And our 2026 Game Plan.
Zama started working on Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) and its applications back in 2020. At the lowest level of the stack, our cryptography team has focused on making FHE practical for real-world use cases.
From this work emerged TFHE-rs: a pure Rust implementation of the TFHE scheme for fast encrypted integer arithmetic. After 17 major releases, TFHE-rs now powers the Zama protocol in production.
In July 2025, Zama released the first version of the Zama Protocol and FHEVM, a full-stack framework for integrating FHE into blockchain applications.
For the first time, developers could use the power of FHE to write confidential smart contracts that compute over encrypted data.
The testnet phase: July–December 2025
During the testnet phase of the Zama Protocol, our goal was to raise awareness about what Zama is building and to gather feedback from users on years of work, so we could understand what to improve. Thanks to honest and consistent feedback from our community, we were eventually able to launch a mainnet that ran flawlessly during the Zama auction.
Two main programs drove the testnet phase:
The Developer Program
The Developer Program aimed to incentivize developers to get onboarded to the Zama Protocol and build apps using Zama’s FHEVM. Each month, developers could join a builder track, a bounty track, or participate in various hackathons.
Across 6 seasons, we awarded 685 developers with $106,000 and 791 Zama OG NFTs. Developers’ contributions helped us improve the developer experience and fix important issues.
The Creator Program
The Creator Program aimed to incentivize creators on X and other platforms to produce content about Zama and FHE, shedding light on a technology few people knew or understood.
Across 5 seasons, we awarded 2,731 creators with $268,000 in cash and 3,793 Zama OG NFTs. Creators’ contributions helped move Zama and FHE from a completely unknown protocol to something bigger than just a lab curiosity. Open incentive programs come with trade-offs. Low barriers to entry mean more noise, bots, gaming, low-effort content. Essentially inclusive, they also bring broader participation for the community and faster feedback loops.
The Zama Protocol Mainnet Release
Zama announced its mainnet launch with the first Confidential USDT (cUSDT) transfer on Ethereum. This was a prerequisite for launching the Zama Token and served as validation for everyone who would participate in and interact with it, showing a proven, working product rather than whitepaper promises.
The Zama Public Sales: January 2026
Zama distributed 12% of initial supply through three pre-TGE sales, designed to provide fair access to a meaningful part of the supply for community members, participants and broader ecosystem users.
The Zama Community Sale
This community sale at floor price rewarded early participants, developers, and creators holding Zama OG NFTs. Each NFT gave its original claimer access to purchase 40,000 ZAMA at the floor price, capped at $200 per NFT.
3,549 participants purchased 190,771,613 ZAMA for a total of 953,858 USDT. This represents nearly 2% of the total supply.
The Zama Public Auction
The core idea behind the Zama Public Auction was to let users experience what we’ve been building for years. Through a sealed-bid Dutch auction built on the Zama Protocol itself, we put our own technology into real-world conditions.
The goal was for participants to experience the tech directly, so they wouldn’t take part in the sale based on promises, “moon math” from a whitepaper or a mainnet announcement. We wanted the world to see that what we built works, and scales, in real life under real conditions.
Key data from the Zama Public Auction:
TVS (Total Value Shield) during the auction: $121,253,609
Total value committed in bids: $118,500,000
Total token demand: 2,805,849,657 ZAMA
Total tokens sold: 880,000,000 ZAMA
Demand/Supply ratio: 3.18x
Clearing price: $0.05
FDV at clearing price: $550,000,000
Total bids: 14,600
Number of bidders: 7,653
Total sold: $44,000,000 USDT
Total refunded: $74,500,000 USDT
The distribution of bids per price shows the auction worked as intended: the mechanics of a sealed-bid Dutch auction using FHE prevented manipulation and front-running, and the clearing price ended up being just above the quantity-weighted average bid price. Most bidders placed a bid at, or under the then pre-market price of the Zama token.
The Zama Binance pre-TGE sale
To widen initial supply distribution, we sold 2% of the supply at the auction clearing price through a Binance Prime Sale.
Separately, we also allocated another 2% to Binance Wallet users as ecosystem incentives, which were distributed to Prime Sale participants rather than through a free airdrop. We supported this because it rewards active participation and is more transparent than discretionary airdrops, which can be uneven, hard to verify, and sometimes concentrated in ways users only discover after the fact.
In other words: this 2% distribution would have happened anyway as part of the normal listing process. Structuring it through the Prime Sale meant participants had to commit capital to receive it, instead of getting it for free.
The Binance Prime Sale attracted over $202m in commitments from 65k participants, with an effective allocation per user of 0.163 BNB (≈ $147), while winning auction participants were able to receive their full allocation.
Why run a pre-TGE sale on Binance Wallet?
Beyond the Prime Sale, we’re also working on bringing the Zama Protocol to the BNB Chain ecosystem, enabling confidential DeFi on BSC and more. This is an important part of our 2026 strategy, and we want to make sure we have strong support from the Binance ecosystem when we launch there. That’s why this mattered to us, and why we chose to do things this way.
All in all, in an already highly adversarial environment, where the pre-sale phase was under massive pressure due to activity on prediction markets and perpetual futures, we delivered on our promise: distributing initial supply widely and at a fair price.
