Catenaa, Wednesday, February 04, 2026-Zama’s public auction for its $ZAMA token raised $118.5 million, marking the first production-scale encrypted initial coin offering (ICO) on the network, Zama has announced.
The auction was conducted on Ethereum using confidential transactions.
The auction employed a confidential Dutch-style bidding process, keeping bid amounts private while calculating clearing prices directly on encrypted data using fully homomorphic encryption (FHE).
The auction ran from January 21–24, 2026, processing 24,697 bids from 11,103 unique participants across three platforms.
A total of 880 million tokens were sold at a $0.05 clearing price, exceeding demand by 218%. The event accounted for 12% of the initial $ZAMA supply, split across community, public, and pre-TGE sales.
Claiming begins February 2, and tokens will be fully unlocked ERC-20 units, usable for encryption fees on the Zama Protocol.
The public auction demonstrated Zama’s ability to handle high transaction throughput without downtime, surpassing USDT, USDC, and Uniswap in usage on January 24.
The protocol achieved a Total Value Shielded of $121.3 million within three days, illustrating FHE’s readiness for scalable financial applications.
$ZAMA holders can stake tokens to support network operators and earn rewards, while the Zama Portfolio allows users to shield and send confidential tokens.
The project positions itself as enabling a “HTTPS moment” for blockchain, providing privacy and confidentiality in digital asset transactions previously fully transparent.
Founded by Dr. Pascal Paillier and Dr. Rand Hindi, Zama focuses on FHE solutions for blockchain, aiming to expand confidential finance, Web3 applications, and secure network states.
