In 2013, only 10% of internet traffic was encrypted. By 2023, that number hit 95%. We went from a world where your data traveled naked across networks to one where encryption is the default. HTTPS won.
Blockchain is still stuck in 2013.
Every transaction you make, every token you hold, every swap, every vote, it's all public. Visible to competitors, visible to front-runners, visible to anyone who cares to look. This level of transparency isn't a feature. It's a bug that's kept serious money on the sidelines.
Zama fixes this.
What We Actually Built
Zama uses Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) to let smart contracts compute on encrypted data. Your balances stay hidden, your transfer amounts stay private, and the blockchain still works exactly as it should: verifiable, trustless, decentralized.
We're not asking you to move to a new chain. Zama sits on top of Ethereum (and soon other EVM chains as well as Solana). Your tokens don't go anywhere. They just become confidential.
Think of it like upgrading from HTTP to HTTPS. Same website. Same functionality. Now private.
The Team
We've been working on this since 2020. Our CTO Pascal Paillier invented the Paillier cryptosystem. If you've used homomorphic encryption anywhere, you've probably used his work. Our CEO Rand Hindi built a privacy-first AI company that Sonos acquired. We have 120 people, including 40 with PhDs, we've published 77 research papers on making FHE actually practical and filed 30 patents.
There are thousands of developers using our various FHE libraries, and 9 out of 10 FHE projects in crypto use Zama one way or another. If you ever interacted with an FHE app, you most likely interacted with Zama behind the scenes.
We're cryptographers who realized blockchain needed what we'd spent our careers building.
The Zama Public Auction
The Zama Protocol is not a whitepaper, it’s actually a fully working protocol that is already on mainnet. Last December, we initiated the first confidential stablecoin transfer (cUSDT). We paid a supplier in confidential tokens. A team ran their first payroll, fully confidentially, using the Zama Protocol, on Ethereum mainnet. Zama already supports more transactions per second than Ethereum itself can support, and we will soon be faster than most L2s. Everything that is onchain, tokens, RWAs, stocks, stablecoins, can now be encrypted.
And we go even further: we're actually doing our ICO using our own technology.
The Zama Public Auction is a confidential sealed-bid Dutch auction (The same mechanic Google used for its IPO) running on the Zama Protocol.
You pick a price (public) and an amount (private). Nobody, not other bidders, not bots, not us, can see how much you're bidding for. When the auction closes, the clearing price is calculated homomorphically, on encrypted data.
After studying more than a hundred TGEs, we found that auctions offer the best balance of fair distribution, price discovery, and capital efficiency.
We're not just claiming FHE works. We're showing it does.
Timeline
Auction is live now: auction.zama.org
Ends on January 24, at 8:00 PM UTC.
Claiming: February 2.
Tokens are fully unlocked at claim.
Why the Token Matters
The $ZAMA token powers the protocol. It pays for encryption and decryption. It rewards the operators who run the network, companies like Ledger, Fireblocks, Etherscan, and LayerZero who collectively secure over $100B in assets. You can also delegate your stake to these operators to help secure the network and share their rewards simply by going on staking.zama.org.
All fees are burned. New tokens are minted on a fixed schedule to reward operators. Simple economics that align everyone toward the same goal: making Zama the default privacy layer for public blockchains.
HTTPZ
We have a name for the future we're building: HTTPZ.
Just like HTTPS became the standard for the web, encrypted transactions will become the standard for blockchain. Not because regulators demand it. Because users and institutions won't accept anything less.
Everything that goes onchain will eventually be encrypted with Zama. Finance first. Then governments. Then AI. Then everything else. As blockchains scale to millions of transactions per second in the future, so will Zama.
That's what we're here to build.
And it starts here: auction.zama.org.
