æmeth · developer of zkFMI · aemeth.fi
The state moves only while the proof holds.
æmeth builds financial market infrastructure in which the venue never sees the order, the settlement layer never sees the amount, and every state change is accepted only against a proof. The stack is zkFMI. The first application is Aethel.
Research stackRustMITNo tokenCustodies nothing
What we build
One stack. One application. Pilots with the people who would run it.
Everything æmeth publishes is source, measured on stated hardware, with the limits written next to the numbers.
zkFMI
A family of protocols: proof-carrying payment instructions, a settlement ledger of commitments, oblivious venues, anonymous eligibility and a decentralized central counterparty. Eight repositories, composed through explicit ports rather than shared state.
zkfmi.com ↗Aethel
Programmable payment-stream receivables. A signed payment stream becomes a receivable; independent credit assessors, guarantors, liquidity providers and servicers act on it with separately signed authority, and it settles through zkFMI.
aethel.fi ↗Joint pilots
A concrete confidentiality problem, a scoped transaction path and acceptance criteria agreed in advance, with financial institutions, market operators and infrastructure teams, including the Avalanche ecosystem the ledger runs on.
What a pilot looks like ↗How it works
Decide anywhere. Instruct once. Settle without reading.
A value enters as a commitment and stays sealed through three layers. The market decides on it, the instruction carries it with its proofs, and the ledger moves it against those proofs. Nobody along the way opens it.
- 01 · DECIDEVenue
QOMM or OCLOB evaluate prices inside multi-party computation. The best price is proven minimal, never revealed.
- 02 · INSTRUCTzkPI
One typed instruction: range proofs, nullifier, deadline, quorum signature. Checkable by anyone, on any node.
- 03 · SETTLEDeFMI
A non-EVM Avalanche L1 verifies the proofs and moves both legs together, or neither.
Conceptual view. Which venue, proof path and trust assumptions apply depends on the deployment; the exact boundaries are in the wire specification and on the trust-boundary page.
Zero-knowledge payment instruction: what it commits to, what a venue checks, the wire layout and the verifier.
ledgerDeFMIA settlement layer that never reads the trade. Commitments on a non-EVM Avalanche L1; both legs move, or neither.
eligibilityDeKYXDecentralized know-your-X. Prove only the qualification one action needs; the application never receives an identity record.
clearingDeCCPDecentralized central counterparty. Threshold-governed clearing books, margin, confidential guarantee facilities, a deterministic loss waterfall.
venue · rfqQOMMQuery-oblivious market making. A request for quote priced inside a seven-node MPC; the best quote is proved minimal and settled unopened.
venue · order bookOCLOBOblivious continuous limit order book. Side, price, size and identity stay hidden from the operator until matching is done.
buildWorkflow DSL & SDKDefine who may change which rights, obligations and balances, run it on its own ledger, add settlement when the rails exist.
applicationAethelPayment-stream receivables: credit, guarantees, funding and servicing by independent providers, settled through zkPI and DeFMI.
Evidence, dated
Working research. Numbers with an artifact behind them.
These are the headline measurements zkFMI publishes, on the hardware and at the widths stated there. They are reproduced here unchanged; the measurement page has the method and the run records.
as published on zkfmi.com · 2026-09-12
What this is not
A research implementation. Not audited. It custodies nothing and there is no token. Every multi-node acceptance ran as processes or containers on one host under one administrator. No deployment has run across independent organisations, a real WAN, HSM-held keys or a legal finality regime.
The name
A letter that makes the thing move.
Write אמת, truth, on the clay and the golem walks. Erase the first letter and מת remains: dead.
æmeth keeps that rule. A proof is the letter. While it holds, the state machine may move; take it away and nothing in the ledger changes, however much everyone else agrees. The spelling Aemeth is the historical one, from John Dee’s Sigillum Dei Aemeth; æ is the same word written as one letter.
Golem legend, Jewish Museum Berlin · Sigillum Dei Aemeth, Sloane MS 3188
Work with us
Bring a real workflow. Define what success means before we run it.
We are looking for financial institutions, market operators and infrastructure teams who need to transact on shared infrastructure without exposing every input to it.
Scope the problem
The transaction, the participants, and which inputs must stay confidential from whom.
Agree the evaluation
Disclosure, correctness, integration with existing systems and failure recovery, written down as acceptance criteria.
Run and inspect
Exercise the chosen path on zkFMI, inspect the artifacts, and record the gaps before any wider deployment.
There is no sales process and no form. The work is public: open an issue or a discussion on the zkFMI organisation, or start from the repositories.