Recently, an interesting technical detail was discovered in the SHIB ecosystem—Shiba Inu and Zama (a Paris-based open-source cryptography team) initiated a strategic partnership as early as February 2024, and this collaboration targets the privacy upgrade plan for Shibarium in 2026.

Speaking of the technical aspect, Zama brings a Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) solution—this sounds complex, but the core logic is quite straightforward: enabling smart contracts to perform computations directly on fully encrypted data without needing to decrypt it first. In other words, transaction amounts, account balances, and even contract logic can be completely confidential. This is true on-chain privacy.

Shibarium's integration plan is also quite concrete. They plan to incorporate Zama's fhEVM (the FHE version of the EVM virtual machine), aiming to make Shibarium one of the few truly native privacy-supporting EVM-compatible public chains. This will enable features like confidential transactions, privacy smart contracts, private DeFi interactions, and even DAO payments.

This technological upgrade will create numerous ripple effects for BONE (used as gas fee and governance token), and in the future, more privacy-oriented applications may be built on Shibarium. It’s worth paying attention to the progress of this route.