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Zama and Pyratzlabs Establish Zaiffer, a Joint Venture for Confidential and Compliant Onchain Finance - Chainwire

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12Nov

Zama and Pyratzlabs Establish Zaiffer, a Joint Venture for Confidential and Compliant Onchain Finance

Paris, France, November 12th, 2025, Chainwire

Zama, the open-source cryptography company building state-of-the-art Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) solutions for blockchain, and PyratzLabs, a premier Web3 venture builder, announced a €2M investment and the creation of Zaiffer. This joint venture is dedicated to building the future of confidential, compliant, and composable decentralised finance across Ethereum-compatible blockchains.

Zaiffer introduces a breakthrough financial primitive: confidential tokens (cTokens). These tokens conceal on-chain amounts while preserving sender/receiver audit trails and enabling selective disclosure for exchanges, auditors, or regulators. The approach redefines confidentiality as a right within DeFi while ensuring compliance with global standards.

“Our mission has always been to help builders scale the next generation of Web3 companies,” said Bilal El Almay, Co-Founder & CEO, Zaiffer. “Think of Zaiffer as the VPN for on-chain finance: confidentiality you can turn on or off, without leaving DeFi or changing wallets. It is a protocol that balances innovation, compliance, and usability. We are proud to partner with Zama to help bring confidential DeFi to market.”

The Problem: Transparency Without Confidentiality

While blockchain transparency underpins trust, it also exposes balances, trade sizes, trade strategies, and treasury moves. This leads to MEV exploitation, copy-trading, targeted liquidations, and corporate data leakage. For institutions, the absence of confidentiality remains a critical barrier to adoption.

Existing confidentiality approaches fall short. Privacy coins operate on isolated networks, mixers break audit trails and face regulatory challenges, and confidentiality-focused L2s or technologies like ZK often require new infrastructure and introduce usability hurdles. Zaiffer closes this gap with a universal, audit-ready confidentiality layer for all EVM tokens and DeFi applications.

The Solution: Confidential Tokens (cTokens)

Zaiffer’s core innovation is the Confidential Token Standard, developed with Zama and OpenZeppelin. Any ERC-20 or EVM-compatible token can be Shield (wrapped) into its confidential version (e.g., USDC → cUSDC, ETH → cETH, WBTC → cWBTC).

Key properties of cTokens include:

  • Hidden amounts: On-chain transfers show encrypted values while preserving sender/receiver links.

  • Owner visibility: Users can selectively reveal balances or transactions for record-keeping.
  • Selective disclosure: Users may grant time-limited access to third parties for compliance or audits.

Because cTokens remain interoperable with existing DeFi apps, Zaiffer enables confidentiality without the need for new wallets, bridges, or fragmented liquidity.

How It Works: Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) in Action

“FHE is ready for mainstream applications. With Zaiffer, we demonstrate FHE’s ability to power real-world financial infrastructure, combining confidentiality with regulatory compatibility. This is a turning point for blockchain adoption,” said Rand Hindi, CEO at Zama. Zaiffer leverages Zama’s FHE protocol, a decentralised set of computation nodes that process encrypted values without ever decrypting them. Currently, each encrypted transaction is completed in less than 5 seconds.

This ensures confidentiality at the protocol level while supporting several use cases:

  • Confidential payrolls and (cross-border) payments
  • Private swaps and OTC trades that conceal trade sizes
  • Treasury management and fund strategies shielded from competitors

Roadmap and Availability

  • Zaiffer’s demo app is live on the Sepolia testnet. Early users can access the demo and earn points in the loyalty program.
  • Mainnet and an SDK for partners to embed Zaiffer’s core confidential features directly into their products are planned for November 2025
  • Confidential DeFi roadmap includes confidential AMMs, lending, borrowing & Perps.

Key Facts

  • Joint Venture: Formed between Zama and Pyratz Labs with a €2M investment.
  • Product: Zaiffer protocol for confidential tokens (cTokens).
  • Tech: Powered by Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE).
  • Launch: Demo app live on Sepolia; mainnet launch scheduled for Q4-2025.
  • Compatibility: Works with any EVM chain; WalletConnect support.
  • Compliance: Audit-ready selective disclosure, AML and sanction screening.
  • Use cases: Confidential swaps, payrolls, treasury management and B2B settlement.

About Zama

Zama is an open-source cryptography company building state-of-the-art FHE solutions for blockchain. Its technology enables a broad range of use cases, from confidential finance to Web3 and network states. Zama was founded by Dr. Pascal Paillier and Dr. Rand Hindi, and has the largest research team in homomorphic encryption.

About PyratzLabs

PyratzLabs is a Paris-based Web3 venture builder helping founders accelerate blockchain startups from concept to monetization.

Contacts

Kirsty Jarvis
kirsty@luminouspr.com
Hugo Compas
hugo@zaiffer.org