Zama's CEO Rand Hindi announced a breakthrough performance milestone for fully homomorphic encryption, reporting the ability to handle 1,000 confidential token transfers per second on GPUs. This marks a significant leap from the company's initial demo four years ago, which managed only 0.2 transactions per second.
Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) allows computations to be performed directly on encrypted data without decryption. Zama applies this technology to protect privacy on public blockchains by enabling confidential token transfers, an area critical for enhancing blockchain confidentiality and scalability. Despite the achievement, the benchmark is not live on mainnet yet activation is expected by the end of this year. Hindi emphasized this speed as the threshold needed to support faster chains with high throughput and minimal latency, unlike Ethereum’s current limitations.
Running a node with Zama’s FHE currently costs about $0.000004 per ERC7984 transaction, which Hindi claims is far cheaper than zero-knowledge proof methods. These figures are self-reported and have not been independently verified.
Looking Ahead
Zama’s roadmap includes reaching 10,000 transactions per second by 2028 and potentially 100,000 tps by 2030, contingent on advancements in cryptography and hardware. July has been a busy month for the company as well: it launched a confidential RFQ swap product, partnered with Elliptic for compliance on encrypted transactions, and reported shielding over 121 million USDT on Ethereum.
Zama also recently raised $57 million in a Series B funding round focused on expanding end-to-end encryption for public blockchains. The team co-founded the Confidential Token Association with OpenZeppelin and Inco to standardize encrypted ERC-20 tokens.
This material is informational and does not constitute financial advice.
