Zama launches token, debuts privacy metric after more than $121 million shielded on Ethereum

Zama has launched and listed its native token, ZAMA, and is pitching it 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 said that today’s launch represents the first production-scale deployment of fully homomorphic encryption on Ethereum mainnet, removing what it describes as the long-standing trade-off between confidentiality and open participation in public crypto markets.

ZAMA is now live and trading, with centralized exchange listings being announced progressively, including on Coinbase and Binance. Trading on centralized exchanges is scheduled to go live at 1 p.m. UTC on Monday, the team told The Block.

TVS privacy metric

Alongside the listing, Zama introduced a new metric called Total Value Shielded, or TVS, which it defines as the total economic value actively encrypted and kept confidential onchain. The concept is intended as a privacy-focused analogue to DeFi’s Total Value Locked, measuring not just capital movement, but how much value is processed under cryptographic confidentiality.

Zama’s sealed-bid Dutch auction, which ran from Jan. 21 to Jan. 25 using its own fully homomorphic encryption technology, provided the first large-scale test of the metric.

More than 11,000 unique participants took part, shielding over $121 million in value, while demand exceeded available supply by 218%, according to the privacy protocol. The team emphasized that the figure reflects the amount of value encrypted during bidding rather than the total amount raised, as 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 on Ethereum by transaction volume, Zama said, highlighting what it described as strong market appetite for confidentiality-preserving mechanisms in open, onchain markets.

“For years, the industry has treated confidentiality and transparency as a trade-off,” said Rand Hindi, chief executive of Zama. “With our FHE-powered sealed bid auction, we’ve shown that you can run a fully public, globally accessible token sale without forcing participants to expose their financial strategies or intentions.”

Unlike traditional private token rounds that rely on off-chain processes such as negotiated allocations or whitelisting, Zama’s auction kept allocation logic publicly verifiable while encrypting individual bids, contribution sizes, and wallet linkages. The structure aimed to preserve fairness at the system level without exposing participant-level financial data.

Zama token sale

The launch follows Zama’s earlier onchain token sale, which set a $55 million fully diluted valuation floor and used the same sealed-bid auction design in partnership with CoinList. That sale served as both a distribution mechanism and a live demonstration of encrypted computation on public blockchains, with tokens fully unlocked and usable upon claim, Hindi told The Block.

Zama positions itself as an infrastructure provider rather than an application owner, offering chain-agnostic tools for encrypted computation that other protocols and developers can build on. Under this model, growth in Total Value Shielded is meant to reflect broader adoption of confidentiality across onchain markets, rather than usage of any single product.

The company said TVS and sealed-bid auctions are early components of its broader “HTTPZ” vision, which aims to make encrypted computation a default feature of blockchain applications, similar to how HTTPS made encryption standard for web traffic.

Zama was founded by Dr. Pascal Paillier and Rand Hindi. It claims to operate the largest research team focused on homomorphic encryption.