The Paris-based cryptography company Zama has rapidly risen from a crypto startup to a highly regarded privacy computing platform within just a few years, attracting the attention of top venture capital firms worldwide. The company has completed Series A funding of $73 million and Series B funding of $57 million, bringing the total funding amount to $130 million. So, what are the key factors behind Zama's success?

This article will analyze multiple dimensions, including team background, the potential of the FHE track, project technological progress, future prospects, and current challenges.

01. Team Background: A Fusion of Academia and Practice

Zama's core team was co-founded by Rand Hindi and Pascal Paillier.

• Rand Hindi is known as a "geek prodigy." Public records show that he started programming at the age of 10 and created a popular social website in France at 14. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and a PhD in Bioinformatics from University College London. Before founding Zama, Hindi successfully founded and sold the AI voice platform Snips, demonstrating outstanding entrepreneurial and commercialization abilities.
• The other co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Dr. Pascal Paillier, is one of the pioneers of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) technology, with over 25 years of research experience in cryptography. He holds about 25 patents, has published dozens of academic papers, won the Best Paper Award at Asiacrypt 2005, and is a core member of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR).

Unlike many blockchain project teams that operate on a small scale and rely on outsourcing, Zama's team has grown to about 75 people, nearly half of whom have PhDs or master's degrees in cryptography, machine learning, or blockchain-related fields. This high density of technical talent enhances the team's credibility and execution capability in the eyes of outsiders.

It can be said that Paillier's academic depth combined with Hindi's entrepreneurial experience, along with the team's high-quality background, has earned Zama the confidence of investors.

02. FHE Track: The "Holy Grail" of Cryptography?

In blockchain, transparency and privacy protection are often difficult to balance. Users want data to be publicly verifiable while also requiring sensitive information to remain confidential. The breakthrough of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) technology provides a feasible solution to this contradiction.

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) offers a groundbreaking solution:

It allows for computations on encrypted data without the need for decryption. This means that data can remain encrypted throughout the entire process of transmission, storage, and computation, achieving "what should be public is public, and what should be confidential is confidential."

Compared to technologies like Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZK), FHE focuses more on "privacy computing," while ZK is primarily used for "privacy verification." The two are not mutually exclusive but rather complementary: ZK is suitable for proving, while FHE is suitable for computing. In the future, their combination is expected to support a truly privacy-protecting Web 3 ecosystem.

This is also an important reason why Zama is considered to have long-term strategic value: FHE can meet the compliance needs of various fields such as finance, identity, healthcare, and AI, thereby opening up the possibility for large-scale commercialization.

03. Technological Progress: Significant Performance Improvement, but Still Early

After completing Series A funding in March 2024, Zama quickly completed Series B funding in June of this year, which, in my view, is largely due to the significant improvement in Zama's technical performance. According to the team, since its establishment in 2020, Zama's FHE computation efficiency has improved by about 100 times.

In terms of hardware support, Zama currently utilizes GPUs to achieve a throughput capacity of hundreds of transactions per second and is developing dedicated acceleration chips based on FPGA and ASIC to further enhance performance.

As of June 2024, Zama can currently process about 20 transactions per second. In my opinion, this still lags behind mainstream blockchains, although the team plans to increase throughput to "10,000+ tps" using dedicated hardware like ASICs. Whether this goal can be achieved still requires practical verification.

04. Future Vision: Building an End-to-End Encrypted Internet

In terms of vision, Zama has clearly stated that it will not be limited to the blockchain field. The company has proposed the concept of "HTTPZ," aimed at promoting the evolution of the internet from HTTPS to the next generation of end-to-end encrypted protocols.

HTTPZ will provide end-to-end encrypted computing capabilities for the entire internet, ensuring that data remains encrypted at all stages. This vision goes far beyond blockchain, encompassing a broader digital world.

Zama plans to launch its mainnet on Ethereum in the fourth quarter of 2025, with application scenarios covering confidential finance, privacy DeFi, on-chain identity and management, AI data markets, and more. As global awareness of data privacy increases, FHE technology is expected to gradually enter mainstream applications, and Zama, as a leading project in this field, has a significant first-mover advantage.

05. Challenges and Outlook

Despite Zama's outstanding performance in technological accumulation and capital support, it still faces numerous challenges. FHE technology has high computational overhead and strong hardware dependencies, and practical implementation needs to overcome performance bottlenecks and cost issues. Additionally, the current TPS is still relatively low, and attracting developers and users to use FHE tools to establish network effects will be a key test.

However, with a solid team background, a clear technological path, and broad application prospects, Zama has already gained initial market recognition. Its $130 million funding not only reflects capital's confidence in FHE technology but also highlights the enormous potential of the privacy computing field.

Whether Zama can truly become a giant in the next generation of blockchain and even internet privacy infrastructure still requires time and market validation.

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