December 2024 Summaries

During Season 6 of the Zama Bounty Program, €30,000 was awarded to developers who created innovative solutions using Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), with notable projects including a privacy-preserving image style transfer application and a confidential variant of the ERC-3643 security token standard. The program recognized several outstanding submissions, with first-place awards going to developers such as Soptq, 0xalexbel, and QiteBlock. Season 7 launches with three new bounties, each offering €10,000 for solutions using different Zama libraries: a Fully Homomorphic Version of the AES-128 Cryptosystem using TFHE-rs, a Privacy-Preserving Invisible Image Watermarking System using Concrete ML, and a Confidential Single-Price Auction for Tokens with Sealed Bids using Zama's fhEVM. Participants must register by completing a form to receive a submission portal link, with the submission deadline set for February 9, 2025. The program encourages engagement through resources like a GitHub repository, community forum, and Discord server, offering support and collaboration opportunities for participants.

Zama has developed the fhEVM, a protocol utilizing Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) to enable confidential smart contracts on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chains, resolving the conflict between public verifiability and data confidentiality inherent in blockchain technology. This innovation encrypts transaction inputs and onchain states, maintaining privacy and allowing smart contracts to define decryption permissions onchain. The newly introduced fhEVM coprocessors facilitate the deployment of confidential smart contracts across any EVM chain without altering the underlying protocol, achieving a significant increase in transaction throughput over previous iterations. By employing symbolic execution and threshold decryption, the protocol enhances scalability and ensures that security is not compromised, allowing developers to build using familiar tools like Solidity without needing extensive cryptographic expertise. Potential applications of this technology span various fields, including confidential finance, governance, identity management, and more, with Zama envisioning an end-to-end encrypted blockchain ecosystem termed "HTTPZ," akin to the privacy HTTPS brought to the internet.