Zama CEO Rand Hindi said the fully homomorphic encryption firm has reached 1,000 confidential transfers per second on GPUs, a company-reported benchmark he described as a milestone for privacy technology.
Fully homomorphic encryption, or FHE, allows computation on encrypted data without first decrypting it. Zama uses that approach for confidential token transfers on public blockchains. Hindi posted the figures on X on Monday, but the company has not activated that level of performance on any live network.
From 0.2 tps in 2022 to 1,000 tps in the latest benchmark
Hindi said the 1,000 tps mark is up from 0.2 tps, which was the level Zama showed when it first demonstrated an FHE smart contract at ETHcc in 2022. He described that as a 5,000x improvement over four years.
He also said running an FHE node now costs about $0.000004 per ERC7984 transaction. Hindi characterized that as orders of magnitude cheaper than zero-knowledge proofs, though that comparison was his own framing and was not independently verified in the report.
Not yet in production, with mainnet activation planned for year-end
The benchmark is not running in production. Hindi said the performance has not been activated on mainnet and is planned for the end of the year alongside other features and improvements. The company’s figures were self-reported and were not accompanied by a published test methodology.
Hindi tied the number to Zama’s deployment plans. He said 1,000 tps was the milestone the company needed in order to feel confident launching on chains that are faster than Ethereum, where users expect low latency, high throughput, and near-zero gas fees.
Longer-term targets reach 10,000 tps in 2028 and 100,000 tps in 2030
Hindi also laid out longer-range goals. He said Zama is confident it will reach 10,000 tps by 2028 and 100,000 tps by 2030. Those targets remain aspirational and depend on further gains in cryptography, engineering, and hardware.
Busy July included product launch, compliance partnership, and token standard work
The benchmark capped an active month for the protocol. Its confidential RFQ swap product went live on July 24, and Zama partnered with Elliptic on July 21 to add compliance screening to confidential transactions.
According to company figures, the protocol shielded more than 121 million USDT on Ethereum in its first weeks. Zama also co-founded the Confidential Token Association with OpenZeppelin and Inco to standardize encrypted ERC-20s.
Zama previously raised $57 million in a Series B round to bring end-to-end encryption to public blockchains. FHE is competing with zero-knowledge approaches as a route to onchain privacy, with the two methods handling encrypted state differently.
The company said mainnet activation is scheduled for the end of the year, which would provide the first live test of the throughput claim.