Summary: Zama is an open-source cryptography company whose current crypto-facing surface centers on the Zama Confidential Blockchain Protocol, a suite of tools and libraries for building confidential smart contracts and dApps on EVM-compatible and other chains. Its official docs and GitHub repos show a full-stack product surface spanning FHEVM, Solidity guides for encrypted contract development, relayer tooling, protocol apps, and foundational FHE libraries like TFHE-rs, Concrete, and Concrete ML. That makes it more useful to catalog as full-stack confidential-compute and cryptography infrastructure than as a single blockchain, a pure research lab, or a generic privacy startup.
What it does:
Publishes the Zama Confidential Blockchain Protocol, which the docs describe as a suite of tools and libraries for building confidential smart contracts and dApps on any chains
Ships FHEVM, a full-stack framework for integrating fully homomorphic encryption with blockchain applications and enabling confidential smart contracts on EVM-compatible chains
Gives Solidity developers encrypted types, encrypted computation, branching, randomness, and permission/decryption primitives so contracts can compute on encrypted data without abandoning normal Solidity workflows
Maintains protocol-side components such as gateway contracts, host contracts, a Rust coprocessor, a KMS connector, deployment charts, and end-to-end test suites in the public FHEVM repo
Exposes official protocol apps including staking for the ZAMA token and a portfolio app for shield, unshield, confidential transfer, and confidential balance management
Maintains broader FHE infrastructure beyond blockchain, including TFHE-rs, Concrete, and Concrete ML, which helps explain why the project spans both crypto protocol tooling and general cryptography infrastructure
Key claims:
The official docs say the Zama Confidential Blockchain Protocol is “a suite of tools and libraries for building confidential smart contracts and dApps on any chains”
The quick-start tutorial says developers can go from a basic Solidity contract to a fully confidential one using FHEVM in about 30 minutes, with Hardhat as the main starter workflow
The Solidity guides say developers can use encrypted Solidity types like ebool, euint8...euint256, and eaddress, plus encrypted branching, encrypted randomness, symbolic execution, and access/decryption controls such as FHE.allow and related primitives
The official docs also point to higher-level confidential-contract building blocks including ERC7984 confidential tokens, ERC20-to-ERC7984 wrapping, confidential vesting wallets, and encrypted voting utilities
The public FHEVM README says encrypted transaction data and encrypted state remain hidden while computations are handled through symbolic execution on the host chain with asynchronous offchain coprocessor work, and it describes key management via MPC-backed KMS components
The FHEVM repo presents concrete target use cases including confidential transfers, tokenization, blind auctions, confidential voting, onchain games, and encrypted decentralized identifiers
Zama’s public licensing post is important context because it says the company uses BSD-3-Clause-Clear plus a commercial patent-license model: development, research, prototyping, and experimentation are free, while commercial users need a separate license
Whitepaper: Official FHEVM whitepaper saved locally as ../whitepapers/zama-fhevm-whitepaper.pdf. Zama’s docs also expose a protocol litepaper, and the current docs + GitHub repos remain the clearest operational source of truth; see ../whitepapers/zama-primary-sources-2026-04-27.md.