Zama and PyratzLabs have launched Zaiffer, a joint venture backed by €2 million to advance confidential, compliant finance on Ethereum-compatible networks. The initiative introduces a new confidential token model designed to protect transaction amounts while keeping audit trails intact for oversight. The goal is to reconcile privacy with regulatory requirements without fragmenting liquidity or changing the user experience.
The Market Problem
Transparency on public blockchains builds trust, yet it exposes balances, trade sizes, and treasury strategies to anyone observing the ledger. This visibility fuels copy-trading, targeted liquidations, and data leakage that can weaken competitive positioning. For institutions, the lack of native confidentiality has remained a key blocker to meaningful adoption.
The Joint Venture
Zaiffer positions itself as a universal confidentiality layer that works with existing EVM tokens and applications. The company is led by co-founder and CEO Bilal El Almay, who frames the protocol as a VPN-like switch for on-chain privacy that users can enable when needed. Zama and PyratzLabs combine cryptography expertise and venture building experience to speed productization and market entry.
Technology and Standard
At the center of Zaiffer is a Confidential Token Standard developed with Zama and OpenZeppelin. Any ERC-20 or EVM-compatible asset can be wrapped into a confidential version, for example USDC to cUSDC or ETH to cETH, without changing wallets or interfaces. Transfers conceal amounts on chain while preserving sender and receiver linkages for analysis and record-keeping.
How FHE Works
Zaiffer relies on Zama’s Fully Homomorphic Encryption protocol to compute on encrypted values without exposing the underlying data. A decentralized set of computation nodes processes transactions end to end, and the team reports sub-five-second completion times for encrypted transfers. Zama CEO Rand Hindi argues this demonstrates FHE’s readiness for mainstream financial infrastructure and regulatory alignment.
Compliance and Auditability
Selective disclosure is built into the model so users can share balances or transaction details with trusted parties. Disclosures can be time bound to meet audits, reporting obligations, or exchange requirements while limiting overexposure. The architecture is designed to support AML screening and sanctions checks without sacrificing operational privacy for day-to-day activity.
Use Cases and Interoperability
The project targets confidential payrolls, cross-border payments, and B2B settlement that protect counterparties and amounts. It also aims to enable private swaps and over-the-counter trades that conceal size, along with treasury operations that limit alpha leakage. Because cTokens interoperate with existing DeFi apps, Zaiffer avoids new bridges, new wallets, or fragmented liquidity pools.
Product Experience
Zaiffer’s design emphasizes owner visibility so users can verify and export their own records while keeping amounts encrypted on chain. The system preserves the familiar DeFi workflow, attaching confidentiality as an attribute rather than a separate network. WalletConnect compatibility is planned to simplify access across EVM ecosystems and standard wallets.
Roadmap and Availability
A public demo is live on the Sepolia testnet for early users to explore the core mechanics. The team plans a mainnet launch in the fourth quarter of 2025 and an SDK release in November 2025 for partners that want to embed confidential features natively. The feature roadmap includes confidential automated market makers, lending, borrowing, and perpetuals to extend coverage across major DeFi primitives.
Leadership and Governance
Bilal El Almay highlights a balance of usability, compliance, and innovation as essential to institutional comfort. The partnership with Zama brings a large homomorphic encryption research team to bear on production-grade performance and formal security. PyratzLabs contributes venture building and commercialization support to accelerate adoption among developers and enterprises.
Zaiffer proposes a pragmatic path to private, compliant finance by attaching confidentiality to tokens rather than rebuilding DeFi from scratch. If performance and interoperability hold in production, the approach could reduce information leakage while preserving the auditability regulators expect. With funding secured and a testnet live, the next year will test how far FHE can move from cryptographic promise to on-chain utility.