TLDR:
- Zama launches 12% of its supply through a sealed-bid Dutch auction with a floor price of $0.005 per token.
- This marks the first fully on-chain and non-custodial sale in CoinList’s platform history.
- The protocol utilizes FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption) to maintain bid privacy on the network.
Zama, the pioneering protocol in cryptographic privacy, announced this Tuesday the Zama token sale, setting a new precedent in digital asset distribution.
With a minimum fully diluted valuation (FDV) of $55 million, the project aims to distribute 12% of its total supply of 11 billion tokens through an innovative sealed-bid Dutch auction, utilizing both its native application and CoinList’s infrastructure.
The process consists of three phases: a community sale for its NFT holders, a main 8% auction running from January 21 to 24, and a final post-auction sale phase.
Zama CEO Rand Hindi stated that this event should be viewed as a distribution mechanism to seed the user and validator base rather than a traditional funding round, given that their mainnet is already operational.
Radical Privacy and the New CoinList Paradigm
The standout feature of the Zama token sale is its Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) technology. This innovation allows computations to be performed on encrypted data directly on the Ethereum mainnet.
During the auction, bid amounts remain encrypted end-to-end; this prevents participants from seeing each other’s positions, eliminating common issues such as front-running or gas wars while maintaining full on-chain auditability.
Furthermore, this auction represents a milestone for CoinList as its first-ever fully on-chain and non-custodial token offering. Typically, the platform relied on internal custodial systems, but on this occasion, investors will interact directly with the project’s smart contracts.
Tokens acquired during the Zama auction will be fully unlocked from the moment of distribution, scheduled for February 2. Users can immediately use them to pay encryption fees, stake as operators, or delegate within the network.
In summary, after previously raising over $150 million from firms like Multicoin and Pantera, Zama plans to open this auction infrastructure to other projects if the model proves successful in terms of distribution and privacy.
