Zama has announced the acquisition of KKRT Labs, the zero-knowledge research firm also known as Kakarot, in a deal centered on scaling confidential activity across public blockchains. The company said the combination is meant to accelerate the Zama Protocol on networks including Ethereum and Solana, with a target of more than 10,000 confidential transactions per second. The stated use cases include confidential stablecoin payments, confidential DeFi, and confidential on-chain asset management.
Deal ties Zama’s FHE stack to KKRT’s ZK-rollup engineering
KKRT Labs built its reputation around high-performance proving architectures and modular rollup systems for Ethereum-equivalent environments. Zama said the acquisition expands its technical bench in blockchain scalability and validity rollups, while speeding up delivery of high-performance confidentiality for public chains. Zama’s CEO described KKRT Labs as one of the strongest ZK-rollup teams in the sector and said the combined group expects to move faster and reach new performance levels for the Zama Protocol.
Engineering team and ongoing work move into Zama
Zama said KKRT’s key engineers, operations staff, and leadership will transition fully into the company. It also said KKRT’s existing initiatives will be folded into Zama’s broader product and engineering roadmap with minimal disruption. That makes the transaction more than a portfolio expansion; it is a direct integration of people, research, and active development programs.
The two companies also framed the move as a philosophical fit. Both pointed to open-source development, confidentiality-first infrastructure, and broader access to advanced cryptography. Their shared view is that scalability and confidentiality should be built together rather than treated as competing design choices. A KKRT Labs co-founder said joining Zama gives the team a way to apply its scaling experience to what it called one of blockchain’s last major challenges: confidentiality, with the aim of enabling high-throughput, low-latency confidential finance on-chain.
Backers and industry figures highlighted KKRT’s cryptography track record
The release notes that KKRT Labs has been backed by investors including Vitalik Buterin, StarkWare, Lambda Class, and Stake Capital. Buterin said Kakarot helped advance cryptographic technology in Ethereum, from early work on ZK-EVMs to client-side proving for privacy preservation, and said he is looking forward to the team’s next phase of research and development.
A statement from the co-founder of ZCash and CEO of StarkWare described the Kakarot team as exceptionally strong, adding that it turned a simple proof of concept from several years ago into substantial technology. He said the team has a deep understanding of how to scale blockchains with advanced cryptography and expects it to support Zama’s scaling roadmap.
Zama’s current position and what the acquisition adds
Zama develops fully homomorphic encryption, or FHE, solutions for blockchain systems. Its flagship product, the Zama Protocol, adds confidentiality to existing chains such as Ethereum and Solana for applications including payments and DeFi. The company was founded by Dr. Pascal Paillier and Dr. Rand Hindi. According to the announcement, Zama has raised $150 million at a $1.2 billion valuation, with backing from Multicoin, Pantera, Protocol Labs, and others.
Before the acquisition, KKRT Labs focused on zero-knowledge R&D and modular proving engines for Ethereum-equivalent systems, with the goal of making verifiable computing simpler, faster, and more accessible. With KKRT now joining the company, Zama is positioning its next phase around combining FHE-based confidentiality with ZK proving and rollup expertise to build higher-throughput confidential infrastructure on public blockchains.