We sat down with Dr Rand Hindi, CEO and co-founder of Zama, during EthCC to discuss how their breakthrough in Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is finally providing the middle ground. By allowing institutions to bake regulatory rules directly into private smart contracts, Zama isn't just shielding data; it’s building the infrastructure for the next generation of global finance.
Privacy is no longer a barrier to entry. Zama CEO Dr. Rand Hindi reveals how Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is bridging the gap between public transparency and institutional mandates, starting with a $100 billion tokenisation pipeline.
For years, the move to public blockchains has been stalled by a binary choice: total transparency or total isolation. For the world’s largest asset managers, neither is viable. To bring a $120 trillion industry onchain, the market needs more than just encryption, it needs Programmable Compliance.
Your background includes a PhD in bioinformatics and a BSc in computer science. How has that combination shaped the way you think about building privacy infrastructure?
I started coding at 10 and built a social network at 14 back in the nineties. That was the first time privacy became a real issue for me. When you run a social platform, a huge amount of personal data flows through your system. As a service provider, you can see all of it with no way for users to verify your actions.
I was a teenager in the nineties, so nobody was really discussing data protection at that time. My PhD in bioinformatics involved applying AI to biology and DNA analysis. This placed me in a field where privacy is absolutely non-negotiable. Healthcare and genetics data contain the most sensitive information imaginable.
Back in 2007, everyone in the lab was already asking how to build automated healthcare pipelines while preserving privacy. In 2015, I started an AI company specialising in language models and agents. The same question arose again regarding digital assistants and data protection.
That was when I first learned about homomorphic encryption and met my current co-founder, Pascal Paillier. We sold the company in 2019 and kept our momentum going. The very next week, Pascal and I launched Zama with the specific mission of making FHE practical for real-world applications.
Your previous company was a privacy-focused AI firm that ended up integrated into 20 million Sonos devices. What did that experience teach you about the gap between functioning technology and scaling a product?
Scaling a product requires much more than just making the technology work. We originally built a privacy-focused consumer AI, but we hit a wall when major platforms blocked the access we needed to compete with their native assistants. That friction made the consumer experience unsustainable. We pivoted to B2B, selling our voice AI to manufacturers seeking to bring natural interactions to their own hardware.
The smart speaker in your living room is the ultimate test for this. Asking for a song sounds simple, but music is actually one of the most difficult hurdles for AI. You have to account for personal taste and the massive, ever-changing variety of artist names. It takes genuine intelligence to get that right every time.
The experience taught me a vital lesson: you have to go deep into a single use case to truly solve it. Attempting to build technology that does everything is a path to mediocrity. Even with the power of modern AI, the best results come from specialised agents working together on narrow tasks. That specialised depth is what bridges the gap between a functioning tool and a product that scales.
Institutions have sought the efficiency of public blockchains for years, but have been hesitant to disclose portfolio holdings and trading activities on public ledgers. What has changed in the past year that made a practical solution feasible, and why is FHE the preferred choice over ZK proofs, TEEs, or private chains?
We launched Zama in 2020 because we knew Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) would become critical infrastructure. Back then, the technology was slow, difficult to implement, and limited to simple tasks. My co-founder, Pascal, is a leading FHE researcher, so our immediate strategy was to assemble the best possible research team to solve those core performance bottlenecks.
That dedicated research paid off, and we successfully made FHE roughly a thousand times faster. This breakthrough naturally led us to the blockchain sector, which presented the clearest market opportunity. Because public chains are completely transparent, they are structurally unusable for large institutions. Moving a billion dollars publicly causes the market to immediately move against you.
To solve this, Zama developed a protocol that brings confidential financial transactions directly to public blockchains. You interact with Ethereum naturally, yet your balances and trades remain completely private. When evaluating alternatives, private blockchains simply fall short. They function like 1990s intranets, allowing bilateral data exchange while lacking the scale required for global access.
Ethereum already acts as the internet of value. Just as the early web needed HTTPS to become a viable commerce platform, Ethereum requires a robust privacy layer to become the global financial network. Zama delivers exactly that. Institutions refuse to adopt technology without a proven security track record, effectively ruling out Trusted Execution Environments due to their history of being thoroughly compromised.
Furthermore, while Zero-Knowledge (ZK) proofs are genuinely effective for verification, they severely lack composability. You cannot easily stake or swap shielded tokens in DeFi, leaving you constrained to single-purpose use cases. FHE solves this by computing directly on the encrypted on-chain state. The data remains completely secure, fully composable, and mathematically post-quantum secure.
Is FHE enabled by default for every transaction, or is it an option users select?
It is an option. The underlying blockchain still operates publicly for those who prefer that approach. In our design protocol, a user can take an existing asset, such as USDC on Ethereum, and convert it into a shielded, confidential version.
From that point onwards, all activities related to that asset become confidential, including transfers, balances, DeFi deposits, and swaps. While FHE is an option at the protocol level, for many institutional assets, it will be the standard. An asset manager issuing a private credit fund onchain will likely require all transactions to be shielded for compliance and competitive reasons.
