Trade your shielded $ZEC for confidential USDC on Ethereum, without ever unshielding it.
No bridge. No custodian. No wrapped ZEC. And the amount never shows up on chain.
I connected
@zama and
@Zcash to make it work.
Live on testnet 👇
What it is
ZEC Desk is a small trading desk on Zama's FHEVM, on Ethereum Sepolia. On one side there's cUSDC, a dollar token whose balances are encrypted. On the other side there's shielded ZEC on Zcash testnet.
You can trade either way.
Built on Zama's model
Zama's Confidential RFQ is already live on Ethereum mainnet, open to everyone:
It runs confidential swaps with encrypted quotes, a sealed-bid pick on chain and a hidden floor.
ZEC Desk takes that same model and extends it to native shielded ZEC. Zama's swap settles both legs on one chain, inside its own contract, so a Zcash leg can't plug into it directly.
Here that leg lives on Zcash and settles minutes later with a proof, so the mechanics run in my own contract. It's a sketch of how native ZEC could sit next to Zama's swaps one day, with no wrapped token.
How a trade works (buying ZEC) 👇
1️⃣ You lock cUSDC in the desk. The amount is encrypted.
2️⃣ Makers send encrypted quotes. Nobody sees anyone else's price, or the minimum you'll accept.
3️⃣ The contract picks the best one under FHE.
4️⃣ The winning maker sends shielded ZEC to your Zcash address, with the order's reference in the memo.
5️⃣ A zero-knowledge proof shows that payment happened, and the contract releases your cUSDC to the maker.
If no proof arrives in time, your cUSDC comes back to you.
Selling is the same in reverse: the maker locks cUSDC, you pay the ZEC, and the proof releases the cUSDC to you.
Why these pieces
Each piece does one job. Zcash keeps the payment private. Zama keeps the amounts encrypted and can still compute on them.
Seam, the Zcash light client I built last month, connects the two: a contract checks every Zcash block header itself, and a RISC Zero proof shows a shielded payment reached the right receiver.
The transaction, the note and the address never touch the EVM chain.
The masked amount
This was the hard part. Seam's proof used to write the paid amount in the clear, and ZEC amount × price gives away the dollar amount.
So the amount is masked. The contract adds an encrypted one-time mask to the encrypted amount and reveals only the sum, which looks random to everyone else.
The mask comes from a secret that the side receiving the ZEC hands to the payer. The proof checks that the payment was at least the sum minus the mask, and never states the amount.
One-time pads are old, and Zama's RFQ uses one too. Using one to hand a value from FHE to a ZK proof is the part I haven't seen before. If you have, please send it my way.
No vault, no signers
Seam can read Zcash, but it can't take ZEC from anyone. So the design never needs someone to pay ZEC on someone else's behalf. Whoever pays, pays from their own wallet, and the escrow on the EVM side enforces the deal. The side that paid the ZEC can prove it itself, so nobody depends on the other side's goodwill.
Seam does more than this
Any EVM app that needs to know a shielded payment happened can use Seam: pay-with-ZEC checkouts, escrows, payouts, cross-chain orders. This desk is one example.
Where it stands ↓
Testnet only, unaudited. On 12 November 2026 I ran a Buy end to end:
➡️ Settled with a proof:
➡️ One proof: 2 minutes on a rented RTX 4090, about $0.25 for the whole session
➡️ Gas per Buy on Sepolia: about 7.6M, in six transactions
➡️ A Sell also ran on Sepolia, up to the maker locking its cUSDC; it settles through the same proof step
➡️ Seam's light client is now deployed on Ethereum Sepolia too, next to Base Sepolia
Where it can go ↓
→ The desk only needs Zama's FHEVM and a cUSDC. Both already run on Polygon, where following Zcash costs a fraction of Ethereum mainnet.
→ Zama keeps adding chains. On any cheap EVM chain it reaches, the same desk can run, and if it comes to Base, Seam's relay already runs on Base Sepolia.
→ Zama's roadmap also goes beyond the EVM, to chains like Solana. Seam's verifier would need a port there.
→ On Ethereum mainnet, following Zcash header by header would cost over 2B gas a day, so batched header proofs are next for Seam.
What it can't do yet
- Settlement takes minutes, not seconds. Zcash confirmations set the pace, not the GPU.
- Right now I'm the only maker, and a maker needs ZEC, cUSDC and a GPU.
- Amounts are hidden, but EVM addresses are public.
