January 2026 Summaries

Zama recently launched its mainnet with the first Confidential USDT transfer on Ethereum, marking a significant milestone in its development. The Zama Public Auction, the first production application on the Zama Protocol, demonstrated the protocol's scalability and real-world usage by becoming the most-used application on Ethereum, surpassing other major applications like USDT, USDC, and Uniswap on January 24th. Within just three days, Zama achieved over $100 million in Total Value Shielded (TVS), a feat that took other privacy protocols years to accomplish. The auction was conducted as a confidential sealed-bid Dutch auction, maintaining bid confidentiality and ensuring fair price discovery. The auction's results included $121.3 million in TVS, $118.5 million in total value committed, and a final clearing price of $0.05, with 2,805,849,657 tokens demanded but only 880,000,000 sold, leading to a 218% oversubscription. The upcoming pre-Token Generation Event (pre-TGE) sale will allow participants who did not get their bids filled to purchase $ZAMA tokens at the auction clearing price. $ZAMA tokens, distributed as ERC-20 tokens, will be usable for transaction fees on the Zama Protocol, and holders can stake them to earn rewards and secure the protocol. The launch of Zama highlights a shift towards more secure and confidential blockchain transactions, akin to the introduction of HTTPS for the internet.

In the past decade, internet traffic encryption has surged from 10% to 95%, yet blockchain technology lags behind, with all transactions remaining publicly visible—a transparency issue that Zama aims to resolve. Utilizing Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), Zama enables smart contracts to compute on encrypted data, maintaining privacy while ensuring blockchains remain verifiable and decentralized. Built on Ethereum and other EVM chains, Zama allows tokens to become confidential without changing chains, akin to upgrading from HTTP to HTTPS. Founded by cryptography and privacy experts, the company has made significant strides since 2020, and its protocol is already operational on the mainnet, supporting more transactions per second than Ethereum itself. The Zama Public Auction, a confidential sealed-bid Dutch auction, showcases their technology, offering a fair, efficient token distribution method. The $ZAMA token powers the protocol, rewarding operators and aligning incentives to make Zama the standard privacy layer for blockchains, with a vision of encrypted transactions becoming ubiquitous, similar to HTTPS in web traffic.

The $ZAMA token serves dual purposes in the Zama Protocol: it is used for transaction fees and for staking. Users pay fees in $ZAMA tokens for encryption and decryption processes, which are then burnt by the protocol, while tokens are minted at a 5% annual emission rate to compensate operators. The protocol employs a Proof-of-Stake mechanism, distinguishing operators into FHE nodes for encrypted computations and KMS nodes for threshold decryptions. Initially, there are 18 operators, including notable names like Artifact, Blockscape, and Etherscan. Operators must stake $ZAMA tokens to participate and earn rewards, which are divided 40% to FHE nodes and 60% to KMS nodes, with adjustments over time based on infrastructure costs. Token holders can delegate their tokens to operators, sharing in the rewards minus commissions, and receive liquid tokens reflecting their share of rewards. While rewards can be claimed anytime, stakes have a 7-day unbonding period. The staking portal, available at staking.zama.org, allows participants, including those from the Zama Public Auction, to stake their tokens as of February 2nd.

Blockchain technology's inherent transparency has historically limited its utility for confidential transactions, but recent developments have introduced groundbreaking advances in privacy. The first-ever confidential payroll on the Ethereum mainnet marks a significant milestone, utilizing confidential USDT (cUSDT) to ensure transaction amounts are encrypted and accessible only to involved parties. This innovation, made possible by the Zama Protocol and the new ERC-7984 standard, allows for private financial operations without sacrificing the transparency and auditability of blockchain technology. The Bron wallet, supporting these confidential tokens natively, enhances security and privacy for both individuals and corporate users, further enabling the shift of real-world financial activities onto blockchain platforms. Additionally, the Zama Public Auction introduces a private bidding process using the Zama Protocol, offering bonuses for participants and highlighting the potential for confidential transactions to transform onchain finance.

Zama has released a collection of 5,500 OG NFTs to reward creators, developers, testers, and community contributors who participated in its foundational campaigns, with none allocated to the core team. Eligibility for these NFTs, which can be checked and claimed at claim.zama.org, provides holders with exclusive benefits such as access to a $ZAMA community sale and a 5% bonus in the public auction. Additionally, Zama distributed $374,000 in cash rewards throughout various seasons of its Creator and Developer Programs, which can be claimed in $ZAMA token or $USDT. To maintain user security, Zama has withheld the release of program leaderboards, ensuring accounts are not compromised. For any inquiries, support can be requested via [email protected].