The Wolf Of All Streets - There’s NO Chance Trillions Move Onchain Until We Solve This

Episode Date: July 18, 2026

Ran Hindi explains why privacy is the biggest obstacle preventing institutions from moving trillions of dollars onchain. He argues that public blockchains are simply too transparent for real-world finance, and that Zama is building the blockchain equivalent of HTTPS by adding confidential transactions to networks like Ethereum and Solana. The conversation explores how encrypted stablecoins, private DeFi, and confidential onchain finance could unlock institutional adoption without sacrificing compliance, ultimately making privacy the default layer for blockchain transactions rather than a niche feature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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with zero extra costs. Go to the Games tab and play FIFA World Cup launch edition now, only on Netflix. Everyone wants trillions of dollars to move on chain, but there's one massive problem. Public blockchains are too... Public. If you trade, pay someone, or move capital, the whole world can potentially see what you're doing. That does not work for real finance, and it definitely does not work for institutions.

Zama is trying to fix that by building what could be the HTT-TPS layer for crypto. Privacy by default on public blockchains like Ethereum and Solana. Today, I'm talking with Rand Hindi from Zama about confidential stable coins, private defy. You can take your shielded confidential USDC tokens and you can earn yields on Morphovolz exactly the same way as if you would with regular non-confidential USC tokens. There's no downside. There's no downside to have your asset shielded. It's a pure upside.

Institutional adoption. There is just no chance that we're going to see trillions moving on chain unless we can solve confidentiality and privacy. That's where Zama comes in. We help the using computer confidentially. And why encryption may be the missing piece that finally brings global finance on chain. Let's go. Let's go. So I think it's fair to say that there's been a problem in crypto where institutions who need full confidentiality have been unable to get that on private or public blockchain. Is that accurate? I think it's even worse than this, actually. Today, if you you want to use a public blockchain to pay someone, everybody knows how much you pay that person,

how much they have in their bank account, how much you have in your bank account. If you want to trade, everybody knows what you're trading. They can frontrun you. They can copy trade you, which is huge in terms of, let's say it creates a lot of loss opportunity for traders. But importantly, I think there's a lot of people, and especially those with large amounts of money to manage. They just don't want to use a technology unless they have some level of confidentiality because they have that intratify. So it's not just institutions, I think, is finance that requires confidentiality. And there's just no chance, no chance that we're going to see trillions moving on chain unless we can solve confidentiality and privacy.

Maybe it would be constructive to talk about what the internet looked like before that existed. what was the solution and what the internet looked like afterwards. Back in the 90s, I don't if you remember, how old are you, by the way? I'm 49, I remember. Okay, you remember. Great. I remember too. So remember there was something called the intranets.

Right. So an intranet was a private network of computers connected within your organization. And you could talk to your coworkers and you could have like a shared database. you could exchange information. And sometimes companies would connect their intranet to other companies intranet to exchange data. This is basically how institutions have been using blockchains up until now.

Every one of them has their own private chain and they talk to each other, but they're fundamentally siloed. What the internet brought was one global public network that everybody could use. It was a way for people to, sell products to anybody in the world as a way for people to access and share information with anybody in the world without having to have this sort of like intranet connectivity between everyone.

This is what public blockchains like Ethereum and Solana are enabling for financial transactions, one global network everybody could use for transacting financially. The problem, however, in the internet of the early days, is if you wanted to buy something on Amazon or any e-commerce website, you had to put your credit card information to anybody on the internet could see it. So paying something online meant revealing your credit card data and what you were purchasing to anybody in the world. This was a very big, it was preventing effectively mass adoption of e-commerce and internet. So people invented something called HTTP, which was simply a layer of encryption on top of

the internet, which allowed you to share information privately with a recipient. So when you sent your credit card information on an e-commerce website, you sent an encrypted credit card number that only the e-commerce website could decrypt and they could actually see it. And all of a sudden, you just enabled global commerce on a single shared network. And from that, we started having private communications. When you're sending a prompt to cloud today, your prompt is encrypted. People online cannot see what you're sending to cloud. So everything that we have today, Google, Entropic, Open AI, Amazon, all of those companies exist because we encrypted the Internet.

And so now, take again a parallel to public chains. If Ethereum and Solana are going to be the internets of global finance, we need an HTTPPS for global finance to run on those. And this is exactly where ZAM actually comes and plays. So it's actually a simple, relatively, not technologically, but conceptually a simple idea that's been proven as one of the most impactful in history. I mean, HTTP, it's not that complicated, right? It's very simple. You encrypt the data.