Read more ↓
Seam on
Seam:
ZEC Desk:
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code for review :
Prompt :
Create a 2D anime short for the web. It must look completely like real Japanese anime, as if it were taken directly from a finished theatrical anime film. This is traditional-looking, hand-drawn 2D anime, not a 3D animation, a moving illustration, or a stylized web graphic.
Deliver the final result as a single, self-contained HTML file that plays offline, with a synthesized soundtrack. Use any tools, libraries, references, guides, literally anything etc.
Use theatrical mecha and kaiju anime as the art style reference for the design, line work, painted backgrounds, color, and atmosphere. The film is 83 seconds long, in 39 shots. Its characters are a colossal silver archer robot, a fleet of container ships, and a leviathan. No people appear in the film. Use any tools or techniques you want, including 3D, as long as the final result looks 100% like hand-drawn 2D anime.
SCENE
A blazing sunny day on a coast. A massive armored archer robot, a hundred meters tall, stands in a deep lunge on a headland and draws a bow taller than itself. Close-ups: the hand on the grip, the limb and cable, the foot planted in the surf. Blue energy crawls along the arrow into the chest armor until the arrowhead blazes like crystal. The string snaps forward and a shockwave flattens the sea. The arrow is a harpoon trailing a thin cable. It tears the clouds into two walls above a ship's deck, climbs through the cloud tops, and reaches the edge of space in a blue flash along the planet's limb.
Out at sea, container ships cross a colossal shadow. Four humpback whales breach beside a ship, with real arcs and full tail flukes, and dive tail last. From below, shapes move under the bright churning surface. Four whale heads rise from a boiling sea, and a ring of teeth rises around them: they are lures inside a mouth. They drop in and the jaws shut. The leviathan breaches through the fleet in one slow, enormous arc. Its belly slides past the bridge windows. The swell it leaves lifts the ships and stands one on end, spilling containers. Its ridged back and flukes sink into spray fog.
High above, the arrow turns over and comes back red-hot through the atmosphere. Below the surface, the leviathan crawls through a luminous canyon on clawed forelimbs and swallows a fleeing whale. A thin streak meets the sea on the horizon and a white plume swells up. The harpoon drives through its back in a blue-white flash, lightning runs along its body, and the barbed tip punches out of its belly into the rock, which bursts apart. The cable stays attached the whole time, rising to the surface. A mountain of water swells from the sea. The dying leviathan erupts, rolls over between the ships and falls, and a wall of water takes the fleet.
ANIME QUALITY STANDARD
Every frame must look as if it was drawn by professional anime animators and painted by master background artists for a finished theatrical film.
Archer: A massive, heavy anime mecha with sculpted overlapping armor plates, panel lines, bolts, markings and a faceted chest reactor that glows blue. Hands really grip the bow and string. The arrow never passes through the armor. Keep it on-model from every angle.
Leviathan: Whale-like and colossal, always dwarfing the ships. Rough, dark grey-teal wet hide with barnacles and scars, a pale ribbed throat, a spined back, huge clawed flippers, and a cavernous maw with uneven teeth. A real bending body with weight, never a stiff model hanging on pillars of water.
Whales: Real humpback anatomy with tail stock, big notched flukes and long curved flippers rooted in the body.
Ships: Detailed container ships with corrugated multicolor containers, lashing bars and a white bridge tower.
Line art: Confident, delicate, hand-inked anime line work with subtle variation in thickness and pressure.
Coloring: Traditional anime cel coloring with clean color areas, hard-edged cool lavender-blue shadows, crisp highlights, and a bright, high-key, saturated palette. Never gloomy, grey or muddy, even in the darkest moments of the story.
Backgrounds: Richly detailed, hand-painted anime backgrounds in a gouache style: towering white cumulus, a cobalt-to-turquoise sea at kilometer scale, a painted coast with a far town, Earth from orbit, a port city from the stratosphere.
Underwater: Luminous cyan depth with god rays, a rippling surface seen from below, jagged canyon rock, silt and fish. Bright, not black.
Lighting: Summer sun with colorful shadows, and a separate character key light so that nothing sinks into shade.
Effects: Bold drawn anime FX on twos and threes. Sharp lightning with a white core, plasma trails, sheets of water pouring off the body, plumes, spray and a wall of water with real mass. Never particle mush or cotton-wool clouds.
Animation: Authentic hand-drawn anime timing, with characters on twos, strong key poses, natural holds, and overlapping movement. Huge things move slowly and heavily. Nothing clips, slides or floats.
Sound: An original epic score with ominous drones, brass and choir, near silence before the impact, then a colossal hit. Add a recurring whale-song motif, bow creak, charge whine, sonic boom, thunder and the sea, muffled underwater, all timed to the picture.
