Raycash, a spin-out from cryptography company Zama, opened a private beta on Ethereum mainnet on November 9, 2026. The launch covers confidential USDC payments and yield on idle balances, both backed by Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). The company says more than 75,000 people have joined its waitlist, with invite access rolling out in stages.

The core mechanics are straightforward: Raycash wraps ordinary USDC 1:1 into ERC-7984 confidential tokens, so balances and payment amounts stay encrypted while settlement remains onchain. FHE is the technique behind that guarantee — a form of encryption that allows computation directly on encrypted data, so balances can be checked and updated without ever being decrypted. The sharper claim behind the product is that Raycash is taking FHE from the Zama Protocol and packaging it so that a payments app can move dollars across a public chain without publishing the figures.

What the Beta Puts in Users' Hands

Raycash lists itself in Zama's ecosystem as an onchain payments product built around private digital dollars, with cards and banking-style rails part of its product story. The company site is at raycash.xyz.

At launch, the app starts with USDC. Users wrap that USDC into confidential tokens, and unwrapping is permissionless, according to the project — the underlying dollars can move back out without going through a new issuer. Wallets are self-custodial through Privy, a wallet-infrastructure provider, Raycash says, and the firm claims that nobody at the company can move or freeze user money at the key layer. Users can still grant view access to named parties such as an accountant or an auditor, an access-on-request model that contrasts with the public-by-default visibility of ordinary token transfers.

Deposits can arrive by bank transfer, card, or stablecoin, and withdrawals can return to bank accounts. Payment links handle sending, requesting, and receiving. Network fees are handled in the background, so users do not need to hold ETH for gas. Idle balances can earn yield from inside the app through Morpho, a decentralized lending protocol that puts supplied assets to work in lending markets, and a private spending card branded Raycard is listed as coming soon.

On X, Raycash also said 500 private-beta spots are reserved for the Zama community. Balances and transfer amounts stay encrypted by default on the Zama Protocol.

"People shouldn't have to choose between the benefits of stablecoins and keeping their financial information confidential," Raycash CEO and co-founder Valerio Leo said. "We don't ask anyone to trust a new stablecoin: we take the dollars people already use and make them private, and they can move back out whenever they want."

How Confidential USDC Moves on Ethereum

Ordinary ERC-20 transfers publish the balance, amount, and counterparty to anyone with a block explorer — a structural difference from card networks and bank rails, where transaction detail stays inside closed financial institutions. Confidential USDC (cUSDC) reframes that problem with FHE: the dollar claim remains USDC, the Circle-issued stablecoin, while amounts and balances become encrypted by default. Zama's product pages say the wrapper is 1:1, lives on Ethereum mainnet, and is built on ERC-7984 with OpenZeppelin-audited contracts.

ERC-7984, the confidential fungible token standard drafted on ethereum.org, keeps an account-based model. Transfer amounts and balances become confidential pointers rather than public integers. Zama's ERC-7984 explainer walks through the payment path in three steps: the client encrypts the transfer amount on-device before submission; coprocessors then perform balance checks, subtraction, and addition on ciphertext; and access control decides who may decrypt — the owner by default, plus any authorized viewer such as an auditor.

That is the mechanism Raycash is wrapping in a phone app. Homomorphic encryption is what allows the app to settle on Ethereum without writing readable dollar figures into the public log. The chain still records that a transfer happened; it does not advertise how much moved.

The company is not minting a competing stablecoin. It is wrapping an existing one and selling the privacy layer as the product.

What Is Demonstrated — and What Is Not

What the primary materials show today is a private-beta product surface: a waitlist, a Zama-powered encryption path, an ERC-7984 wrap story, Morpho earn inside the app, and self-custody claims on the company site. Zama's own confidential Morpho track predates this beta. In June 2026, Zama launched a Morpho vault for confidential USDC and later said that first vault grew past $40 million in shielded total value locked within seven weeks. A September expansion opened 16 vaults.

What remains unfinished is proof of retail spend at scale. Public materials do not break out how many waitlist users are live in the beta, how much USDC has been wrapped through Raycash, or when Raycard will ship. Selective disclosure for accountants and regulators is designed into the stack, but acceptance by banks, payroll providers, and supervisors still sits ahead of the invite list — in a sector where payment privacy has long been a regulatory flashpoint.

For AI and blockchain readers, the catch is not a new dollar peg — it is whether FHE confidential tokens can hold up under everyday payments. The risk is a slide back into trusted intermediaries for fees, yield routing, or view rights. This beta is a product bet that ciphertext can serve as the default balance sheet on a public chain.

The mental model is simple: settlement stays on Ethereum, but the numbers do not have to. Whether beta users actually send encrypted dollars, whether Morpho positions stay private in practice, and whether unwrapping stays as easy as the launch pitch once real money wants out are the things to watch.