on chain privacy is gaining huge attention across crypto and DeFi. At Zama Labs, we’ve spent years studying the problem and invested heavily in both research and infrastructure to tackle it at scale. => The key insight is that privacy only matters if it applies to the assets people actually use. It’s no good making a random token private. Users want privacy on the assets they already hold and transact with. For most people, the value of holding these assets outweighs abstract privacy experiments. There are three main ways people try to add privacy on-chain: => Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) => Any privacy solution for DeFi needs to solve three big challenges: a) Operate in a fully permissionless environment. b) Enable standard DeFi operations while still reasoning about global state. c) Scale efficiently, ideally being limited only by computation hardware, not network latency. TEEs are tempting because they are simple in private, permissioned systems, but in open networks they break down and are vulnerable to attacks. They are not a long-term solution for decentralized finance. ZKPs are clever, but building full DeFi on them is extremely hard. If you shield every transaction, how do you reason about loans, collateral, or liquidity pools? Developers end up rebuilding every protocol primitive from scratch while learning highly complex cryptography. FHE offers a different path. You can compute over encrypted data directly. The logic works as if everything were transparent, but the data itself remains private. This makes designing DeFi intuitive while keeping privacy strong. Scaling FHE is remarkable because it’s hardware-bound, not network-bound. Adding CPUs, GPUs, or ASICs directly improves throughput. Other approaches like MPC or garbled circuits slow down as the network grows because computation is spread across nodes. Recognizing this, Zama Labs raised a major funding round in 2023, bringing in leading crypto and research partners. The team now includes dozens of PhDs, focused on pushing FHE performance and building practical tools for private DeFi. The result is a platform that could finally make privacy practical at scale without compromising usability or security. Zama is building infrastructure that could change how DeFi is designed for the next decade. #ZamaCreatorProgram @zama_fhe