Zaiffer launches with €2M backing from Zama and PyratzLabs to bring confidentiality to DeFi

Today, open source cryptography company  Zama and Web3 venture builder PyratzLabs announced a €2 million investment and the creation of Zaiffer. 

This joint venture is dedicated to building the future of confidential, compliant, and composable decentralised finance across Ethereum-compatible blockchains.

Zaiffer introduces confidential tokens (cTokens), which conceal on-chain amounts while preserving sender/receiver audit trails and enabling selective disclosure for exchanges, auditors, or regulators. The approach redefines confidentiality as a right within DeFi while ensuring compliance with global standards.

“Our mission has always been to help builders scale the next generation of Web3 companies,” said Bilal El Almay, co-founder and CEO of Zaiffer. 

“Think of Zaiffer as the VPN for on-chain finance: confidentiality you can turn on or off, without leaving DeFi or changing wallets.

It is a protocol that balances innovation, compliance, and usability. We are proud to partner with Zama to help bring confidential DeFi to market.”

While blockchain transparency underpins trust, it also exposes balances, trade sizes, trade strategies, and treasury moves. This leads to exploitation, copy-trading, targeted liquidations, and corporate data leakage.

For institutions, the absence of confidentiality remains a critical barrier to adoption. Existing confidentiality approaches fall short. Privacy coins operate on isolated networks, mixers break audit trails and face regulatory challenges, and confidentiality-focused technologies like ZK often require new infrastructure and introduce usability hurdles.

Zaiffer closes this gap with a universal, audit-ready confidentiality layer for all EVM tokens and DeFi applications. Zaiffer’s core innovation is the Confidential Token Standard, developed with Zama and OpenZeppelin.

Any ERC-20 or EVM-compatible token can be Shield (wrapped) into its confidential version (e.g., USDC → cUSDC, ETH → cETH, WBTC → cWBTC).

Key properties of cTokens include:

• Hidden amounts: On-chain transfers show encrypted values while preserving sender/receiver links.
• Owner visibility: Users can selectively reveal balances or transactions for record-keeping purposes.
• Selective disclosure: Users may grant time-limited access to third    parties for compliance or audits.

Because cTokens remain interoperable with existing DeFi apps, Zaiffer enables confidentiality without the need for new wallets, bridges, or fragmented liquidity.

According to Rand Hindi, CEO of Zama, Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is ready for mainstream applications. 

“With Zaiffer, we demonstrate FHE’s ability to power real-world financial infrastructure, combining confidentiality with regulatory compatibility. This is a turning point for blockchain adoption.”

Zaiffer leverages Zama’s FHE protocol, a decentralised set of computation nodes that process encrypted values without ever decrypting them. Currently, each encrypted transaction is completed in less than 5 seconds. This ensures confidentiality at the protocol level while supporting:

• Confidential payrolls and (cross-border) payments.
• Private swaps and OTC trades that conceal trade sizes.
• Treasury management and fund strategies shielded from competitors.

Lead image: Freepik.