The Zama Public Auction: $118M Committed for the First Encrypted ICO on Ethereum

This has been years in the making. A few weeks ago, Zama 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 3 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, we found that auctions offer 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). Nobody could see how much they were bidding for, not other bidders, not bots, not us. 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
• Refund ratio: 62.89%

What's next

The Zama Public Sale accounting for 12% of the initial supply and is 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, and the days of fully transparent transactions are behind us.

Additional links

• If you participated in the Zama Public Auction, you can check your allocation at auction.zama.org/results
• Interested in building with the Zama Protocol? Contact the Zama team.
• Zama Protocol Litepaper
• Zama Public Auction Dune Dashboard‍
• Zama on X and Telegram