Zama has already shielded $121 million in total value. What does the path from promising infrastructure to institutional standard look like?
That figure deserves proper context. While legacy privacy protocols struggled for years to find a product-market fit, Zama shielded $121 million in just three days. This isn't just growth; it’s a massive signal that the market has been waiting for an institutional-grade confidentiality layer that works on Ethereum.
We achieved this by building directly on Ethereum, eliminating the need for users to bridge assets elsewhere. We also integrated deeply with the existing Ethereum user experience. Using Zama feels completely natural, much like how HTTPS encrypts your browser traffic unseen. We bring that same invisible-by-default experience to onchain transactions.
Institutions seek privacy along with the advantages of a public blockchain. They are reluctant to adopt new tools or chains. They simply desire encrypted Ethereum. We are introducing a new metric, Total Value Shielded (TVS), alongside TVL to measure the dollar value of encrypted assets. The next phase involves increasing that TVS into the billions through institutional RWA use cases and strategic partnerships.
How does FHE hold up against the transaction volumes institutions require?
Institutions actually perform fewer transactions than you might expect. The transactions themselves are simply very large. Our throughput already surpasses what Ethereum itself can currently support, meaning we are not the bottleneck. We are on track to reach a few hundred TPS per supported chain this year.
This outperforms most L2s in operation today. Our roadmap aims for 1,000 TPS and ultimately 100,000 TPS over the next three to four years. FHE is a fully solved problem from a pure mathematical perspective.
The remaining challenge is entirely related to compute scalability. The more compute you apply to FHE, the faster it becomes and the larger the addressable market grows. Compute challenges are ultimately capital challenges. We scaled AI with infrastructure investment, and that same approach will work perfectly for FHE.
You previously served on the French Digital Council, focusing on AI and privacy at a government level. What did that experience teach you about how regulators view encryption?
Regulators aren't the "bad guys" in the privacy debate but are merely caught between two unyielding demands. My time on the French Digital Council showed me that government bodies and big banks are fighting the same battle. On the one hand, they know that privacy is a human right and a national security imperative. On the other hand, they are legally required to stop money laundering and assist law enforcement.
For a long time, blockchain forced a binary choice: you either stayed fully public or went completely dark. There was no middle ground.
The real breakthrough is programmable compliance. Until recently, no one had built a way for token issuers to define exactly who can access transaction data and under what specific conditions. Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) resolves this. It allows you to integrate compliance rules directly into smart contracts.
This provides regulators with a clear, auditable way to identify wrongdoers without compromising everyone's privacy. It finally allows privacy and compliance to coexist in the financial sector. This was the single biggest roadblock to institutional blockchain adoption, and we finally have the key to unlock it.
Finance is clearly the first major use case. What sectors do you see FHE expanding into after that?
We focus solely on what people are willing to pay for, which today means financial transactions on public blockchains. People trust major tech companies enough that FHE for consumer AI functions as a supplement. Blockchain presents a completely different scenario because the network is public by design, creating an existential issue for institutional finance.
FHE acts as a true painkiller in this environment. After finance, I see identity as the next major category. The ability to have a programmable, confidential onchain identity serves as a significant enabler. Instead of repeating KYC each time you use a new service, you can reuse a verified identity.
You can prove a specific attribute, like being over 18, without disclosing any other information about yourself. The third category is government infrastructure. We will see elections conducted onchain with privacy, land registries verifying property ownership, and vehicle registrations securely linked without public exposure. Money, identity, and government services impact every one of the eight billion people on earth.
Are there any partnerships or upcoming milestones you'd like to share?
We recently announced a major partnership with the T-Rex protocol. This platform is built for tokenised assets and is supported by Apex Group, a large asset manager. Apex has committed to tokenising $100 billion of assets on the T-Rex protocol within the next 18 months. Zama serves as their selected confidentiality layer.
To put that into perspective, the asset management industry is a $120 trillion market. Stablecoins attract a lot of attention, but asset classes like real estate and private credit far surpass them in size. When those assets go on-chain, the volume needing encryption will be enormous. The partnership with Apex Group to tokenise $100 billion via the T-Rex protocol is the turning point. It proves that the RWA migration isn't a future possibility; it’s happening now, and it requires Zama’s confidentiality layer to scale. We are moving from 'Proof of Concept' to 'Proof of Volume.’
Where do you see Zama and FHE by 2030?
I expect 95% of financial transactions onchain to be encrypted with Zama and FHE. As finance continues its migration onchain, a very large proportion of global financial activity will soon rely on FHE infrastructure. We aim to demonstrate that people can now use Ethereum with complete privacy. This is a highly compelling proposition for the market.
Do you have any final thoughts?
If we do our job well, most people will never be aware of Zama's existence. We will be deeply integrated into blockchain infrastructure and, by default, seamlessly embedded in every financial transaction. Users will not think about us, just as no one considers HTTPS in their web browser today.
There may be a small icon indicating your transaction is encrypted, but Zama itself remains unseen. Technology reaching eight billion people must fade into the background and become the new standard. We aim to establish complete privacy as the norm.