Rand Hindi, CEO of the fully homomorphic encryption firm Zama, said the company reached 1,000 confidential transfers per second on GPUs, a self-reported benchmark he described as a milestone for the privacy technology.
Fully homomorphic encryption, or FHE, lets computations run on encrypted data without decrypting it, a method Zama applies to confidential token transfers on public blockchains. Hindi posted the figures on X on Monday. Zama has not activated the performance on any live network.
Hindi said the 1,000 tps figure is up from 0.2 tps when the company first demoed an FHE smart contract at ETHcc in 2022, which he called a 5,000x improvement in four years. He said running an FHE node now costs about $0.000004 per ERC7984 transaction, which he characterized as orders of magnitude cheaper than zero-knowledge proofs. That cost comparison is Hindi's own framing and is not independently verified here.
Not in Production
The benchmark is not running in production. Hindi said the performance has not been activated on mainnet yet and is planned for end of year alongside other features and improvements. The figures are self-reported by the company and were not accompanied by published test methodology.
Hindi tied the number to Zama's deployment plans. He said 1,000 tps was the milestone the company needed to feel confident launching on chains faster than Ethereum, where users expect low latency, high throughput and near-zero gas fees.
He also set out longer-range targets. Hindi said Zama is confident it will reach 10,000 tps by 2028 and 100,000 tps by 2030, projections that remain aspirational and depend on further gains in cryptography, engineering and hardware.
Active July for Zama
The benchmark caps a busy month for the protocol. The protocol's confidential RFQ swap product went live on July 24, and Zama partnered with Elliptic on July 21 to add compliance screening to confidential transactions. The protocol shielded more than 121 million USDT on Ethereum in its first weeks, per company figures, and Zama co-founded the Confidential Token Association with OpenZeppelin and Inco to standardize encrypted ERC-20s.
Zama raised $57 million in a Series B round to bring end-to-end encryption to public blockchains. FHE competes with zero-knowledge approaches as a route to onchain privacy, with each handling encrypted state differently.
The company said the mainnet activation is scheduled for end of year, which would provide the first live test of the throughput claim.