September 2026 Summaries

Zama’s confidential DeFi vaults grew from roughly $35 million to nearly $60 million in shielded total value locked within days of launching 16 vaults across five assets and five curators, signaling interest from institutional-scale depositors seeking privacy alongside yield. In a discussion with Wintermute’s Igor Igamberdiev and Zama CEO Rand Hindi, participants argued that confidentiality can protect institutions’ positions, strategies, and trades from competitors and front-running while still allowing compliance-oriented transaction analysis. Armitage, Wintermute’s curation arm, has launched six vaults for USDC, USDT, and WBTC, including a confidential WBTC product offering up to 5% yield, compared with historically limited Bitcoin lending returns. The speakers expect vault strategies to expand beyond collateralized lending into market making, derivatives, tokenized securities, and real-world assets, while emphasizing that reputable curators remain important for risk management, due diligence, and institutional trust. They also see confidential infrastructure as a potential route for moving some large off-chain OTC trading volumes onchain, projecting that confidential vaults could reach hundreds of millions of dollars in deposits over the next year.

Zama announced that its $ZAMA utility token is now trading natively on Solana through Sunrise, giving Solana users access to ecosystem-wide liquidity while signaling Zama’s longer-term plan to bring fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) privacy capabilities to the network. The company argues that although Solana provides fast, inexpensive transactions, its public ledger exposes balances, transactions, trading strategies, and wallet histories, creating barriers for users and institutions seeking privacy. Zama’s FHE technology is designed to allow smart contracts to process encrypted information, such as balances and transfers, without revealing underlying data, while preserving blockchain verifiability and composability. Founded in 2020 by Rand Hindi and cryptographer Pascal Paillier, Zama says it aims to make blockchain confidentiality as standard and unobtrusive as HTTPS became for internet traffic. Potential Solana applications include confidential tokens, payments, trading, DeFi services, compliance systems, payroll, and treasury management. $ZAMA supports protocol staking and payment of fees for functions such as decryption and encrypted-input verification.

Zama announced an expansion of its Confidential DeFi offering, adding 15 new vaults across confidential USDC, USDT, AUSD, tGBP, and WBTC, along with a confidential swap protocol initially supported by market maker Flowdesk. CEO Rand Hindi said the company’s first confidential vault, launched with Steakhouse and Morpho, reached $40 million in total value locked and helped demonstrate demand for private onchain yield products. The discussion argues that confidentiality is particularly important for institutions and active vault strategies because public transactions can expose balances, trading intentions, and proprietary investment rules to front-running or imitation. Zama envisions a future of programmable, composable vaults spanning tokenized equities, real-world assets, stablecoins, and crypto, with privacy supported by fully homomorphic encryption, wallet and custodian integrations, and programmable compliance features. Hindi described Zama’s business model as fee-based, with protocol revenue intended to fund liquidity growth and, over time, ZAMA token buybacks and burns, while emphasizing that the company aims to build deep confidential liquidity and broader adoption of encrypted onchain finance.

Zama and Merkl have launched confidential incentive campaigns for 16 Morpho vaults, allowing users to earn rewards on encrypted deposits without publicly revealing their balances, strategies, or reward amounts. The integration supports Zama’s ERC7984 confidential token standard by enabling depositors to delegate limited balance-viewing access to Merkl, which then calculates time-weighted rewards while keeping participant data and leaderboards private. Rewards accrue from the start of participation and will be claimable in the coming weeks through confidential token transfers. Zama presents the initiative as a step toward making confidential DeFi applications, including real-world assets, payments, and trading, viable by extending privacy support across infrastructure such as wallets, explorers, custodians, aggregators, market makers, and incentive systems.

On September 15, 2026, Zama announced an expansion of its Ethereum-based confidential DeFi offering from a single cUSDC yield vault to 16 Morpho vaults spanning USDC, USDT, WBTC, AUSD, and TGBP, curated by Steakhouse Financial, Armitage by Wintermute, Flowdesk, RockawayX, and Bitwise. The launch includes four confidential-only products, notably a WBTC yield vault, while 12 existing strategies now accept encrypted confidential-token deposits without changing their stated liquidity, strategy, or risk parameters. Zama also introduced its Confidential Swap Protocol for private swaps between confidential assets and partnered with Merkl to support incentive campaigns computed on encrypted balances, concealing depositor positions, rewards, and leaderboards. Built as a confidentiality layer for existing L1 and L2 networks rather than a standalone blockchain, the protocol aims to let institutions and other users access familiar onchain yield infrastructure while limiting public exposure of balances and transaction amounts, with integrations from wallets and platforms such as Utila, Zerion, and Yield.xyz planned after launch.

Zama’s September 2026 newsletter recaps August developments in its confidential onchain finance ecosystem, including the availability of the $ZAMA token on Revolut for its reported 70 million users and the planned launch of a Revolut Learn & Earn campaign later in the year. The Steakhouse Confidential Prime USDC vault on Morpho, which uses encrypted balances and batch-settled deposits to conceal individual positions, surpassed $40 million in deposits. Zama also partnered with Hypernative for real-time contract monitoring and business-logic alerts while retaining encrypted balances and transfer amounts, and highlighted an Openfort integration offering gasless embedded wallets for confidential USDC transactions. For developers, the company noted the September 5 deadline for its Season 4 bounty to build a confidential PoolTogether-style application, previewed Season 5, and featured builder Chris Wilder’s work on more than 12 confidential applications. Upcoming activities include appearances at Korea Blockchain Week and TOKEN2049, a public launch of Confidential RFQ, and additional ecosystem demos and discussions focused on compliant tokenized securities.

Zama reported that its $ZAMA token became available through the Revolut app, potentially reaching Revolut’s 70 million users and marking a broader deployment milestone for fully homomorphic encryption in confidential onchain finance. The Steakhouse Confidential Prime USDC vault on Morpho, which uses encrypted balances and batch-settled deposits to conceal individual positions, surpassed $40 million in assets, while Zama also introduced confidential USDC yield access through its app. Partnerships with Hypernative and Openfort expanded real-time contract monitoring, compliance capabilities, and gasless embedded-wallet support for encrypted USDC transactions. The update also highlighted a September 5, 2026 deadline for the Developer Program Season 4 confidential PoolTogether bounty, ecosystem demonstrations and discussions, upcoming appearances at KBW and TOKEN2049, an anticipated public launch of Confidential RFQ, Season 5 of the developer program, and a Revolut Learn & Earn campaign planned for later in the year.