French cryptography startup Zama is pushing the boundaries of blockchain privacy with a new integration that could reshape how institutions interact with tokenized assets on public networks.
By partnering with T-REX Ledger, a compliance-focused infrastructure backed by Apex, the company aims to embed confidentiality directly into the foundation of regulated digital asset systems.
At the core of this development is the ERC-3643 standard, which allows issuers to enforce identity verification and transfer restrictions within tokenized securities. Zama, which announced the close of a $57 million Series B funding round in 2025, also introduces a privacy layer powered by fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), enabling sensitive financial data to remain encrypted even while being processed onchain.
BREAKING
Zama becomes the native confidentiality layer for T-REX Ledger, the RWA infrastructure backed by Apex Group (servicing $3.5T in assets) and targeting $100B in tokenized assets by June 2027. pic.twitter.com/jYnUghboXw
— Zama (@zama) March 24, 2026
A new path for institutional privacy onchain
One of the biggest barriers to institutional adoption of public blockchains has been the lack of confidentiality. Financial institutions are often unwilling to expose transaction details, positions, or proprietary strategies on transparent networks.Zama’s solution tackles this directly.
According to founder Rand Hindi, institutions using T-REX Ledger can now “shield” their holdings by wrapping ERC-3643 tokens into confidential equivalents. These wrapped assets maintain a 1:1 value ratio while encrypting balances and transaction data end-to-end.
The system also ensures compliance remains intact. Identity checks and regulatory rules are enforced through smart contracts, while sensitive Know Your Customer (KYC) data stays offchain. This allows institutions to operate on public blockchain rails without sacrificing privacy or regulatory alignment.
Zama has rapidly built momentum in 2026, marking key milestones that strengthen its position in confidential blockchain infrastructure. The company successfully processed its first confidential stablecoin transactions on the Ethereum mainnet, proving its technology in a live environment. This was followed by the launch of its native ZAMA token, which debuted after a $118 million sealed-bid Dutch auction in January and began trading on major exchanges like Binance, OKX, and Bybit in February.
Privacy wars: FHE vs ZK vs permissioned systems
Zama’s move comes amid a broader industry debate over the future of blockchain privacy. Competing approaches, including zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs and permissioned networks, are vying for dominance in the tokenization stack.
Leaders like Alex Gluchowski argue that ZK-based systems offer the best path forward, enabling transaction validation without revealing underlying data. Meanwhile, Digital Asset co-founder Shaul Kfir believes permissioned architectures already provide sufficient privacy with stronger legal enforceability.
Zama, however, is positioning FHE as a complementary breakthrough. By allowing computations on encrypted, shared data across multiple users, FHE addresses what Hindi describes as a “shared state problem” in existing models, unlocking new possibilities for confidential DeFi and real-time regulatory checks on public infrastructure.
While encryption introduces slight latency, Zama claims it does not impact throughput or composability, potentially making privacy-native tokenization a reality.
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