[PRESS RELEASE – Paris, Zug, France/Switzerland, June 25th, 2025]

Zama Raises $57M in Series B to Bring End-to-End Encryption to Public Blockchains

• With new backing by leading U.S. blockchain investors, Zama becomes the world’s first Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) unicorn.
• Funding coincides with the announcement of the Zama Protocol, which enables confidential applications on any blockchain.
• From July 2025, developers can start building FHE applications on Zama’s public testnet.

Zama, the open-source cryptography company building state-of-the-art Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) solutions for blockchain, announced a $57 million Series B funding round co-led by U.S.-based investment firms Blockchange Ventures and Pantera Capital, bringing Zama’s total funding to over $150 million, and its valuation to north of a billion USD. The new funding will support Zama’s mainnet launch, ecosystem adoption, and research efforts to make financial applications built with FHE scale to thousands of transactions per second.

The timing of Zama’s announcement reflects the accelerating demand within the finance ecosystem for technologies that enable confidential, scalable, and compliant onchain financial applications.

“With this latest raise, Zama becomes the world’s first unicorn in the FHE space, which is a major milestone for the industry. Reaching a $1 billion valuation represents a significant increase that reflects the market’s confidence in our FHE technology and our team’s ability to deliver confidentiality to financial applications onchain” said Dr Rand Hindi, CEO and co-founder of Zama.

The funding coincides with the announcement of Zama’s Confidential Blockchain Protocol and its public testnet in July 2025, enabling developers to build confidential applications through Zama’s FHEVM, with support for other EVM chains and Solana to follow.

Ken Seiff, Co-Managing Partner of Blockchange Ventures, said: “Not since I first saw Ethereum in 2014, have I seen a company commercializing an entirely new technology that could be as foundational to our global technology infrastructure. As finance moves onchain and regulations tighten globally, public blockchains are likely to be the first beneficiaries of what Zama is building. But the opportunity goes well beyond that, as industries such as health care, defense, and virtually all others that use cloud computing could massively benefit from the stepchange in confidentiality and compliance pioneered by FHE, and in particular, Zama.”

“Zama’s FHE protocol launch is a cryptography milestone. By enabling efficient, developer-friendly FHE, Zama unlocks secure, compliant, and verifiable dApps for AI, crypto, and cloud,” said Paul Veradittakit, Managing Partner at Pantera. “The protocol paves the way for onchain identity, financial, and consumer applications—previously out of reach for developers.”

Zama’s FHEVM makes it possible to run confidential smart contracts on encrypted data, guaranteeing both confidentiality and composability. Blockchain-native confidentiality unlocks several use cases:

• Onchain Finance: Zama enables financial institutions to securely use public blockchains for a range of applications, including confidential stablecoin issuance and payments, asset tokenization, compliance, and more.
• Confidential Tokens: The ability to keep balances and amounts encrypted onchain enables blockchain companies to distribute tokens confidentially. Investors, team members and other token holders no longer have to publicly disclose their ownership, allowing them to better manage their portfolio and reduce the risk of being targeted by hackers.
• Identity and Proof of Humanity: The ability to distinguish between humans and AI in onchain applications is essential to the security of onchain finance. With the Zama Protocol, application developers can verify whether a user is human, without disclosing their identity publicly.
• Network States: Zama enables onchain communities and network states to operate confidentially. From currency to identity, governance and registries, it now becomes feasible to run key infrastructure on public blockchains.

Zama will use the fresh funding to advance the field of FHE and further commercialize its accessibility to blockchain applications and beyond. Zama is actively addressing the core challenges that have historically held back FHE adoption:

• Speed: At current benchmarks, Zama’s FHE technology is 100x faster than when the company was founded, and is now capable of supporting most onchain payment use cases. Zama is expecting its technology to be 100x more scalable within the next five years, allowing it to address the most demanding onchain applications.
• Hardware integration: Using GPUs enables Zama to scale to hundreds of transactions per second. Zama is working towards a dedicated hardware-accelerated chip to advance FHE performance, with the ultimate goal of reaching tens of thousands of transactions per second.
• Developer usability: Using Zama doesn’t require learning new programming languages. Instead, developers can use Solidity and other existing languages, and deploy their applications on their preferred chain.

“This round also underscores a broader shift: confidentiality is no longer a niche concern—it’s a foundational requirement. The broad adoption of blockchain in finance is driving demand for secure, confidential computing technologies,” said Hindi.

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.

To learn more about Zama, users can visit https://www.zama.ai/.

This weekend saw significant headlines in crypto, including financial disclosures tied to a high-profile political figure, a new decentralized exchange announcement from a major platform, and a criminal case involving a social media trader.

Here are the top stories that stood out over the past few days.

Trump’s Crypto Play Pays Off

Donald Trump reportedly earned more than $57 million from his crypto initiative, World Liberty Financial (WLFI), launched with his sons before reclaiming the presidency in 2024. Critics have labeled the earnings “open corruption,” pointing to the massive token sales that brought in $550 million and drew tens of thousands of investors.

The earnings were disclosed in a 234-page financial filing submitted to the Office of Government Ethics. While the venture has proven highly lucrative, some argue it blurs the lines between public office and personal gain. Despite this, Trump’s largest moneymaker remains his golf business, which generated $110 million in the same period.

Bybit Unveils ‘Byreal’

Bybit is stepping into the decentralized finance space with Byreal, its upcoming Solana-based DEX, which is set to launch a testnet on June 30 and a mainnet in Q3 2025. In a post on X, CEO Ben Zhou explained that the platform offers the best of both worlds – centralized exchange-level liquidity and decentralized transparency.

This hybrid model is intended to set Byreal apart from existing DEXs like Uniswap, which currently leads the market with a 24% share and $4.93 billion in TVL, as per data compiled by DefiLlama. Byreal will serve as an on-chain extension of Bybit’s global exchange.

Abducted Crypto Trader Let Go When Funds Fall Short

A disturbing incident in Northern France saw a 26-year-old TikTok crypto influencer abducted Friday night by four individuals demanding €50,000 in crypto (equivalent to $57,000). The attackers beat the influencer and forced him into a stolen vehicle. However, the situation took an unexpected turn when the victim, who has 40,000 TikTok followers, convinced them he lacked the funds.

Upon seeing his crypto account, which was low on balance, the kidnappers released him the next day. Now under investigation by France’s Organized and Specialized Crime Division, the latest case adds to the growing threat of physical extortion schemes, dubbed “wrench attacks,” targeting retail crypto users across the country.

Key Takeaways

• A U.S. federal court has frozen $57.65M in USDC amid a class action lawsuit over the LIBRA token scam
• The funds stay frozen until June 9th, pending a hearing on whether the freeze continues during the lawsuit
• LIBRA investors are suing Kelsier Ventures, a crypto firm, along with its co-founders, Gideon, Thomas, and Hayden Davis