Zama Launches ZAMA Token, Pushing Onchain Privacy Into Production

Zama has officially launched and listed its native token, ZAMA, positioning the project as a new benchmark for onchain privacy after more than $121 million in economic value was encrypted on Ethereum during its recent public token auction. The open-source cryptography company says the launch marks the first production-scale deployment of fully homomorphic encryption on Ethereum mainnet, addressing what it describes as a long-standing trade-off between confidentiality and open participation in public crypto markets.

ZAMA is now live and trading, with centralized exchange listings rolling out progressively. The team confirmed that trading on major platforms, including Coinbase and Binance, is scheduled to go live at 1 p.m. UTC on Monday. The launch follows months of testing and a public auction designed to showcase how encrypted computation can function in fully open, onchain environments.

Alongside the listing, Zama introduced a new privacy-focused metric called Total Value Shielded, or TVS. The metric is intended as a counterpart to DeFi’s Total Value Locked, measuring not just how much capital moves through a system, but how much economic value is actively processed under cryptographic confidentiality. According to Zama, TVS captures the scale of real onchain usage where sensitive financial data remains encrypted rather than exposed by default.

The sealed-bid Dutch auction that ran from Jan. 21 to Jan. 25 served as the first large-scale demonstration of this metric. More than 11,000 unique participants took part, shielding over $121 million in value during the bidding process, while demand exceeded available supply by 218%. Zama emphasized that this figure reflects the value encrypted during bidding, not the amount raised, since participants were required to convert USDT into a confidential form before submitting bids. On the auction’s final day, the application became the most-used app on Ethereum by transaction volume, highlighting what the team described as strong demand for confidentiality-preserving mechanisms in open markets.

Privacy Without Sacrificing Transparency

Zama’s approach aims to challenge the assumption that transparency and confidentiality are mutually exclusive in public blockchains. Chief executive Rand Hindi said the auction demonstrated that a fully public and globally accessible token sale can run without forcing participants to reveal their strategies, bid sizes, or financial intentions. Unlike traditional private rounds that rely on off-chain negotiations or whitelisting, Zama’s design kept allocation logic publicly verifiable while encrypting individual bids and wallet linkages, preserving fairness at the system level without exposing participant-level data.

The token launch builds on an earlier onchain sale conducted in partnership with CoinList, which set a $55 million fully diluted valuation floor and used the same sealed-bid auction structure. That sale functioned both as a distribution event and a live proof of encrypted computation on public blockchains, with tokens fully unlocked and usable upon claim.

Zama positions itself as infrastructure rather than an application-layer project. Its tools are designed to be chain-agnostic, enabling other protocols and developers to integrate encrypted computation directly into their products. Under this model, growth in Total Value Shielded is meant to signal broader adoption of confidentiality across onchain markets, rather than usage of any single Zama-controlled application.

The company describes TVS and sealed-bid auctions as early building blocks of its broader “HTTPZ” vision, which seeks to make encrypted computation a default feature of blockchain applications, much like HTTPS standardized encryption for web traffic. Founded by Dr. Pascal Paillier and Rand Hindi, Zama says it operates the largest research team dedicated to homomorphic encryption, aiming to bring privacy-preserving computation from theory into everyday blockchain use.