That's it. And that's exactly what we do for financial transaction on chain. We just encrypt them so that whenever you're paying someone on chain is private. Whenever you're transacting and buying or selling stocks or crypto assets on chain is private. You can have a portfolio of assets that you're managing as an asset manager. You can have a bank account on chain with our people knowing how much money you're making, what you're paying for. We can recreate all of finance completely on-shane with one global network, 24-hour settlement anywhere in the world, instantaneous, with the same level of privacy as you would have in existing financial institutions.

It's so interesting because privacy has become one of the hot topics, again, I would say, because I think in the earlier crypto days, privacy was probably one of the main topics. And then we went through all these crazy bubbles and, you know, people seem to have forgotten about it because I guess they were making so much money at the time. But it seems that we've come home, right? And privacy seems like you're capitalizing on the perfect moment where people are starting to really care about this again. Definitely.

I've been in crypto since 2013. So, you know, this is my fourth or fifth cycle. Like, I don't even count cycles anymore. I'm like, eh, sure, Bitcoin dropped again. Well, see you guys in two years, you know. No, but the reality is what changed, and this was our bet at Zama, by the way. When we decided to build the Zama protocol, you know, the HTTP for on-chain finance, we did it because we saw that institutions.

banks, that people wanted to use blockchain for finance. And this was really like a missing element. So I think people are excited about privacy today, not because of the original cypherpunk ideals that we had initially, but because finance requires it and because people are excited about the prospect of having trillions moving on chain. So to be honest, I think if we do our job rights, nobody cares about privacy anymore.

It will not be a topic. not because we gave up, but because it'll just be by design in every blockchain transaction. It'll just be there. It's in your browser or it's like this small lock when you connect to a website is there.

You know the connection is encrypted. You don't think about it. We have to do the same for blockchain transactions. From a dev perspective, the internet was the internet, right, for HTTP, but now you're talking about having something that needs to effectively fit every chain,

I would imagine. So technologically, is it, you have to create something different for every single chain or is it really a one-size-fits-all solution that you can create? It's very much a one-size-fits-all solution. So there is a version for EVM that works with any EVM chain, Ethereum, base, polygon, Binance. And then there is a Solana version, which works, I guess, for Solana, right?

That's fine. You know, when you're building a mobile app, you build it for Android and iOS. We're building it for EVM and for SVM. And with those two versions, we can target effectively all of blockchain. So the protocol is designed to be cross-chain on day one. There isn't going to be like a different version in every chain. There's just going to be one encryption later. You've got confidential assets shielded USDC on Ethereum.

You can move it shielded to Polygon and Solana. That's really interesting. It seems complicated, but it solves all the interoperability issues, even of transactions and bridges that existed just by using your layer. Is that accurate? I think you have to. Whenever you're building core infrastructure today, you have to build it cross-chain by design. You know, liquidity is fragmented.

People have money on Solana. They have money on Ethereum. If you're a trader and you want to access a liquidity, there needs to be a way to do that seamlessly. And just because you're doing it confidentially shouldn't mean that you have worse access than someone who's using blockchain today. So the baseline is what people have today, on top of which we add confidentiality.

We cannot make things worse than they are without confidentiality. Otherwise, people are just not going to use it. Okay, so you kind of alluded to the fact that everybody needs this. Okay, so let's start with the individual, and then we'll go to the institution. So as an individual, I want to send a transaction to somebody somewhere, and it's a financial transaction that I obviously don't want people to have any visibility into.

Does this feel to me the same as I'm used to from going into Metamask or Phantom and typing in a wallet and sending someone a transaction? Am I using it through your, do I have to go to a different wallet? What does this look like for me who wants to use it tomorrow? I think we've done too good of a job to make it visible that we spend years building this technology and make it work. and now it works so well and it's so seamless that people are like, eh, you know, it doesn't even look magic, right? I'm like, if you knew what went behind making this boring in a way, right? But boring is precisely what you want.

You know, privacy is not what you're selling. What you're enabling is for use cases to come on chain that would not be possible without privacy. So you can use it today with any existing wallet that you have. If you've got MetaMask, Rabi, you're using any one of those things. It works off the shelf. We are currently working on integrating

those confidential tokens into every wallet, every custodian, every exchange so that you can use it just like to use traditional ERC20 tokens. Right now, we also have a Zama app

on app.zama.org that you can go to to manage your confidential assets, to put them in vault, to swap them confidentially. But this user interface we created is just one way that you can interact with confidential assets. Exactly in the same sense that you can swap assets on the Uniswap website or you can do it from Metamask. At the end of the day, you know, this is going to be integrated everywhere. And it doesn't really matter which entry point the user is going through. It's just going

