There are numerous ways to transfer files these days, the oldest and still very widely used method is FTP. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol and was defined as early as 1971 in the very early days ...

If you're using sftp, you're connecting to a ssh server, not a ftp server. As for your original question, yes you can have encrypted ftp. E.g. vsftpd support TLS. Of course you need a client with TLS ...