ERC-7984

Smart Contract Standard

An Ethereum token standard for confidential fungible tokens. Structurally similar to ERC-20, but balances and transfer amounts are stored on-chain as ciphertext handles — pointers to encrypted values held by a fully homomorphic encryption co-processor — so no amount is publicly readable while transfers remain composable and verifiable. Selective disclosure is possible through view keys, allowing compliance and audit without making balances public. A companion wrapper registry maps existing ERC-20 tokens to their ERC-7984 confidential equivalents, letting any ordinary token gain confidentiality. This is the first entry in this file to use FHE rather than zero-knowledge proofs as its privacy primitive.

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License Permissive (MIT) — reference implementation in OpenZeppelin Confidential Contracts; ERC text published openly through the EIP process
Dev Status 🟢 Active
Owner Co-authored by OpenZeppelin and Zama, with Inco; the three co-founded the Confidential Token Association, which also involves Stellar, Fhenix and Predicate. Published as an Ethereum ERC through the open EIP process
Governing Body Ethereum EIP/ERC process | Confidential Token Association (industry consortium co-founded by OpenZeppelin, Zama and Inco, also involving Stellar, Fhenix and Predicate)
Country International — OpenZeppelin, Zama (France) and Inco; the Ethereum EIP process is jurisdiction-independent
Start Year 2026
Stack Solidity — contracts built on OpenZeppelin's Confidential Contracts library, using the Zama fhEVM co-processor for FHE operations on ciphertext handles
Funding Corporate / venture — OpenZeppelin and Zama contributed the authoring work; Zama is venture-funded with a token launched February 2026. No separate funding attaches to the standard itself
Last Investigated Jul 1, 2026

Use Case Domains

Platform Evolution & Sovereignty

Smart Contract Standard Attributes

Origins Ethereum token standards / privacy — motivated by the fact that ERC-20 makes every balance and transfer publicly readable, which blocks institutional and payroll use cases, and by the maturation of FHE co-processors making encrypted on-chain arithmetic practical
Data Formats Solidity contract interface; balances and amounts as FHE ciphertext handles (pointers to encrypted values on the co-processor) rather than plaintext integers; view keys for selective disclosure
Terms Free / open standard — no licensing fee for the ERC or the MIT reference implementation. Operational cost is Ethereum gas plus FHE co-processor usage
Funds N/A for the standard; underlying co-processor development is venture-funded (figures not confirmed in the sources reviewed)
Based On ERC-20 (interface lineage and mental model); Zama fhEVM and TFHE-based fully homomorphic encryption (ciphertext handles and encrypted arithmetic); OpenZeppelin Confidential Contracts library; Ethereum EIP process
Permissions Cryptographic — balance visibility is controlled by view keys held by the account owner, who may grant selective disclosure to an auditor, regulator or counterparty. No ACL at the contract level beyond ordinary token semantics
Development Tools OpenZeppelin Confidential Contracts library with published API reference and worked ERC-7984 examples; Zama Protocol SDK including wallet and exchange integration guides; a Confidential Token Wrappers Registry mapping ERC-20 tokens to ERC-7984 equivalents
Protocol Maturity / Standardization Ethereum ERC with a production reference implementation and a multi-organization standards body (the Confidential Token Association). Formal EIP status field not confirmed in the sources reviewed — check eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-7984 before finalising
Trust Framework Cryptographic with an operational dependency — confidentiality rests on FHE, so amounts are never decrypted on-chain, but the co-processor performing the encrypted computation must behave correctly and remain available. Threshold decryption is used for view-key disclosure rather than any single party holding a master key
Target Application Domain Confidential payments and onchain finance — stablecoins, payroll, institutional settlement, OTC trades, and any use case where public balances are commercially or personally unacceptable. Also compliance tooling, since selective disclosure enables audit without public exposure
Deployment Model Deployed contracts per token, plus a shared wrapper registry — each confidential token is its own ERC-7984 deployment, while the Confidential Token Wrappers Registry provides canonical mappings from existing ERC-20 tokens. Requires an FHE co-processor (currently Zama's) alongside the host chain
Standard Type Token interface standard (ERC) — defines a fungible-token interface and behavioural rules, in the same family as ERC-20 and ERC-3643, but with encrypted state as the defining departure
Ecosystem Ethereum and EVM chains via the Zama Protocol as a cross-chain confidentiality layer; Confidential Token Association members include OpenZeppelin, Zama, Inco, Stellar, Fhenix and Predicate; Shibarium integration announced for 2026