Zama Opens Confidential Access to DeFi’s Existing Yield Venues

[PRESS RELEASE – Paris, France, 17th September 2026]

Following June’s launch with Morpho and Steakhouse, Zama extends confidential access to 16 curated vaults across five curators and five asset classes, and opens the Zama Swap Protocol for confidential swaps between positions.

Zama, the fastest growing confidentiality protocol for onchain finance, today announced a major expansion of confidential access to onchain yield in partnership with Morpho, alongside five of the leading DeFi curators: Steakhouse Financial, Armitage by Wintermute, Flowdesk, RockawayX, and Bitwise. The launch adds 16 confidential vaults across 5 asset classes (USDC, USDT, WBTC, AUSD, and TGBP), and opens the public launch of the Zama Swap Protocol, allowing users to confidentially swap between confidential assets on Ethereum.

This launch builds on the confidential Steakhouse USDC Prime vault Zama launched with Morpho and Steakhouse in June 2026, which grew from zero to $40 million in TVL within seven weeks and established confidential DeFi as a proven institutional product category.

On public blockchains, positions, balances, and strategies are visible to competitors and front-runners, a structural blocker to institutional deployment at scale. By expanding the range of curated confidential vaults and adding four new asset classes as deposit assets, Zama enables institutional allocators, corporate treasuries, and active market participants to access diversified onchain yield without disclosing their holdings or strategies.

“When we launched the first confidential USDC vault with Morpho and Steakhouse in June, we proved that confidentiality and DeFi are not mutually exclusive,” said Dr. Rand Hindi, Co-founder and CEO of Zama. “Today’s expansion is proof of the model at scale. Sixteen vaults, five curators, five asset classes, all built on the same DeFi infrastructure that sophisticated capital already uses. Same vaults, same curators, same liquidity, now with confidential entry. This is how confidential DeFi becomes a category and not an experiment.”

The expansion offers depositors two types of confidential vaults, running in parallel:

• 12 Hybrid vaults: confidential entry to existing curated vaults, including the Prime USDT vault curated by Steakhouse. Same strategy, same liquidity, and same risk profile as the underlying vault, with confidential deposit and position.
• 4 Exclusive vaults: net-new confidential-only vaults with no public equivalent, including the Wintermute Confidential WBTC – armcWBTC. (—-)

All 16 vaults are deployed on Morpho and available today through the Zama App. Additional entry points, including Utila, Zerion Wallet, and Yield.xyz, will roll out in the weeks following launch.

The Zama Swap Protocol launches alongside the vault suite, allowing depositors to swap between confidential assets, including all vault share positions, and cUSDC, cUSDT, cWBTC, cAUSD, and cTGBP, without exposing intent or size. This closes the full deposit-earn-swap loop entirely inside a confidential envelope.

“Institutions have increasingly been exploring how onchain capital allocation can be made more confidential to fit their requirements. Adding these confidential vaults on Morpho was an important step for us. It’ll scale confidential DeFi efficiently and open new possibilities for allocators onchain, without changing the strategy, the liquidity, or the risk profile.” said Merlin Egalite, Co-founder of Morpho

“Confidentiality is the condition onchain capital markets have to satisfy before they can carry institutional-scale volume. Through our work with Zama, we’re opening up confidential access to our AUSD RWA Strategy Vault, giving institutional allocators a compliant path onchain.” said Guilhem Chaumont, Co-founder and CEO of Flowdesk.

“We were happy to work with Zama on its first confidential vault, and the market response makes it clear that depositors value confidentiality,” said Sébastien Derivaux, Co-founder of Steakhouse Financial. “The natural next step was to extend that access to a five-vault suite across USDC, USDT, and tGBP. Depositors now have more choice in how they use stablecoins across Morpho, while keeping their positions private.”

“BTC has mostly sat onchain as collateral because there has rarely been meaningful yield to earn on it. The Wintermute Confidential WBTC vault gives WBTC holders a way to actually put it to work, pairing Armitage’s active risk curation with a confidential-only design that has no public equivalent, so positions stay off the public record,” said Igor Igamberdiev, Armitage Lead.

“Zama’s confidential product suite is unlocking institutional adoption opportunities globally including in the UK where stablecoin adoption with large institutions is a greenfield opportunity,” said Benoit Marzouk, CEO of BCP Technologies the issuer of tGBP. “The combination of confidentiality with bluechip protocols like Morpho provide a clear entry point for any institutional player integrating stablecoins into their business.”

“Every position a self-custodial wallet user holds is public by default. That’s one of the reasons people are reluctant to keep large amounts onchain. Zama’s confidentiality layer plugs into vaults people already use rather than asking them to move to a new chain. A wallet can support this natively with minimum friction, and why these vaults are coming to Zerion in the weeks ahead.” — Evgeny Yurtaev, Co-founder & CEO at Zerion.

Institutions can be hesitant to lend onchain for two reasons. They can’t tell exactly what they’re exposed to, and anyone with a block explorer can see what they hold. RockawayX’s RWA vault handles predictable returns and collateral you can check onchain, underwritten the same way we’ve run CeFi and DeFi lending since 2022 with zero defaults. Zama handles the second with its confidentiality platform.” Nassim Alexandre, Head of Onchain Asset Management and Curation at RockawayX.

“Confidentiality should not require institutions to abandon the platforms they already use. Yield.xyz makes Zama’s confidential Morpho Vaults accessible through the same integration layer that wallets and financial platforms use to offer onchain yield. That gives platforms a practical path to support confidential positions while preserving the underlying strategy, liquidity, and risk profile,” said Serafin Lion Engel, Co-Founder and CEO at Yield.xyz.

“Institutions need to protect their investment strategies while maintaining clear control over how capital is deployed,” said Bentzi Rabi, Co-founder and CEO of Utila. “Through our work with Zama, we’re bringing confidential access to Morpho vaults into Utila’s MPC wallet infrastructure, so treasury and investment teams can access onchain yield with the policy controls and approval workflows they rely on across their digital asset operations.”

“Incentives were the one thing confidential assets could not have, because rewarding a balance meant reading it. It was a real pleasure working with the Zama team to change that, extending Merkl’s engine to ERC7984 so campaigns run on encrypted balances. Depositors see an APR and earn, while no position, reward, or leaderboard entry ever becomes public.” said Pablo Veyrat, CEO of Merkl.

This expansion establishes the operational blueprint for further additions to the confidential DeFi ecosystem in 2026 and 2027, including additional curators, asset classes, distribution surfaces, and native institutional custody integrations.

The 16 confidential vaults will officially open for deposits on September 15, 2026 on the Zama app.

For more information, technical documentation, or to review the integration architecture, please visit zama.org or follow @Zama on X.

About Zama – www.zama.org

Zama is the fastest growing confidentiality protocol for onchain finance. By leveraging Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), it enables digital assets to be issued, managed, and traded privately on existing public blockchains such as Ethereum and Solana. Founded by FHE pioneer Dr. Pascal Paillier and entrepreneur Dr. Rand Hindi, Zama brings together one of the world’s largest teams of FHE researchers and engineers and supports a global ecosystem of developers building confidential applications. zama.org.