Author: Rand Hindi, Zama CEO; Translation: 0xxz@金财经
On March 7, 2024, we used fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) to encrypt the Internet end-to-end an important milestone in our mission.
I am proud to announce that Zama has raised $73 million in Series A funding, one of the largest venture rounds in French history, from Multicoin Capital, two of the leading pioneers in the blockchain industry. Co-led by Protocol Labs, with participation from Metaplanet, Blockchange, VSquared, Stake Capital and Portal Ventures, as well as several other strategic founders including Juan Benet (Filecoin/IPFS), Gavin Wood (Ethereum/Polkadot), Anatoly Yakovenko (Solana ), Julien Bouteloup (StakeDAO) and Tarun Chitra (Gauntlet). This round brings together the brightest minds in the industry, working towards a single goal: making FHE ubiquitous in blockchain and artificial intelligence.
Zama Development Progress
Four years ago, we founded Zama, an open source cryptography company focused on FHE (the "Holy Grail of Cryptozoology"). At the time, FHE was more theoretical mathematics than practical code, was too slow, too expensive, required too much cryptographic expertise, and could only support a handful of practical applications. Over the next few years—thanks in large part to the tireless efforts of our team—we methodically worked through these issues, making FHE generally available to non-cryptography developers for the first time. I'm very proud of this work. That alone is a major achievement.
Today, Zama offers a powerful set of open source FHE libraries and solutions. From independent developers to large enterprises, anyone can build applications that provide users with end-to-end encryption out of the box. Developers don't need to know anything about cryptography to get started. Our FHE solution is built on TFHE and supports any type of application, no matter how complex, greatly expanding the applicability of FHE.
In addition to security and developer experience, we have a relentless focus on performance. Since launch, we have made FHE scenarios 20x faster and are on track to reach 100x soon. This critical performance milestone unlocks key confidential blockchain and AI use cases. Dedicated FHE hardware accelerators launching over the next two years will close the final gap to enable web-scale applications such as confidential large language models (LLMs) and encrypted software as a service (SaaS).
In addition to advancing our research, this funding gives us several years of runway and the necessary resources to support our partners who will move into production with FHE today. While our partners span a wide range of industry sectors, we have found blockchain to be a key market that Zama is focusing on this year. A major problem with blockchain is that all transactions and data are publicly visible, which creates challenges for application developers who need to work with sensitive information, such as personal or financial data. To solve this problem, we created fhEVM, a confidential smart contract solution that enables developers to create confidential on-chain applications in Solidity. fhEVM can be integrated into any EVM-compatible chain, ensuring that state remains encrypted from the time a transaction is submitted to when it is processed by the smart contract.
Several incredible projects have integrated fhEVM:
Fhenix is a FHE 2-layer Rollup that uses fhEVM to implement confidential transactions in the Ethereum ecosystem , meeting the critical need for privacy in scaling solutions.
Shiba InuIt is the token with the largest market value It is using fhEVM to build the entire network state for its community, powering everything from decentralized financial infrastructure to the Metaverse.
Inco is a modular blockchain that uses fhEVM to provide confidentiality as a service to various layer 1 networks, thereby enhancing existing blocks The privacy of the chain.
Over the next year, we expect FHE innovation to grow exponentially as more developers discover what they can now build.
Some of the more popular blockchain use cases include:
Confidential Token - Balance and amount are encrypted. For example, this allows companies to manage payroll on-chain without revealing employees’ identities and salaries.
DID - user's age, nationality, social security number or credit Ratings can be stored confidentially on-chain. This solves the elusive identity problem in cryptocurrencies and enables Sybill resistance for regulatory compliance, airdrops, uncollateralized credit, and more in DeFi.
Game - Properties can remain hidden during gameplay. Examples include Poker, Wordle or other strategy games.
Institutional Finance - Real-world assets such as mutual funds or mortgages can Tokenize and trade without revealing identities and amounts to other participants.
I am also excited about the application of FHE in AI. Using our Concrete framework, it is now possible to convert AI models into FHE equivalent models and train and run inference on encrypted data. Data scientists can already start building simple confidential AI applications now and integrate more complex models, such as large language models, with the introduction of hardware acceleration in the near future.
Blockchain and AI are just the beginning. Our long-term goal is to make the entire Internet end-to-end encrypted.
Zama’s master plan:
First, make FHE very easy to use for developers , regardless of their use case.
Second, make FHE extremely fast, scaling the confidential blockchain to over 1,000 transactions per second and generating dozens of encrypted LLM tokens per second.
Third, introduce FHE into cloud applications, from databases to SaaS.
Finally, the entire Internet is encrypted end-to-end via the new "HTTPZ" protocol supported by FHE.
Invite developers to build the future of the Internet with us.
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