Zama Opens Confidential Access to DeFi’s Existing Yield Venues
Paris, France, September 17th, 2026, Chainwire
Following June’s launch with Morpho and Steakhouse, Zama extends confidential access to 16 curated vaults across five curators and five asset classes, and opens the Zama Swap Protocol for confidential swaps between positions.
Zama, the fastest growing confidentiality protocol for onchain finance, today announced a major expansion of confidential access to onchain yield in partnership with Morpho, alongside five of the leading DeFi curators: Steakhouse Financial, Armitage by Wintermute, Flowdesk, RockawayX, and Bitwise. The launch adds 16 confidential vaults across 5 asset classes (USDC, USDT, WBTC, AUSD, and TGBP), and opens the public launch of the Zama Swap Protocol, allowing users to confidentially swap between confidential assets on Ethereum.
This launch builds on the confidential Steakhouse USDC Prime vault Zama launched with Morpho and Steakhouse in June 2026, which grew from zero to $40 million in TVL within seven weeks and established confidential DeFi as a proven institutional product category.
On public blockchains, positions, balances, and strategies are visible to competitors and front-runners, a structural blocker to institutional deployment at scale. By expanding the range of curated confidential vaults and adding four new asset classes as deposit assets, Zama enables institutional allocators, corporate treasuries, and active market participants to access diversified onchain yield without disclosing their holdings or strategies.
“When we launched the first confidential USDC vault with Morpho and Steakhouse in June, we proved that confidentiality and DeFi are not mutually exclusive,” said Dr. Rand Hindi, Co-founder and CEO of Zama. “Today’s expansion is proof of the model at scale. Sixteen vaults, five curators, five asset classes, all built on the same DeFi infrastructure that sophisticated capital already uses. Same vaults, same curators, same liquidity, now with confidential entry. This is how confidential DeFi becomes a category and not an experiment.”
The expansion offers depositors two types of confidential vaults, running in parallel:
- 12 Hybrid vaults: confidential entry to existing curated vaults, including the Prime USDT vault curated by Steakhouse. Same strategy, same liquidity, and same risk profile as the underlying vault, with confidential deposit and position.
- 4 Exclusive vaults: net-new confidential-only vaults with no public equivalent, including the Wintermute Confidential WBTC – armcWBTC. (—-)
All 16 vaults are deployed on Morpho and available today through the Zama App. Additional entry points, including Utila, Zerion Wallet, and Yield.xyz, will roll out in the weeks following launch.
The Zama Swap Protocol launches alongside the vault suite, allowing depositors to swap between confidential assets, including all vault share positions, and cUSDC, cUSDT, cWBTC, cAUSD, and cTGBP, without exposing intent or size. This closes the full deposit-earn-swap loop entirely inside a confidential envelope.
“Institutions have increasingly been exploring how onchain capital allocation can be made more confidential to fit their requirements. Adding these confidential vaults on Morpho was an important step for us. It’ll scale confidential DeFi efficiently and open new possibilities for allocators onchain, without changing the strategy, the liquidity, or the risk profile.” said Merlin Egalite, Co-founder of Morpho
“Confidentiality is the condition onchain capital markets have to satisfy before they can carry institutional-scale volume. Through our work with Zama, we’re opening up confidential access to our AUSD RWA Strategy Vault, giving institutional allocators a compliant path onchain.” said Guilhem Chaumont, Co-founder and CEO of Flowdesk.
“We were happy to work with Zama on its first confidential vault, and the market response makes it clear that depositors value confidentiality,” said Sébastien Derivaux, Co-founder of Steakhouse Financial. “The natural next step was to extend that access to a five-vault suite across USDC, USDT, and tGBP. Depositors now have more choice in how they use stablecoins across Morpho, while keeping their positions private.”
“BTC has mostly sat onchain as collateral because there has rarely been meaningful yield to earn on it. The Wintermute Confidential WBTC vault gives WBTC holders a way to actually put it to work, pairing Armitage’s active risk curation with a confidential-only design that has no public equivalent, so positions stay off the public record,” said Igor Igamberdiev, Armitage Lead.
“Zama’s confidential product suite is unlocking institutional adoption opportunities globally including in the UK where stablecoin adoption with large institutions is a greenfield opportunity,” said Benoit Marzouk, CEO of BCP Technologies the issuer of tGBP. “The combination of confidentiality with bluechip protocols like Morpho provide a clear entry point for any institutional player integrating stablecoins into their business.”
