Zama raises $118.5 million in Ethereum auction for encryption token

Zama raised $118.5 million in committed capital through an encrypted Dutch auction on Ethereum that ran from 21 to 24 January.

The company said the auction marked the first production application built on the Zama Protocol and became the most-used application on Ethereum on 24 January, ahead of stablecoins USDT and USDC, as well as Uniswap.

Total Value Shielded in the auction app rose above $100 million within three days and reached $121.3 million, according to the company.

Zama reported that 24,697 bids were executed across three platforms, with 11,103 unique bidders. It said the final clearing price was $0.05, with $44 million paid by winning bids. In total, 2,805,849,657 tokens were demanded and 880,000,000 sold, resulting in 218% oversubscription.

The total value committed included $2.2 million from a sale on Kucoin and $4.2 million from a sale on CoinList.

The auction accounted for 12% of the initial supply and was split into three segments: a Community Sale of 2%, a Public Auction of 8% and a Pre-TGE sale of 2%.

Zama said an upcoming pre-token generation event sale would allow unsuccessful participants from the main auction to purchase $ZAMA tokens at the same clearing price, subject to a $10,000 participation cap. Token claiming will open on 2 February.

The company said $ZAMA tokens will be distributed as standard ERC-20 tokens, fully unlocked and immediately usable for encryption and decryption fees. Token holders will be able to stake their tokens with chosen operators to earn rewards and help secure the protocol.

Zama described itself as an open-source cryptography company focused on building homomorphic encryption solutions for blockchain. It said it was founded by Dr Pascal Paillier and Dr Rand Hindi and has the largest research team in the field.