Circle Freezes $12.6M USDC Tied to Zama, Sparking Controversy

The Zama Confidential Blockchain Protocol (or simply the Zama Protocol) enables issuing, managing and trading assets confidentially on existing public blockchains. It is the most advanced confidentiality protocol to date, offering:End-to-end encryption of transaction inputs and state: no-one can see the data, not even node operators.Composability between confidential contracts, as well as with non-confidential ones. Developers can build on top of other contracts, tokens and dapps.Programmable confidentiality: smart contracts define who can decrypt what, meaning developers have full control over confidentiality rules in their applications.The Zama Protocol is not a new L1 or L2, but rather a cross-chain confidentiality layer sitting on top of existing chains. As such, users don’t need to bridge to a new chain and can interact with confidential dapps from wherever they choose.It leverages Zama’s state-of-the-art Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) technology, which enables computing directly on encrypted data. FHE has long been considered the “holy grail” of cryptography, as it allows end-to-end encryption for any application, onchain or offchain. We believe that just like the internet went from zero encryption with HTTP to encrypting data in transit with HTTPS, the next natural step will be to use FHE to enable end-to-end encryption by default in every application, something we call HTTPZ.The $ZAMA tokenThe $ZAMA token is the native token of the Zama Protocol. It is used for protocol fees and staking. It follows a burn and mint model, where 100% of the fees are burnt and tokens are minted to reward operators.Fee modelDeploying a confidential app on a supported chain is free and permissionless. Furthermore, the Zama Protocol does not charge for the FHE computation, instead charging for:Verifying ZKPoKs. Each time a user includes encrypted inputs in a transaction, they need to pay a fee to the Zama Protocol to verify it.Decrypting ciphertexts. When a user wants to decrypt a ciphertext, they need to pay a fee to the Zama Protocol.Bridging ciphertexts. When a user wants to bridge an encrypted value from one chain to another, it needs to request it from the Zama Protocol and pay a fee.The protocol fees can be paid by the end user, the frontend app or a relayer. As such, developers can create applications without their users ever needing to hold $ZAMA tokens directly.Protocol fees are paid with $ZAMA tokens, but are priced in USD. A price oracle regularly updates the $ZAMA/USD price on the Gateway, which updates the number of $ZAMA tokens paid for each protocol functionality. This has several advantages:it ensures protocol fees are proportional to usage and not dependent on speculationit creates predictability for users, developers and relayers, which can model their costs in USD rather than potentially volatile tokens.Staking rewardsOperators need to stake $ZAMA tokens to participate in running the protocol and receive the associated staking rewards. Tokens distributed as staking rewards are minted according to an inflation rate (5% initially), which can be changed via governance.When rewards are distributed, they are first split by role (sequencer, coprocessors, KMS nodes), then distributed pro-rata of the square root of the stake of each operator within that group. Each operator then decides how they want to split their rewards with their delegators.Distributing rewards this way ensures that each operator gets rewarded according to the job they did, while avoiding concentration of rewards into a few operators only.The TeamZama is a cryptography company operating across the globe. It was founded in 2020 by Dr Rand Hindi (CEO) and Dr Pascal Paillier (CTO), with other prominent researchers leading the company, such as Prof Nigel Smart (Chief Academic Officer) and Dr Marc Joye (Chief Scientist). There are more than 90 people working at Zama, of which nearly half hold PhDs, making Zama the largest research team in FHE.About the founders:Rand is an entrepreneur and deeptech investor. He is the CEO at Zama and a partner at Unit.vc, where he invested in over 100+ companies across cryptography, AI and biotech. Rand is also a competitive biohacker, and currently ranks in the top 5% of the Rejuvenation Olympics with an aging rate of 0.68. Rand started coding at the age of 10, founded a Social Network at 14 and started his PhD when he was 21. He then created Snips, a confidential AI startup that was acquired by Sonos. He was previously a member of the French Digital Council, advising the government on AI and Privacy issues, a lecturer at Science Po University in Paris, and an advisor to several biotech, AI and defense companies. He holds a BSc in Computer Science and a PhD in Bioinformatics from University College London (UCL).Pascal is a pioneer in FHE and cryptography, and the CTO at Zama. He invented one of the first additive homomorphic scheme (the Paillier encryption scheme), which is still widely used today. Pascal has published dozens of papers, with major contributions across various cryptography domains, including FHE, smart cards, and more. Prior to Zama, he led the cryptography innovation team at Gemalto, and founded CryptoExperts a leading cryptography consulting firm. Pascal is a 2025 IACR fellow, received several awards for his research, and led multiple ISO standards for cryptography. He holds a PhD in cryptography from Telecom Paris.