to be a wallet. I mean, dude, does this get to the point eventually in your mind where it just becomes the default of every transaction that everybody does on every chain and we don't even know it? Like kind of as you're saying, like I just go into my metamask, I send something and you guys have integrated in some way, shape, or form, and I'd never even think about it at all. Exactly. There's a point. There's a point. And, you know, for that to happen, you need two things. First of all, you need integrations. So you need this to be supported everywhere so that you never have to think about, oh, this is shielded, it doesn't work in this wallet. So you need every wallet, every on and off ramp, every exchange, every touchpoint in the crypto ecosystem has to support

it. This is the work we've been doing this year, really kind of like getting those integrations done. The second thing you need is utility. Great, I've got shielded USDC. What for? What do I do with it? I can send it to people, but can I make money? Can I make yield on it? Can I swap it? So that's where you need to start integrating with a broader financial and defy ecosystem. And this is precisely what we launched recently with Morpho and Stakehouse. We launched the first confidential USDC vault with Stakehouse on top of Morpho. You can take your shielded confidential USDC tokens and you can earn yield on Morpho vaults exactly the same way as if you would with regular non-confidential USDC tokens. So think about that for a second. You can have the same

yield, actually better because we incentivize it, you can have the same yielder better with confidential assets than non-confidential assets. So my question is, why not do it confidentially? There is no downside. Zero. There is no downside to having your asset shielded. It's pure upside. I agree. And that kind of speaks to the individual in the way that we behave with blockchains. But I've got to imagine when we start talking about the black rocks of the world and the largest institutions, as you said, we kind of have a, have had a chicken and an egg problem. They want to bring trillions of dollars and quadrillions and volume literally into tokenize assets and settlement, but they can't do that if I can literally just go on the blockchain explorer and see what

BlackRock's doing, right? So I guess maybe speak to how they do that now without the privacy layer or if they've already moved to privacy and how this will, you know, solve those problems for them. There are two sort of forces happening right now in Onshin finance. We've got the defy native financial players, the creators like Steakhouse, the protocols like Morphua and Uniswap. They're moving progressively towards more traditional finance products as well, right? Offering yield coming from different products than just collateralized lending, right? So you've got this bottom-up momentum that's happening going from defy to this sort of middle ground that we now call on-chain finance. It's not defy, it's not trac-fi, is something in the middle. And at the same time,

you've got Trat-Fi, the Black Rocks and the other guys, starting to move on-chain, but they still want to keep the level of compliance that they have with Trad-Fi, the confidentiality they have with Trat-Fi, the liquidity, the access, the distribution they have with Trat-Fi. And so So on-chain finance is where those two world meet, where Define TractFi actually sort of like end up merging is on-chain finance. So I think you need to serve both. I think you need to work very closely with the morphos and the curators and you need to work very closely with the institutions and the Black Rocks so that we can find this gigantic

trillion-dollar market called on-chain finance. So I just want to talk, I guess, a little bit more about what you've built. I'm looking at it through here. Obviously, you know, it's kind of built by Paris FHE cryptography company, right? And so you guys are running the Zama Protocol here. You raise $115 million. Yeah. Of 150 total, 57 in a series B led by Pantera blockchain.

So at a $1 billion valuation. So just people understand. We're talking about a unicorn here. This isn't some nascent idea. No, it's not. Actually, I started working on FHE in 2015. My previous company that I was running was an AI company already focusing on privacy. I sold that company in 2019.

In 2015, I discovered FHE full homomorphic encryption, which is a way that you can compute on encrypted data without having to decrypt it. So think about it like end to an encryption for any kind of ongoing. service that you might want to use. Unfortunately, back in the days, a decade ago, it didn't work. It was too slow, very hard to use. You could barely do things with it. So it was a good idea, but not doable in practice.

When I sold my company, a week later, I started Zama with my co-founder Pascal Paye, who was one of the inventors of FHE. And we didn't really know yet what the product was going to be. We just wanted to make FHE work. So we assembled the Avengers team of corporate team of cryptographers and researchers, you know, to just look, you know, here's a bunch of money, make it work pretty much, right? And a couple of years later, it did start to work. And so we started looking for what did the market want to apply it for? Is it confidential AI? Is it

blockchain? Is it databases? And what's interesting is that when you look at cloud applications like AI, if you trust the provider that you're, you know, working with entropic, Open AI, Google. And if they don't get hacked, technically your data is not public, right? Sure, they see it, but your neighbor doesn't. And for most people, that's good enough. That's what most people are happy with. Blockchain didn't give you that opportunity.

