Open-source cryptography company Zama has officially launched its native ZAMA token, marking a significant milestone for privacy on the Ethereum blockchain. The launch follows a highly successful public on-chain auction that encrypted over $121 million in value, demonstrating the first production-scale implementation of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) on the Ethereum mainnet.
The Dutch-style sealed-bid auction, which ran from January 21 to January 25, attracted more than 11,000 participants. Demand far exceeded supply, with interest reaching 218% above the available token allocation. Participants converted USDT into an encrypted form to submit their bids, ensuring their financial strategies and amounts remained confidential while the auction's rules stayed publicly verifiable on-chain. By the final day, the auction contract became the most active application on Ethereum by transaction volume.
Concurrently with the token launch, Zama introduced a novel metric called Total Value Shielded (TVS). This metric is designed to measure the economic value processed confidentially on-chain, positioning itself as a privacy-focused counterpart to the widely used Total Value Locked (TVL) in DeFi. The $121 million TVS figure from the auction represents the initial benchmark for this new standard.
The ZAMA token is now live and has begun a staged rollout for trading on major centralized exchanges, including Coinbase and Binance. The token sale established a fully diluted valuation floor of $55 million, and all tokens were immediately available for claim and use by holders.
Zama's CEO, Rand Hindi, framed the launch as a foundational step toward the company's broader "HTTPZ" vision, which aims to make encrypted computation a default standard for blockchain applications—akin to how HTTPS secured web traffic. The company positions itself as providing core privacy infrastructure that other development teams can integrate across various blockchains.
