In the past few days, friends have been asking me whether I will go to @EFDevcon, which may also be
@zama_fhe one of the most notable offline events recently

Devconnect is the annual gathering of the Ethereum community, which will be held in November this year at
Buenos Aires, with the theme 'The Future City Driven by Ethereum'
Zama is taking this opportunity to upgrade their developer program: building each month
tracks, not only rewarding the top five projects but also providing full airfare for the top projects
and the opportunity to showcase at the 'Zama World Expo'. Developers can use
Zama's tools to build FHE applications and then present directly at Devconnect
demo. Think about it, in the past, Devcon was more about zk and layer2's heaven,
now with FHE joining, privacy can become a mainstream topic. Zama's
CEO Rand Hindi emphasized in a recent post that this is a 'bridge from code
to reality', encouraging Solidity developers to 'get on the road with one submission.'
Last month's winners already included some innovative projects, such as encrypted identity
systems and private ML inference, showing that collaboration is already yielding results.

Zama's progress is not isolated; it responds to the needs of the entire crypto ecosystem.
Many friends have mentioned before that the 'openness' of blockchain somewhat
daunts institutions, as banks do not expose their trading strategies to everyone.
However, Zama's FHE makes confidentiality the default setting, such as in DeFi for
implementing sealed bid auctions or conducting hidden votes in DAOs without sacrificing
composability. This reminds me of some community voices pointing out that FHE can bridge
AI and blockchain: models can infer from encrypted datasets and return verifiable
results without leaking the original data. Tools like Concrete ML have
already made PyTorch and ONNX compatible with FHE, suitable for medical or financial
scenarios. Compared to zk, it focuses more on computational privacy rather than proofs; compared to
TEE, it avoids hardware trust issues. Of course, the computational overhead is significant, requiring
coprocessor modes to share the load. However, Zama's multi-chain approach and open-source
strategy are gradually addressing these pain points. Not all projects need their own
chain, but for privacy infrastructure, a dedicated environment can accelerate
iterations and avoid being dragged down by the bottlenecks of existing chains. Zama's collaboration with Devconnect
might mark the transition of FHE from the margins to the center. After multi-chain expansion
next year, we may see more practical implementations: private stablecoin transfers, encrypted
credit scoring, and even on-chain federated learning?

#Zama
#ZamaCreatorProgram