If you used a blockchain application, if you did finance on chain, the whole world, including your neighbors, would actually see what you're doing. And we looked at this, we're like, oh, wow, our technology is a vitamin for cloud applications, but it's a painkiller for blockchain applications. How big is the market if you enable confidentiality on public networks like Ethereum? Well, if you look at how big the internet became with HTTPS, I think it's pretty clear that blockchain and on-chain finance is going to be trillions and trillions of dollars more with confidentiality. And so a couple of years ago, we're like, you know what, let's go all in on that, decided to refocus the entire company with one single purpose in. enable confidentiality on public blockchain and drive adoption of that so that in, let's say,

four years, 95% of financial transactions on Ethereum and Solana will be encrypted using Zama. That's the goal. 95% in four years. Quite a goal. So who's using it now? Obviously, I read about T-Rex ledger, which 32 billion in tokenized assets. So this is very much in use already.

T-Rex is huge. I mean, we haven't rolled out with them yet. But we are the privacy partner for their protocol. So TREX, the protocol, is being launched by APEX Group. Apex is a $3.5 trillion asset servicing companies, like one of the biggest tri-fi institution out there. They've already committed to tokenize $100 billion of assets on TREX. To give you some sense of the scale that represents, all of RWAs on public chains today

is about $25 billion. So the one partner that TREX has, Apex, is going to tokenize four times more assets than all of blockchain RWA's today. Over that $100 billion, if only 5% is shielded using Zama, 5%. I'm not talking about 95%. 5%.

It would make Zama the largest protocol in terms of value shielded, bigger than Zama. Zcash. So one partner, 5% of one partner integration is enough to Mxama bigger than Zcash. Like that is the scale we're talking about here. Like finance is literally trillions. Defi is peanuts in comparison to the amount of money coming on chain once you have confidentiality. So does this function sort of for people who, you know, don't quite get the depth of it, like a swap? You swap into the shielded asset, and then you go about your business with the shielded asset,

and basically it's private once you're in it. But you, that how it? It's not a swap. The way it works is more like, you know, like you can have eth and wrapped eth. Effectively, you know, you just send, let's say you want to have shielded USDC. You take your USDC and you deposit it into the confidential USDC contract on Ethereum. So this is on Ethereum. You're not bridging, right?

It's on Ethereum. The confidential USDC contract will then mint the same amount that you deposited as confidential USDC. So sure, people can see how much you deposited because by definition that's public. But from that point, every transfer you're making, every token you're receiving is shielded. So people don't know how much you're moving around, how much your balance actually ends up being. And whether you're swapping confidentially, depositing in the Stakehouse, Morphi Vault confidentially, nobody has any idea how much money you have.

But that's a beautiful thing. You're on Ethereum. You're not on a different chain. We're not asking you to use a new L-1. You're on Ethereum. Your money's on Ethereum. Is she'll it on Ethereum? You're swapping on Ethereum.

It's Ethereum with encryption. So interestingly, if I have, say, shielded USC and I want to go trade, right? What about the asset that I'm purchasing? That's, I assume, not shielded. If I swap into some new alt-coin or something like that, right? That's correct. That's the reason why we're adding more and more assets to the protocol so that you never have to do that. So you can go from shielded asset to shielded asset back to what's effectively your vault and all that's ever seen is what you deposited or removed from that vault once you decide to, I guess, if you decide to go out of the shielded assets. That's great, which if we're a job right, you're never going to actually unshield.

Like there's no reason for you to unshield. If every wallet, every unlaw, every exchange, every swap, every lending protocol. support shielded assets and that's the goal that's exactly the goal right which shouldn't be a problem because eventually i mean even if i'm an american so we obviously are in a very like highly regulated and watched i would imagine as as it goes less than europe right if eventually okayx or coin base or crack in or all of these you know are accepting your shielded asset the government will still see when i go to cash right because there's nothing i can do about that but they won't be able to see kind of what I do in between, which I think is really the somewhat ideal version.

So that actually is interesting conversations. So compliance, people think about compliance as KYC, right? Compliance is different. Compliance is primarily about how can you make sure that people using your products are using it for legitimate reasons. So how do you make sure that North Korea is not laundering money? How do you make sure that, you know, a terrorist group is not getting funded that way. And we don't want that. I want to be very clear about something. The market for

compliant finance on chain is a million times bigger than the market for illicit activity on chain. The terrorist financing money laundering is a tiny use case in comparison to, you know, banks settling on chain, people paying for the groceries and investors putting money into all kinds of different ETFs. So we've made a position very clear, ZAMA will not welcome illicit activity in the protocol, period. And the way that we do that is that we enable the token issuers and the defy companies and the financial service providers to build their compliance rules directly into their confidential assets and applications in the Zama protocol. So when I'm issuing confidential USDC after someone deposited USDC, the user can see their own balance, obviously.

