🛡 Zama Protocol: A Cross-Chain Confidentiality Layer
The Zama Protocol is not a new Layer-1 (L1) or Layer-2 (L2), but rather a cross-chain confidentiality layer that sits on top of existing chains. As such, users do not need to bridge to a new chain and can interact with confidential dapps from wherever they choose.
The Protocol utilizes 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 for end-to-end encryption for any application, whether onchain or offchain.
Zama believes that just as the internet transitioned 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—a concept they term HTTPZ.
Until recently, however, FHE was too slow, too limited in terms of the applications it could support, and too difficult for developers to use. This is the problem Zama's team has spent the last five years solving. They now possess a highly efficient FHE technology that can support any type of application, using common programming languages such as Solidity and Python, while being over 100 times faster than five years ago. Importantly, Zama’s FHE technology is already post-quantum, meaning there are no known quantum algorithms that can break it.
📈 Integration with MPC and ZK
While FHE is the core technology used in the Zama Protocol, they also leverage Multi-Party Computation (MPC) and Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZK) to address the shortcomings of other confidentiality solutions:
1. FHE: Enables confidentiality while remaining fully publicly verifiable (anyone can recompute the FHE operations and verify them). The use of GPUs will soon allow scaling to 100+ transactions per second, while dedicated hardware accelerators (FPGAs and ASICs) will enable scaling to thousands of transactions per second.
2. MPC: Enables the decentralization of the global network key, ensuring no single party can access it. Using MPC solely for key generation and data decryption for users minimizes latency and communication, thereby making it far more scalable and decentralized than using it for private computation.
3. ZK: Ensures that the encrypted inputs provided by users were actually encrypted correctly. Using ZK only for this specific purpose makes the ZK proofs lightweight and cheap to generate within a browser or mobile app.
💰 Stay Tunned:
🌐 https://www.zama.ai
🐦 http://x.com/zama_fhe
✈️ https://t.me/zama_on_telegram