it needs to request it from the Zama Protocol and pay a fee.