Introducing the Zama Confidential Blockchain Protocol

Ask anyone familiar with blockchain what the biggest drawbacks to the technology are: while some specific answers might vary here and there, you’ll likely find that security and privacy concerns are always high on the list, often accompanied by questions about the technology’s speed and the regulation around it.

Then why even use blockchain, if you can’t entirely trust it? After all, you’ve been managing things like finance, governance, and more without blockchain for a long time before this technology came along. What has certainly changed is the growing need for users and consumers, as well as companies and organizations, to receive adequate guarantees that the services they require are provided securely.

Transparency VS Confidentiality?

Blockchain networks are fundamentally transparent, and the fact that everything onchain is public is widely considered positive, especially when it comes to verify transactions. The downside, of course, is that all the key information about the transactions are also available, including data that you’d rather not disclose. This is where the ongoing dilemma plaguing a more widespread implementation of blockchain technology comes in: keeping transactions private prevents verifiability, but without the ability to verify the transactions the lack of transparency exposes users to uncomfortable scenarios.

The line between transparency and confidentiality becomes even more blurred when building decentralized applications (dapps). Today, all transaction details — including balances, transfer amounts, and contract states — are publicly visible onchain; this makes blockchain unusable for many institutional and consumer applications requiring privacy, which is the standard in the world of finance.

The lack of confidentiality is a big obstacle to the mass adoption of dapps, which is crucially the next frontier for blockchain. The past few years have seen a big focus on building stable  infrastructures: now it’s time to build upon those infrastructures and create applications that can realise the full potential of blockchain. The key to unlocking this potential is a solution that combines the best of both worlds, shifting the conversation from “transparency VS confidentiality” to “transparency + confidentiality”, as the web did when moving from HTTP to HTTPS.

Solving the dilemma: the Zama Confidential Blockchain Protocol

Transparency, while foundational to consensus, comes at the cost of privacy. It is with the intention to overcome this problem that Zama’s team has been working tirelessly for the past couple of years. An open-source cryptography company building state-of-the-art FHE solutions for blockchain, Zama has long identified Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) – a technology that enables processing data without decrypting it – as the groundbreaking technique that can change the way users, businesses and organizations think about privacy.

From the start, blockchain seemed the perfect environment to dive into and develop the full potential of FHE, a long and complex exploration culminating with the launch of the Zama Confidential Blockchain Protocol.

The Zama Protocol resolves the longstanding tension between transparency and confidentiality onchain. Combining FHE coprocessors, threshold Multi-Party Computation (MPC), and Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), the protocol enables private computation in public environments.

This is the most complete confidentiality protocol to date, allowing developers to code fully confidential smart contracts using familiar tools like Solidity without modifying the underlying blockchain by offering a few key elements:

• End-to-end encryption of transaction inputs and state
• Composability between confidential contracts, as well as with non-confidential ones
• Programmable privacy, with smart contracts defining who can decrypt what, making it easy to build dapps that comply with regulations globally

As outlined in the Zama Protocol Litepaper, the protocol introduces a novel cross-chain confidentiality layer that can operate on top of existing blockchains. With these characteristics, the Zama Protocol enables confidential smart contracts to run seamlessly across any Layer 1 or Layer 2 network, extending privacy guarantees without altering the underlying infrastructure.

Beyond FHE

The Zama Protocol heavily leverages the ability to securely compute directly on encrypted data. For this reason, FHE has long been considered the “holy grail” of cryptography, despite slow speed and limitations to ease of use: this is why Zama’s team has worked to deliver a technology that can support any type of application, using common programming languages such as Solidity and Python, while being over 100x faster than a few years ago.

With the goal to create a game-changing comprehensive protocol meeting all the requirements to deliver a fully confidential blockchain, the team worked outside the familiar confines of FHE. As the main component powering the protocol, Zama’s library FHEVM makes it possible to run confidential smart contracts on encrypted data: combining this with MPC to ensure secure collaboration and ZK for verifiability, Zama looks to overcome the main shortcomings of each individual solution.

Unlocking new possibilities

One of the main motivations behind Zama’s dedication to this project is the growing demand for privacy-preserving primitives in blockchain. Whilst there is an increasing interest for solutions from confidential token transfers to stablecoins, from private DeFi to privacy-preserving identity and compliance, none of these can currently be safely deployed on public chains without confidentiality guarantees.

• Finance & Banking: Secure transaction processing, risk modeling, and confidential onchain payments, making blockchain technology suitable for financial institutions.
• Confidential DeFi: Private smart contracts and dapps apps that fully protect user data.
• FHE State OS & Network States: Strong confidentiality for onchain communities and network states, supporting democratic governance while protecting sensitive information.
• End-to-End Encrypted Transactions & State: All data in transactions is encrypted and never exposed, ensuring complete confidentiality.
• Onchain Composability & Data Availability: Smart contract states are continuously updated while remaining fully encrypted, preserving both composability and privacy.

Thanks to this approach, adopters of the Zama Protocol can enjoy all the advantages of the different techniques without limitations: verifiability, decentralization, scalability, composability, security and, crucially, ease of use for developers.

To usher in what aims to be a revolution for onchain privacy with its protocol, Zama has launched a public testnet (read more about it on the official Zama Protocol documentation), providing developers with a ready-to-build foundation for privacy-preserving decentralized applications. This will allow anyone to deploy and test their confidential dapps, as well as enabling operators to coordinate and get used to the operations.

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