Stellar Community Fund

ZKELLA Protocol - Compliance-Ready Confidential Finance Infrastructure for Stellar

SCF #45

Description

ZKELLA is a confidential finance infrastructure stack for Soroban. While Stellar is widely used for payments, stablecoins, RWAs, and financial applications, transaction amounts, balances, and asset flows are public by default, creating challenges for institutions, treasury operations, and DeFi protocols.

Protocol 25 (X-Ray) introduced the cryptographic primitives required for zero-knowledge applications on Soroban, including BN254 host functions and Poseidon hashing. While Stellar now has the building blocks for confidential applications, developers still lack reusable infrastructure.

ZKELLA addresses this gap through CT-20, a confidential token standard, ZK circuits and verifier contracts, viewing keys, compliance-oriented disclosure, a note-state indexer, and a TypeScript SDK. Developed by PyratzLabs, ZKELLA brings confidential finance expertise from Zaiffer, its Zama-backed initiative for EVM chains, to the Stellar ecosystem.