On Thursday, November 27, a Shiba Inu executive, Lucie, confirmed that the team is preparing a significant privacy upgrade for the Shibarium network as the Zama public testnet goes live.
The upgrade, which has been planned to take effect before the end of Q2 2025, will see Shibarium leverage Zama’s fast-growing Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) technology.
With this, Shibarium will be able to gain full on-chain privacy and confidential smart contracts in the coming year to redefine how privacy and security function across the SHIB ecosystem.
Nonetheless, Lucie further shared an image revealing Zama’s updated protocol roadmap, which shows that its public testnet is already live.
Furthermore, its Ethereum mainnet deployment took effect in the last quarter in 2025, and broader EVM-chain support will roll out in early 2026.
While Shibarium is fully EVM-compatible, it automatically falls into this next expansion expected to happen in 2026. With this potential development, encrypted transactions, confidential smart contract logic, and private user interactions could soon become native features of Shibarium, powered directly by fhEVM.
While the development positions Shibarium to become a privacy-focused EVM Layer-2 network, it is set to efficiently meet the demand of developers who want to build next-generation DeFi, gaming, governance, and institutional tools without exposing user data.
What does Zama entail?
The initiative behind the launch of Zama follows efforts to remediate the issues associated with overly transparent public blockchains that expose user behavior and contract data to anyone with a block explorer.
To solve this problem, Zama allows smart contracts to run while all data and state remain encrypted throughout execution, even while staying fully on-chain.
This development, which is set to put the Shibarium network in the spotlight, will further boost its adoption among DeFi users, while propelling the ecosystem’s native token SHIB for more demand, which could fuel an upside trajectory for the token.
Dan Burgin
Vladislav Sopov
U.Today Editorial Team