Direction: Cinematic shots, macro close-ups against huge wide shots, thoughtful staging, and pacing that builds from quiet tension to a devastating climax.
IT MUST NOT LOOK LIKE
- 3D: No plastic materials, CGI shading, visible polygons, game-engine lighting, or computer-perfect perspective.
- Blocky "Minecraft" shapes: No plain boxes, empty flat surfaces, or toy-like proportions. Every surface carries design detail.
- SVG or vector art: No simple geometric shapes, perfect curves, uniform outlines, flat corporate illustration, or basic gradients.
- Web animation: No sliding layers, constant bobbing, floating parts, smooth software easing, or puppet-like joint rotation.
- Pasted-on elements: No 2D sprites floating in a 3D scene.
- AI art: No warped shapes, melted details, flickering, or changing designs.
- Non-anime art: No Western cartoon designs, realistic rendering, soft painterly shading on the characters, or generic digital illustration.
- Amateur work: No stiff poses, empty backgrounds, muddy colors, clip art, placeholders, or unfinished details.
You are free to change any part of the prompt, if it would result in better results.
The result should feel enormous, terrifying and beautiful, a blockbuster in bright anime colors.
Before finishing, inspect random frames as still images. If any frame does not look completely like real 2D anime, keep improving it.
Do not stop until every frame could pass as a still from a theatrical anime film.
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And yeah
@fermah_xyz started with a problem that sits deep inside the ZK stack.
Zero knowledge applications can prove that a computation was done correctly, but producing those proofs at scale takes serious infrastructure:
specialised hardware, several proving systems, workload scheduling, and reliability and cost controls. A team building a ZK rollup, zkVM, bridge or coprocessor cannot simply ask for "a proof" and move on.
Fermah's first answer was a universal proof generation layer. Provers with GPUs and other hardware supply capacity, applications that need proofs create the demand, and Fermah matches the two. That marketplace is now called Froben.
The problem behind the proof
Running this in production exposed something bigger. A proof is one step in a longer sequence. Something has to trigger the work, the work has to run, the result has to be verified, and then the result usually has to start the next action.
Fermah's argument is that blockchains are good at recording state and weak at starting what happens next. Take a lending position that crosses its liquidation threshold. The chain records the fact, but nothing forces the liquidation. A keeper, bot or backend still has to notice the condition, build the transaction and submit it. Consensus settles what happened, and a human run service still decides what happens after.
Fermah calls the missing piece protocol agency: a protocol's ability to act on a verifiable condition without depending on an outside operator.
What Kernel does
Kernel is Fermah's Protocol Agency Engine, and its pitch is short: Define. Execute. Attest. A developer defines a workflow, Kernel runs it, and the result is published onchain with a cryptographic proof.
Three design choices matter here:
-Typed nodes. Workflows are built from a library of verified building blocks such as HTTP calls, onchain reads, price feeds and math functions. The type system validates how they connect before anything runs.
-Sandboxed execution. Workflows run in an isolated environment built for untrusted code, and the same inputs always produce the same output.
- AI where it helps, code where it counts. Fermah says AI agents can compose workflows, but deterministic code executes them, with no LLM in the execution path.
Kernel can work as an oracle too. A smart contract requests a workflow, Kernel runs it, and the contract receives the result with a proof that the workflow ran exactly as written.
Froben and Flashcast
Fermah did not walk away from ZK. Froben still runs, now on top of Kernel, and its paying customers include ZKsync Era and Abstract.
In Froben, a workflow defines the proving pipeline and Kernel schedules the work across the prover fleet.
Flashcast Social shows a different use of the same engine. A user posts a question, and within seconds it becomes a live prediction market. Kernel then runs the resolution workflow and settles the market automatically when the event happens, with no committee and no dispute window.
Proof generation and market resolution have little in common on the surface. What they share is a condition that has to produce an action, and that is the workload Kernel is built around.
Fermah also lists data aggregation, pricing oracles and cross chain coordination as things Kernel can run.
Where agents fit
Fermah's latest thinking extends this to autonomous software agents. An agent working onchain needs to find available actions, check whether it is allowed to run them, pay, execute, and use the output as the input to its next step.
Fermah describes this as action manifests, which make actions machine readable across discovery, eligibility, execution, payment and output.
The shift in one line
The old question was how to generate ZK proofs efficiently at scale.
The new one is how a protocol can turn a verifiable condition into a complete, executable sequence. Proving is still part of the system, but it is now one workload among several that Kernel coordinates.
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