November 2026 Summaries

Zama has launched Season 5 of its Developer Program Mainnet, inviting developers to create confidential games on the Sepolia testnet using the Zama Protocol and fully homomorphic encryption. The Confidential Gaming bounty focuses on games whose hidden state or verifiable fairness would be impossible on a fully transparent blockchain, such as poker with private cards, private mystery-box outcomes, or auditable raffles with concealed entries and winners. Submissions must include a smart contract, frontend, documentation, a three-minute human-presented video pitch, and an X post, and will be judged on gameplay, user experience, confidentiality design, fairness, functionality, demonstration quality, and code quality. Up to three winners will share 5,000 cUSDT, with applications closing December 14, 2026, while Zama provides documentation, templates, encrypted-randomness tools, examples, and confidential-contract resources to support participants.

Zama announced the three winners of its Developer Program Mainnet Season 4, which challenged builders to create functional confidential versions of PoolTogether-style no-loss prize savings pools using the Zama Protocol and fully homomorphic encryption. The projects, SaveTogether by @Himess__, CachePot by @yanyuan888, and confipool by @realchriswilder, were deployed on Sepolia and open-sourced, with each allowing users to deposit into shared pools, retain withdrawable principal, and receive yield-based prize distributions while keeping deposits, balances, odds, and winnings encrypted. Their designs preserved publicly verifiable onchain draws while seeking to prevent the privacy disclosures inherent in conventional public prize pools, including revealing participants’ stakes and prize claims. Zama noted that the community projects are unaudited and encouraged users to assess risks before connecting wallets, while presenting the submissions as demonstrations of how confidential applications could support more private onchain financial products; the program’s next season will focus on confidential gaming.

Zama presents confidential vaults as an added encryption layer for existing DeFi vaults that keeps deposit amounts, positions, and exits private while leaving underlying vault strategies and curator operations unchanged. The company argues that although custody, regulation, tokenization, and modular vault infrastructure have advanced, public blockchain transparency remains a barrier for institutions whose balances and trading activity could otherwise be exposed. In its model, allocators deposit encrypted assets into a batcher that reveals only aggregated amounts to the underlying vault, while users receive encrypted vault shares and can selectively grant access to auditors or regulators. Zama says this approach can benefit allocators, curators, vault infrastructure providers, wallet and custody platforms, and token issuers, and reports that its initial confidential USDC vault with Morpho and Steakhouse Financial reached $46 million in six weeks before an expanded set of 16 vaults and multiple assets reached $100 million in shielded total value locked. Looking ahead, Zama plans to extend confidentiality to swaps, institutional custody access, additional stablecoins and real-world assets, and compliance-oriented monitoring integrations.

Zama’s October 2026 newsletter reports growing adoption of confidential DeFi on its fully homomorphic encryption-based protocol, highlighting more than $122 million in shielded total value locked as of October 31, including over $102 million in confidential vaults, up from more than $90 million in September. It promotes the Q3 edition of Shielded, Zama’s institutional report featuring participants from Bitwise, Hypernative, Utila, and Zerion, alongside a DefiLlama Research report that estimates confidential DeFi reached $197.6 million in TVL in September and attributes 42% of the market to FHE. Product and ecosystem updates include confidential token support in Zerion Wallet, private $cZAMA reward claims through Merkl and the Zama App, and Zama joining the Open Transaction Layer as a founding partner. The newsletter also covers industry appearances, partnerships and events, including the forthcoming FHE.org 2027 conference in Seattle, while positioning expanded confidential vault availability and integrations with established DeFi infrastructure as the next phase of the protocol’s development.