Privacy-focused Ethereum Layer 2 developer Aztec Network has successfully concluded its public AZTEC token sale, raising 19,476 ETH (approximately $61.3 million) from more than 16,700 participants. The sale, which ran from December 2 to December 6, utilized a novel Continuous Clearing Auction (CCA) mechanism developed in collaboration with Uniswap Labs.
Aztec emphasized that this sale represents a significant shift from traditional, insider-dominated token launches. The project reported that half of the capital raised came from its existing community, including testnet operators, early users of its discontinued Aztec Connect product, and other ecosystem participants, rather than large institutional allocations. The CCA mechanism started at a floor price corresponding to a $350 million fully diluted valuation, which Aztec stated represented a 75% discount compared to the implied valuation from its previous equity financing rounds. To prevent whale concentration, the sale instituted a per-user cap of 240 ETH.
Uniswap founder Hayden Adams praised the auction model on X, noting, "No sniping, bundling, timing games. Just slow, fair price discovery ending at 59% above the floor — with literally days to bid earlier and get a better average price."
Following the token generation event, a Uniswap v4 liquidity pool containing 273 million AZTEC tokens (roughly 2.6% of the total supply) will launch to bootstrap secondary market trading. Tokens purchased in the sale will remain non-transferable until at least February 11, 2026. Transferability will then be subject to a governance vote; if no vote passes, tokens will unlock linearly through November 2026. Validators wishing to stake on the network must commit 200,000 AZTEC tokens.
The a16z-backed project, which has raised over $119 million in total funding including a $100 million Series B round in December 2022, recently launched its privacy-focused Ethereum Layer 2 network, Ignition Chain, in mid-November. Aztec bills Ignition as the "first fully decentralized L2 on Ethereum." The chain is currently producing blocks with 165 nodes but is not yet processing user transactions—a deliberate staging approach intended for economic stress-testing ahead of full functionality planned for early 2026. Nearly 556 million AZTEC tokens have already been staked on the network.