But me as a token issuer, I can also authorize myself or my compliance officer to see all the activities of people using my assets. And so by doing that, you're kind of recreated what Tritfi has today, where I see my bank accounts. My bank sees my bank accounts, but my neighbor does. doesn't see if they can count. Yeah. Right. And then compliance is just track-fied compliance.

You don't have to reinvent it. You know, it's the same as we've had. Right. So it literally doesn't, it doesn't allow for any illicit activity. It has the same protections. It just gives you, like, if I want to go to a store and pay with cash,

the world doesn't need to know that I went and paid with cash. Exactly. It doesn't mean I'm doing anything wrong. I'm just paying with cash. Exactly. And we've gone one step further than this. We've actually,

we do what's called transitive compliance. So if the underlying asset is shielded, let's say if you're shielding USDC into confidential USDC, if Circle freezes an address in USDC, it automatically propagates and freezes the asset in confidential USDC as well. So you don't actually have to do anything. You know, you just need Circle to do what they're doing and then it will just propagate into confidential USDC automatically. And I really think that this is how things should be. You know, I don't think that that we as the protocol should decide what assets should be frozen, but the token issuer who's issuing confidential stable coins

or whatever else, they can decide whatever they want this right for their own business. You couldn't work with USDC and Tether if that wasn't the case, because they've always very transparently said, you know, we work with law enforcement, if there's a lift of activity, they freeze things, right? That's normal, so it has nothing to do with you. Yeah, just do it, you know, not our problem.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I mean, I find this so absolutely fascinating. You said 95% in four years, was that sort of the goal? Well, that's my goal, you know? But even if we reach a fraction of that, the market for on-chain finance is so huge. Because it's not just that the number of confidential transactions will be bigger in four years, is that the amount of dollars on-shane will be bigger as well. And so if you compound those two things, so the addressable market growing and the adoption of a 10 times bigger pie.

I mean, 10% of on-chain finance in four years is 10 times bigger than all of defy today. Right. Right. So it's just the reason why I'm saying 95% is because encryption technologies, HTTPPS and alike, have a tendency to have very strong network effects and to become a winner-take-sol kind of markets. Yeah, once it works. It works. You know, if you're shielding your assets in Zama, they're not compatible with assets shielded in a different privacy protocol.

And so you could unshield it and move it, but then you're losing privacy. So I think that there is a very strong network effect in having the liquidity before others do. And from that, you can compound into this 95% adoption curve. This is a winner-takes-all situation. Well, 100% winner-takes-all situation. and I'm very well set on being the winner in this market for sure. Yeah, it sounds that way. Because I've got to imagine there were a lot of competitors

to the idea of HTTPS that we don't remember these days. Honestly, you know what? I'll tell you something. Or other idea. Yeah. Interesting. I've spoken to hundreds of customers, partners, partners, everybody integrating this.

I have yet to see someone else than Zama and Canton on those deals. That's it. There are two companies being considered right now, Canton for like intranet type privacy and Zama for internet type privacy. That's it. Do you differentiate that in a way. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, Canton is intranets and we're HTTPs. Like that's how really how you think. Both have value, right, to be clear. And Canton is a fantastic company and they're doing an incredible job onboarding everybody to blockchain. I think we serve a different purpose. You know, I think, you know, if an institution wants to use Ethereum, that's where Zama comes in.

Canton doesn't help them use Ethereum confidentially. We help them use Ethereum confidentially. But we don't go and deploy a chain in your organization. That's not our job. So I think, you know, we're going to have both. There's going to be, I think where this is going is you're going to have Canton-like consortiums between large institutions. So banks will talk to each other, kind of like you have, you know, interbank settlement networks. Yeah, I was just going to say, underbank sentiment. Yep. Same thing, right?

And they'll use Canton for that, for sure. But then you've got, you know, e-commerce. You've got Visa, MasterCard, Swift, all of these things, you know, running on public rails. This is more of like Razama is actually coming in. Yeah. Very, very big. Yeah. Anything else that I missed here?

Because, you know, I feel like I have a good grasp of it in the audience will too, but that doesn't mean that I asked every question that I should have asked. I think it's pretty good. Awesome, man. It's really impressive. It really is. And I think, you know, I've never heard anybody address the problem holistically. It seems like, you know, you kind of get a solution to each tiny problem.

But as you said, that seems like it will be so disjointed and that there's no way that wins. So, you know, I give you all the credit in the world for being the winner takes all here. You're a good host. You're a good host. I appreciate it, man. Thank you so much, Rand. Thank you for having me.