Zama, an open-source cryptography company specializing in privacy layers for blockchains, announces a market-first Zama token auction scheduled for January 12 through January 15. The event distributes 10% of the total $ZAMA supply via a sealed-bid Dutch auction on the Ethereum mainnet, deploying the protocol’s own Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) technology to encrypt participant bids and prevent the predatory bot behaviors that typically plague token generation events.
Solving Price Discovery with Encryption
In the announcement released Tuesday, Zama co-founder Rand Hindi positioned the auction as a structural fix for the “distorted” price discovery mechanisms found in traditional crypto launches. By employing a sealed-bid model, the company aimed to level the playing field between retail users and high-frequency trading algorithms.
“Confidentiality is a critical part of Dutch auctions,” Hindi wrote in the announcement article. “When participants can see others’ bids, they can manipulate the outcome, and price discovery becomes distorted.”
The auction infrastructure prevented this by keeping the bid quantity private. While the bid price remained public to establish a floor (set at $0.005 per token, or a $55 million FDV), the volume demanded by each bidder remained encrypted on-chain.
This effectively neutralized the ability of bots to monitor the mempool for “sniping” opportunities or to engage in gas wars to front-run large orders.
Zama Token Auction Mechanics: Shielding and Clearing
The Zama token auction was structured in four distinct phases designed to maintain privacy from deposit to distribution.
- Shielding: Participants were required to deposit standard stablecoins (USDC, USDT, or DAI) into a wrapping contract. In return, they received ERC-7984 confidential tokens. These assets maintained encrypted balances, ensuring that a user’s “buying power” remained invisible to the market.
- Bidding: During the four-day window, users placed bids using these confidential tokens. The system allowed participants to submit multiple bids at varying price points.
- Clearing: Upon the auction’s close, the smart contract computed the clearing price using FHE, calculating the lowest price at which the total allocation could be filled.
Allocation: All successful bidders paid the same uniform clearing price. Zama confirmed that any funds bid above this price would be automatically refunded.
Mainnet Utility and Retail Access
The sale was timed as a “post-sale” event, occurring after the expected year-end launch of the Zama mainnet. Consequently, the $ZAMA token possessed immediate utility upon distribution.
According to the project’s documentation, the token served as the fuel for the protocol’s privacy layer. Holders utilized it to pay for “encryption and decryption fees” and to reward operators running the Key Management System (KMS) nodes. Zama described its protocol not as a new blockchain, but as “HTTPS for blockchain”—a layer enabling confidentiality on existing chains like Ethereum.
To further democratize access, Zama allocated 8% of the total supply to the primary auction and reserved 2% for a fixed-price sale immediately following the clearing phase. This secondary round was capped at $10,000 per participant, ensuring broader distribution to smaller holders.
Chain Street’s Take
Zama leans on its own privacy tech to rewrite how token launches work. A sealed-bid Dutch auction with encrypted order size shuts out the usual bots and games, giving retail a cleaner shot at price discovery. With mainnet utility already live and a capped fixed-price round waiting on the other side, the company is trying to prove that privacy tooling can hold up under real market pressure.
