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The Zama FHE Master Plan

March 7, 2024
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Rand Hindi
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Today marks an important milestone toward our mission of making the internet end-to-end encrypted using Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). 

I’m proud to announce that Zama has raised $73 million in a Series A—one of largest venture rounds in France’s history—co-led by Multicoin Capital and Protocol Labs, two of the leading pioneers in the blockchain industry, 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 (Stake Capital Group), and Tarun Chitra (Gauntlet). This round brings together the brightest minds in the industry to work toward a singular goal: making FHE ubiquitous in blockchain and AI. 

Four years ago, we founded Zama as an open source cryptography company focused on FHE, the “holy grail of cryptography.” At that time, FHE was more theoretical math than practical code—it was too slow, too expensive, required too much cryptography expertise, and could only support a handful of real-world applications. In the years that followed—largely thanks to the relentless efforts of our team—we methodically tackled each of these problems, making FHE generally accessible to non-cryptography developers for the first time. I’m incredibly proud of this work. It alone is a significant achievement. 

Today, Zama offers a robust suite of open source FHE libraries and solutions. Anyone, from solo developers to large enterprises, can build applications that deliver out-of-the-box, end-to-end encryption to their users. Developers don’t need to know anything about cryptography to get started. Our FHE scheme, which builds on top of TFHE, supports any type of application, no matter how complex, vastly expanding the applicability of FHE. 

Alongside security and developer experience, we maintained an unrelenting focus on performance. Since inception, we have improved the speed of our FHE scheme by a factor of 20x, and are on track to reach 100x soon. This key performance milestone has unlocked critical confidential blockchain and AI use cases. Dedicated FHE hardware accelerators, which are coming in the next two years, will bridge 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 that are going into production with FHE today. While our partners span a wide cross section of industries, we found blockchain to be a key market for Zama to focus on this year. A major issue with blockchain is that all transactions and data are publicly visible, creating a challenge for developers of applications that require using sensitive information, such as personal or financial data. To address this, we created the fhEVM, a confidential smart contract solution that enables developers to create confidential onchain applications in Solidity. The fhEVM can be integrated into any EVM-compatible chain, ensuring that the state remains encrypted end-to-end, from the moment a transaction is submitted to when smart contracts are processing it.

Several incredible projects have already integrated the fhEVM: 

  • Fhenix is an FHE Layer 2 rollup which uses the fhEVM to enable confidential transactions in the Ethereum ecosystem, addressing the critical need for privacy in scaling solutions.
  • Shiba Inu, one of the largest tokens by market cap, is using the fhEVM to build an entire network state for their community, powering everything from their decentralized financial infrastructure to their metaverse.
  • Inco is a modular blockchain using the fhEVM to offer Confidentiality-as-a-Service to various Layer 1 networks, thereby enhancing the privacy of existing blockchains. 

Over the coming year, we expect FHE innovation to take off exponentially as more developers discover what they can now build. Some of the more popular blockchain use cases include:

  • Confidential Tokens — where balances and amounts are encrypted. This, for example, allows companies to manage payroll onchain without revealing the identities and salaries of their employees.
  • Decentralized Identity — where a user’s age, nationality, social security number, or credit score can be stored confidentially onchain. This solves the elusive identity problem in crypto and enables regulatory compliance in DeFi, Sybill resistance for airdrops, uncollateralized credit, and much more.
  • Gaming — where attributes can remain hidden during gameplay. Examples include poker, Wordle, or other strategy games.
  • Institutional Finance — where real world assets such as mutual funds or mortgages can be tokenized and traded without revealing the identity and amounts to other participants.

I am also excited about the applications of FHE in Artificial Intelligence. Using our Concrete framework, it is now possible to convert an AI model into an FHE equivalent, and to both train and run inference on encrypted data. Data scientists can already start building simple confidential AI applications today, and integrate more complex models such as LLMs as hardware acceleration becomes available in the near future. 

Blockchain and AI are just the start. Our long term goal is to make the entire internet encrypted end-to-end. Here is our masterplan:

  • First, make FHE extremely easy to use for developers, no matter their use case.
  • Second, make FHE extremely fast, scaling confidential blockchains to 1,000+ transactions per second and generating dozens of encrypted LLM tokens per second.
  • Third, bring FHE to cloud applications, from databases to SaaS.
  • Finally, make the entire internet encrypted end-to-end via a new, FHE-powered “HTTPZ” protocol.

If this plan resonates with you, whether you are considering incorporating FHE in your product or simply experimenting with it, get in touch! My DMs are always open.

Come build the future of the internet with us. 

Rand (@RandHindi)

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Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.If two parties have some sort of dealings, then each has a memory of their interaction. Each party can speak about their own memory of this; how could anyone prevent it? One could pass laws against it, but the freedom of speech, even more than privacy, is fundamental to an open society; we seek not to restrict any speech at all. If many parties speak together in the same forum, each can speak to all the others and aggregate together knowledge about individuals and other parties. The power of electronic communications has enabled such group speech, and it will not go away merely because we might want it to.Since we desire privacy, we must ensure that each party to a transaction have knowledge only of that which is directly necessary for that transaction. Since any information can be spoken of, we must ensure that we reveal as little as possible. In most cases personal identity is not salient. When I purchase a magazine at a store and hand cash to the clerk, there is no need to know who I am. When I ask my electronic mail provider to send and receive messages, my provider need not know to whom I am speaking or what I am saying or what others are saying to me; my provider only need know how to get the message there and how much I owe them in fees. When my identity is revealed by the underlying mechanism of the transaction, I have no privacy. I cannot here selectively reveal myself; I must always reveal myself.Therefore, privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems. Until now, cash has been the primary such system. An anonymous transaction system is not a secret transaction system. An anonymous system empowers individuals to reveal their identity when desired and only when desired; this is the essence of privacy.Privacy in an open society also requires cryptography. If I say something, I want it heard only by those for whom I intend it. If the content of my speech is available to the world, I have no privacy. To encrypt is to indicate the desire for privacy, and to encrypt with weak cryptography is to indicate not too much desire for privacy. Furthermore, to reveal one's identity with assurance when the default is anonymity requires the cryptographic signature.We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence. It is to their advantage to speak of us, and we should expect that they will speak. To try to prevent their speech is to fight against the realities of information. Information does not just want to be free, it longs to be free. Information expands to fill the available storage space. Information is Rumor's younger, stronger cousin; Information is fleeter of foot, has more eyes, knows more, and understands less than Rumor.We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do.We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to write it. We publish our code so that our fellow Cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Our code is free for all to use, worldwide. We don't much care if you don't approve of the software we write. We know that software can't be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can't be shut down.Cypherpunks deplore regulations on cryptography, for encryption is fundamentally a private act. The act of encryption, in fact, removes information from the public realm. Even laws against cryptography reach only so far as a nation's border and the arm of its violence. Cryptography will ineluctably spread over the whole globe, and with it the anonymous transactions systems that it makes possible.For privacy to be widespread it must be part of a social contract. People must come and together deploy these systems for the common good. Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one's fellows in society. We the Cypherpunks seek your questions and your concerns and hope we may engage you so that we do not deceive ourselves. We will not, however, be moved out of our course because some may disagree with our goals.The Cypherpunks are actively engaged in making the networks safer for privacy. Let us proceed together apace.Onward. By Eric Hughes. 9 March 1993.