Zama's Public Auction Attracts $118M For Ethereum's First Encrypted ICO

After several years of development, Zama recently announced its launch on mainnet with the first Confidential USDT (cUSDT) transfer on Ethereum. Over the last few days, the Zama Public Auction became the first production application built on the Zama Protocol, demonstrating real-world usage and scalability.

The Zama auction app was the most-used application on Ethereum on January 24th, above USDT, USDC, and Uniswap. It took Zama only three days to grow Total Value Shielded (TVS) above $100m, something that took other Ethereum-based privacy protocols multiple years. The protocol experienced no downtime, and was able to keep up with the throughput of Ethereum itself, proving that FHE is now production-ready and can be used at scale by anyone building a financial application on the blockchain.

The Zama Public Auction

The Zama ICO was done through a confidential sealed-bid Dutch auction.

After studying more than a hundred TGEs, auctions were identified as offering the best balance of fair distribution, price discovery, and capital efficiency. In a Dutch auction, the clearing price isn't the highest bid, it's the lowest price at which a bid gets filled. Confidentiality is critical: when participants can see others' bids, price discovery becomes distorted as people react to one another rather than bidding what they truly believe.

Participants picked a price (public) and an amount (private). Bid sizes were not visible to other participants or to automated systems. When the auction closed, the clearing price was calculated homomorphically, directly on encrypted data.

The numbers

The auction ran from January 21–24, 2026. ‍

• $121.3M Total Value Shielded (TVS) directly in the Zama auction app
• ‍ $118.5M total value committed in the auction (including $2.2M from the Kucoin sale and $4.2M from the CoinList sale) ‍
• 24,697 total bids executed across all 3 platforms ‍
• 11,103 unique bidders
• $0.05 clearing price
• $44,000,000 final amount paid by winning bids
• 2,805,849,657 tokens demanded
• 880,000,000 tokens sold
• 218% oversubscribed

What's next

The Zama Public Auction accounted for 12% of the initial supply and was handled in three segments:

• The Community Sale (2%)
• The Public Auction (8%)
• The Pre-TGE sale (2%)

The upcoming pre-TGE sale will give a chance to participants who did not get their bids filled in the auction to buy $ZAMA tokens at the auction clearing price, with a $10k participation cap.

Claiming opens February 2nd. $ZAMA tokens will be distributed as standard ERC-20 tokens, fully unlocked and immediately usable for paying encryption and decryption fees on the Zama Protocol.

All $ZAMA holders can stake their tokens on their choice of operators to earn rewards and help secure the Zama Protocol.

Using the Zama Portfolio, anybody can start to shield and send confidential tokens.

Finally, blockchain gets its HTTPS moment, marking the end of fully transparent transactions. Zama calls this vision HTTPZ.

Additional links

• Allocation results for the Zama Public Auction: auction.zama.org/results
• Information on building with the Zama Protocol is available from the Zama team
• Zama Protocol Litepaper
• Zama Public Auction Dune Dashboard ‍
• Zama on X and Telegram

About Zama

Zama is an open-source cryptography company building state-of-the-art FHE solutions for blockchain. Its technology enables a broad range of use cases, from confidential finance to Web3 and network states. Zama was founded by Dr. Pascal Paillier and Dr. Rand Hindi, and has the largest research team in homomorphic encryption.

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