September 2025 Summaries

Zama has achieved a significant milestone in Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) by reducing the latency of TFHE bootstrapping to microseconds using GPUs, while maintaining the same security level and probability of failure for 4-bit messages. This advancement is crucial for performing efficient operations on encrypted data, as bootstrapping has been a major performance bottleneck. The journey to this achievement began with a CPU implementation that took 53 ms and has culminated in GPU acceleration that reduces the time to approximately 800 microseconds. This was made possible through the use of a multi-bit algorithm that offers more parallelism, alongside numerous optimizations that enhance GPU performance. The current implementation balances latency and throughput, facilitating faster high-level operations like addition and multiplication of 64-bit encrypted messages. With this progress, the FHE performance is approaching that of cleartext computation, potentially revolutionizing its application in fields like blockchain, despite other bottlenecks such as network communication and zero-knowledge proofs.

The Zama Bounty Program encourages developers to contribute to the Zama Confidential Blockchain Protocol by launching seasonal challenges, with the current season focusing on creating a beginner-friendly "Hello FHEVM" tutorial. This challenge invites Web3 developers, particularly those familiar with Solidity and standard Ethereum tools but new to Fully Homomorphic Encryption Virtual Machine (FHEVM), to develop a comprehensive and accessible dApp tutorial. Participants must create a complete, reproducible example, guiding users from setup to deployment, while emphasizing the encryption, computation, and decryption workflow, all without requiring prior cryptography knowledge. The competition offers a $10,000 prize pool, with submissions judged on educational value, completeness, effectiveness, and creativity, and winners receiving monetary rewards, community recognition, and the opportunity to be featured as an official Zama resource.

The Zama Developer Program aims to empower developers in building confidential blockchain applications by utilizing Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) to address blockchain's transparency issues. The program offers monthly rewards totaling $20,000 for participants who advance FHE development through demo apps or bounty submissions. Developers have the opportunity to become certified, granting them access to exclusive contractor roles and partnership projects. Additionally, the Zama Startup Program provides support for transforming innovative ideas into successful startups, including mentoring, VC introductions, and subsidies. This comprehensive initiative is designed to nurture developers from initial project submissions to becoming leaders in the confidential computing space.

The Zama Creator Program introduces a new model to reward content creators monthly, addressing the shortcomings of traditional token distributions and airdrops in the web3 space. Unlike conventional methods, the program distributes a $50,000 monthly prize pool to the top 100 creators, aiming to increase this amount over time. Creators can choose to receive their rewards in stablecoins or $ZAMA tokens, with a substantial budget allocated to support this initiative over the next five years. The program employs a publicly verifiable algorithm designed to ensure fairness, accounting for factors like audience quality, engagement depth, and community response while preventing manipulation. To further support emerging creators, an additional 6% of the prize pool is allocated for exceptional content, curated by the Zama team. The program is live, and creators are encouraged to participate by sharing content related to Zama, with the registration required on Guild when the claim period begins.