Zama Acquires KKRT Labs to Scale Blockchain Confidentiality

The acquisition announced on November 5th, 2025, brings together two complementary forces in the blockchain cryptography space. Zama, known for its confidential blockchain protocol, gains KKRT Labs’ specialized expertise in designing high-performance proving architectures and modular rollup systems for Ethereum-equivalent environments. This strategic move significantly strengthens Zama’s technical depth in blockchain scalability and validity rollups while accelerating its ability to deliver high-performance confidentiality to all public blockchains.

According to Rand Hindi, CEO at Zama, “KKRT Labs has assembled one of the best ZK-rollup teams in the world. Together, we will scale faster and reach new levels of performance, bringing the Zama Protocol to tens of thousands of transactions per second.” The combined entity aims to process 10,000+ confidential transactions per second on public chains such as Ethereum and Solana, opening up critical financial applications including confidential stablecoin payments, confidential DeFi, and confidential on-chain asset management.

KKRT Labs, also known as “Kakarot,” comes to the acquisition with impressive credentials and backing from prominent industry figures. The company was supported by investors including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Starkware, Lambda Class, and Stake Capital. Buterin commented on the acquisition, noting that “Kakarot has played a significant role in advancing the state of cryptographic technologies in Ethereum, from their early pioneering work on ZK-EVMs to their work on client-side proving for privacy preservation.”

Eli Ben Sasson, co-founder of ZCash and CEO of StarkWare, added his endorsement, stating: “I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with the exceptional Kakarot team over the years and witnessing firsthand what they can build. They’ve achieved tremendous success by taking a simple PoC from some of our engineers three years ago and turning it into impressive technology.” This strong industry backing underscores the significance of the acquisition and the potential impact on blockchain confidentiality and scalability.

Zama has committed to ensuring a seamless integration of KKRT Labs, with plans for full team retention of KKRT’s key engineers, operations, and leadership. The integration strategy includes aligning KKRT’s ongoing initiatives with Zama’s broader product and engineering roadmap with minimal disruption. This approach recognizes the value of KKRT’s talent and expertise in advancing Zama’s ambitious scaling objectives.

Clément Walter, co-founder of KKRT Labs, emphasized the strategic alignment between the two companies: “Joining Zama allows us to bring our expertise towards scaling one of the last major challenges in blockchain: confidentiality. We’ve always believed scalability and confidentiality are essential to the adoption of blockchains, and by joining forces with Zama we can finally make high-throughput, low latency confidential on-chain finance a reality.” Both teams share a common philosophy centered on open-source innovation, confidentiality-first infrastructure, and democratizing access to advanced cryptographic technology.

The acquisition represents a convergence of complementary technologies and philosophies. Zama brings its state-of-the-art Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) solutions and the largest research team in FHE, having raised $150 million at a $1.2 billion valuation from investors including Multicoin, Pantera, and Protocol Labs. KKRT Labs contributes its zero-knowledge R&D expertise focused on building modular proving engines for Ethereum-equivalent systems. Together, they aim to demonstrate that scalability and confidentiality are not trade-offs but complementary building blocks for the next generation of decentralized systems.