“Every position a self-custodial wallet user holds is public by default. That’s one of the reasons people are reluctant to keep large amounts onchain. Zama’s confidentiality layer plugs into vaults people already use rather than asking them to move to a new chain. A wallet can support this natively with minimum friction, and why these vaults are coming to Zerion in the weeks ahead.” — Evgeny Yurtaev, Co-founder & CEO at Zerion.
Institutions can be hesitant to lend onchain for two reasons. They can’t tell exactly what they’re exposed to, and anyone with a block explorer can see what they hold. RockawayX’s RWA vault handles predictable returns and collateral you can check onchain, underwritten the same way we’ve run CeFi and DeFi lending since 2022 with zero defaults. Zama handles the second with its confidentiality platform.” Nassim Alexandre, Head of Onchain Asset Management and Curation at RockawayX.
“Confidentiality should not require institutions to abandon the platforms they already use. Yield.xyz makes Zama’s confidential Morpho Vaults accessible through the same integration layer that wallets and financial platforms use to offer onchain yield. That gives platforms a practical path to support confidential positions while preserving the underlying strategy, liquidity, and risk profile,” said Serafin Lion Engel, Co-Founder and CEO at Yield.xyz.
“Institutions need to protect their investment strategies while maintaining clear control over how capital is deployed,” said Bentzi Rabi, Co-founder and CEO of Utila. “Through our work with Zama, we’re bringing confidential access to Morpho vaults into Utila’s MPC wallet infrastructure, so treasury and investment teams can access onchain yield with the policy controls and approval workflows they rely on across their digital asset operations.”
“Incentives were the one thing confidential assets could not have, because rewarding a balance meant reading it. It was a real pleasure working with the Zama team to change that, extending Merkl’s engine to ERC7984 so campaigns run on encrypted balances. Depositors see an APR and earn, while no position, reward, or leaderboard entry ever becomes public.” said Pablo Veyrat, CEO of Merkl.
This expansion establishes the operational blueprint for further additions to the confidential DeFi ecosystem in 2026 and 2027, including additional curators, asset classes, distribution surfaces, and native institutional custody integrations.
The 16 confidential vaults will officially open for deposits on September 15, 2026 on the Zama app.
For more information, technical documentation, or to review the integration architecture, please visit zama.org or follow @Zama on X.
About Zama – www.zama.org
Zama is the fastest growing confidentiality protocol for onchain finance. By leveraging Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), it enables digital assets to be issued, managed, and traded privately on existing public blockchains such as Ethereum and Solana. Founded by FHE pioneer Dr. Pascal Paillier and entrepreneur Dr. Rand Hindi, Zama brings together one of the world’s largest teams of FHE researchers and engineers and supports a global ecosystem of developers building confidential applications. zama.org
About Morpho
Morpho is the open credit network with $14B+ in deposits connecting lenders and borrowers to the optimal opportunities worldwide. Its modular, open infrastructure enables fintechs, wallets, exchanges, and institutions to embed configurable credit products directly into their platforms, while maintaining full control over the user experience. Leaders like Coinbase, Robinhood, Bitwise Asset Management, and Société Générale already build on Morpho to deploy secure, scalable onchain credit products. For more information, please visit Morpho.org.
Vault curators
About Steakhouse Financial
Steakhouse Financial builds products for the stablecoin economy, with over $4.5B in TVL. Steakhouse is the market leader in risk curation of noncustodial DeFi vaults, powering earn products for Coinbase, Bitget, Crypto.com, Safe, and Trust Wallet, among others. Steakhouse’s mission is to empower everyone with institutional-grade DeFi tools to raise, manage and distribute the capital they need to make a difference in the world. For more information, please visit Steakhouse Financial.
About Armitage
Armitage is Wintermute’s onchain vault curation arm. Armitage executes liquidations itself across every supported market, enabling it to accept a broader range of collateral types and expand the yield opportunity set for depositors. Armitage is designed to scale across protocols and chains as yield opportunities emerge across an expanding DeFi landscape. For more information, please visit Armitage.
About Flowdesk
Flowdesk is a full-service digital asset trading and technology firm specializing in liquidity solutions and OTC trading for institutional clients and digital asset issuers. Built on proprietary trading technology and deep market connectivity, Flowdesk combines traditional finance expertise with institutional-grade crypto infrastructure to deliver secure, transparent, and efficient access to digital asset markets worldwide. For more information, please visit flowdesk.co.
