Following our report on Zama, “A Look Into Confidential DeFi,” Ryan Celaj, our head of research, and Kyle Cai, our former senior research analyst, sat down with the company’s CEO and co-founder, Rand Hindi. They discussed Zama’s unexpected foray into crypto, its competitors’ approach to encrypting blockchain data, the “AI apocalypse,” and much more. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You can find the full interview here.
Ryan Celaj: For anyone new to Zama, what are you building and why does it matter?
Rand Hindi: My background is in AI. I did a PhD at 21, built one of the first AI companies, and sold it in 2019. Since 2020, I've been building Zama with my co-founder Pascal Paillier, a pioneer of Homomorphic Encryption. I've also been in crypto for over a decade.
Zama is a confidentiality layer for onchain finance. It lets you pay, trade, invest, and put money in vaults on public blockchains like Ethereum and Solana without everyone seeing what you're doing.
A good analogy is, what HTTPS did for the internet, we're doing for onchain finance.
Kyle Cai: You started with a Steakhouse Financial confidential USDC vault and have since expanded to 16 vaults across five curators: Steakhouse Financial, Armitage by Wintermute, Flowdesk, Rockaway, and Bitwise.
Rand Hindi: The people who need privacy most onchain are those with large positions. This isn't about hiding what you buy with your credit card. It's about making sure competitors and other funds can't see how you trade or allocate your portfolio.
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