The privacy revolution needs to be advertised
Blockchain didn’t wait for privacy to matter, it has reached a point where privacy is needed to keep growing on its exponential trajectory.
We need more people thinking about onchain privacy. We want more people talking about FHE. Not because engagement metrics look good in a pitch deck, but because privacy is a conversation worth having.
But building great technology isn’t enough. You also need people to care for a technology to survive. There’s a “chasm” between early adopters and the early majority. Most high-tech products die in that gap. That’s why we need marketing. Innovations don’t spread just because they’re good.
All participants in the Zama Public Auction were eligible for up to a 10% bonus in ZAMA tokens on their filled bids, by combining any two of the following +5% incentives:
Bonus code: participants earn +5% on filled bids. Some codes included a referral fee, some did not.
Zama OG NFT holder: earn +5% on filled bids.
Bron wallet user: earn +5% on filled bids.
Separately, while there was no free airdrop and no KOL allocation round, Zama collaborated with handpicked KOLs to promote the project across the ecosystem, similar to a standard influencer marketing campaign, which is common practice in any industry. The very large majority of bids did not use KOL codes however, they used codes we gave to our other partners, such as Zama protocol operators.
The TGE
Our TGE strategy was focused on centralized exchanges. We wanted to make sure there were as many venues to trade Zama tokens as possible. We delivered something no one else in privacy had done before: day spot listing on all major exchanges, including Binance, Coinbase, OKX, Bybit, Kraken, KuCoin, Bitget, and many others. This is also where we seeded the vast majority of the liquidity, as we did not expect as much initial volume from DEXes.
However, one thing we don’t control is market conditions. The weekend before our TGE, the crypto market had one of its biggest liquidations of the past decade, and precious metals had their biggest crash since the 70s. This was quite literally the worst day to launch in 2025-2026, but we decided to go ahead and ship what we said we would.
Over the long term, only fundamentals matter though: users, apps, fees, and TVS.
The 2026 Game Plan: HTTPZ
Our ambition is clear, become the HTTPS layer for blockchain transactions. This is what we call HTTPZ.
Building a company solving important and complex problems requires radical focus and clear direction.
Now that the utility token powering the Zama protocol is live, we are entering our go-to-market phase with a clear roadmap and one ambitious goal: become the default privacy protocol for public blockchains.
The North Star: Total Value Shielded (TVS).
To make sure we’re building in the right direction, we’ve chosen Total Value Shielded (TVS) as our North Star metric. TVS is a clear signal that blockchains are evolving from fully transparent ledgers into a more confidential infrastructure, where sensitive data can exist and be used securely.
TVS proves real adoption: it reflects actual assets protected in production, not just interest or experimentation.
TVS creates ecosystem gravity: higher TVS attracts developers, apps, liquidity, and partners, reinforcing network effects.
TVS underpins long-term revenue: as more value is shielded, usage grows, and monetization scales with real economic activity.
Focusing on use cases with proven product–market fit.
We’re prioritizing categories where demand already exists and where the Zama Protocol can drive immediate usage, fees, TVS growth and ultimately revenue:
Confidential Payments. High transaction volume, clear real-world utility, and direct protocol-fee potential. Teams are already building in this space on Zama (e.g., Raycash.xyz).
Confidential Capital Formation. Sticky TVS through mechanisms like vesting, distributions, and token sales. This is where confidential rails become infrastructure. Projects are already building here, and we will make a big announcement regarding this soon.
Confidential Tokenization & Asset Management. Institutional-friendly adoption, larger TVS potential, and strong category credibility (e.g., T-Rex chain).
Enabling yield on confidential tokens.
One of our top priorities for the coming months is enabling yield for confidential assets such as cUSDT. We are currently working on a new feature for the protocol that will enable using confidential tokens with non-confidential DeFi protocols. This means you will be able to stake your cUSDT, cUSDC, cETH on AAVE, Morpho, and all other venues. This will be a major enabler for adoption, and all the revenue from it will accrue to the $ZAMA token through burn mechanisms.
What we must ship in 2026.
To win in 2026, we need to deliver the core protocol capabilities that make confidentiality usable at scale, and make it easy for developers and ecosystems to build on top.
Foundations: trust, security, compliance, reliability
Production-grade guarantees across audits, monitoring, incident response, and compliance readiness, so institutions and builders can ship with confidence.
A reason to stay: trading and yield for confidentiality users
Unlock sticky usage by enabling real onchain activity (trading, liquidity, yield) that benefits from confidentiality, not just one-off transfers.
Performance architecture upgrades
Ship the infrastructure required to support our core use cases at scale (GPU acceleration, Gateway improvements, KMS, and related components).
Claim ground: deploy everywhere that matters
Expand to the top chains and the highest-leverage ecosystems, prioritizing distribution and the best opportunities for adoption and TVS growth.
Developer experience with low integration friction
Make confidentiality easy to adopt in existing stacks through clean APIs/SDKs, strong documentation, tooling, and minimal changes to workflows.
Confidential tokens as a first-class primitive
Support the full token lifecycle across the ecosystem, wallets, custody, explorers, indexers, onramps/offramps, so confidential assets “just work” end to end.
We’re building all this with transparency, and we’re always ready to engage with the community, because while we build the tech, we know we can’t do it alone.
We’re locked in.