About RockawayX
RockawayX is a leading digital asset investment firm operating across venture, liquidity, curation, and infrastructure, with over $2 billion in collective assets under management. Through its evolved approach to onchain yield, the firm applies institutional-grade credit underwriting to construct, monitor, and manage diversified exposure across stablecoin and real-world asset strategies.
This framework is supported by advanced allocation models, automated risk controls, and real-time opportunity detection, enabling the firm to maintain a zero-default record across CeFi and DeFi lending since 2022.
For more information, please visit Rockawayx.com
About Bitwise
Bitwise Asset Management is a global crypto-focused asset manager with $9 billion in client assets and a suite of over 70 investment products spanning ETFs, separately managed accounts, private funds, hedge fund strategies, and staking. The firm has a nine-year track record and today serves more than 5,500 private wealth teams, RIAs, family offices, and institutional investors, as well as 21 banks and broker-dealers. The Bitwise team of technology and investment professionals is backed by leading institutional investors and has offices in San Francisco, New York, and London. For more information, please visit bitwiseinvestments.com.
Token issuers.
About Tether
Tether pioneered the stablecoin category in 2014 and today issues the largest stablecoin by volume, USDT. Its token suite spans USDT, MXNt (Mexican peso), XAUt (Tether Gold), deployed across multiple blockchains to enable digital use of traditional currencies without the volatility of native crypto assets. For more information, please visit tether.to.
About Agora
Agora is a stablecoin issuer and infrastructure platform building the monetary network for global settlement. Agora issues AUSD, an institutional-grade, fully backed U.S. dollar stablecoin built for financial products, fintechs, and applications. Agora provides the platform for treasury management, settlement, and cross-border flows. For more information, please visit agora.finance.
About Tokenised GBP (tGBP)
Tokenised GBP (tGBP) is a British pound stablecoin issued by BCP Technologies Ltd, an FCA-registered cryptoasset firm. Each tGBP is pegged 1:1 with GBP, fully backed by cash and cash equivalents with independent monthly attestations of reserve backing. There is $27m of tGBP in circulationacross Ethereum, Base, Solana, Arbitrum, Polygon, BNB Chain, Gnosis Chain, and Avalanche. For more information, please visit tokenisedgbp.com.
DeFi, Wallets, Custodians
About Pendle
Pendle is the largest yield trading platform in crypto, with $1.24B in TVL and over $93B in cumulative trading volume across its Pendle V2 (spot yield) and Boros (leveraged yield) products. Pendle enables users to trade, fix, and leverage yield across 784 markets in DeFi. For more information, please visit pendle.finance.
About Yield.xyz
Yield.xyz is the unified access layer for onchain finance, enabling developers to integrate once and access over 3,000 opportunities across staking, lending, perpetuals trading, and onchain vaults on 80+ networks. Trusted by leading wallets and financial platforms including Ledger, Trust Wallet, Privy, Utila, Dfns, Crossmint, Turnkey, Tangem, and 100+ more, Yield.xyz powers production-grade onchain products with built-in support for secure transaction verification and fee-customizable revenue sharing. Yield.xyz abstracts complex integration work into simple API calls, enabling teams to ship scalable onchain products without rebuilding per-protocol infrastructure. For more information, please visit yield.xyz.
About Merkl
Merkl is the onchain distribution infrastructure for stablecoin issuers, fintechs, neobanks, exchanges, and tokenized funds. Trusted by 1000+ companies including PayPal, Coinbase, and Robinhood, Merkl has distributed over $1.8B to more than 5 million unique recipients across 60+ chains. For more information, please visit merkl.xyz.
About Zerion
Zerion is a wallet infrastructure company that powers its own non-custodial crypto wallet and provides developer APIs for real-time token, NFT, and DeFi data. Known for its intuitive user experience and reliable data, Zerion supports both developers building wallet-based apps and users managing assets across Ethereum, Solana, and 50+ EVM-compatible networks. For more information, please visit zerion.io.
About Utila
Utila is the leading stablecoin and digital asset infrastructure platform for fintechs and enterprises. Utila enables organizations of all sizes to securely build, manage, and scale digital asset operations across stablecoin payments, treasury, trading, tokenization, and beyond. The platform combines institutional-grade MPC wallets, granular policy controls, robust APIs, multi-chain support, payment and tokenization engine, and deep integrations with banking, compliance, exchanges, DeFi, and more. Trusted by 350+ industry leaders, Utila processes more than $35B in monthly volume and has secured over $300B in transactions to date. For more information, please visit utila.io