ZAMA, the native coin of the open-source cryptography blockchain project Zama, has posted gains of almost 50 percent over the past 24 hours. As of Thursday, the digital asset is trading at $0.054, following the creation of a new all-time high (ATH) earlier in the day.
ZAMA posts new ATH amid privacy DeFi narrative
According to Coingecko, earlier on Thursday, ZAMA hit a fresh ATH of $0.0584 before losing some of its gains and starting to consolidate around the $0.054 level. From its bottom – around $0.016 in February 2026 – the token has surged about 212 percent.
The main catalyst behind ZAMA’s recent outburst is likely the partnership with blockchain intelligence firm Elliptic. On Tuesday, Zama had announced an alliance with Elliptic to integrate blockchain intelligence into Zama’s confidential financial applications.
The partnership directly addresses the single biggest institutional objection to confidential DeFi – regulatory compliance and anti-money laundering (AML) screening on encrypted transactions. Elliptic being one of the better known blockchain analytics platforms adds a degree of credibility that institutions are desperately looking for.
The demand for confidential DeFi is real, as recently, a confidential USDC vault on Morpho had grown to more than $23 million. ZAMA has also benefitted from enhanced liquidity since on July 16, Indonesia’s largest crypto exchange, Indodax, listed the ZAMA/IDR trading pair.
As for the technology behind ZAMA, it is a pioneer in Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) – described as “HTPPS for blockchain.”
The technology enables computations on encrypted data without ever decrypting it, allowing private smart contracts that keep balances and logic hidden from node operators while remaining publicly verifiable.
The project’s token generation event on February 2, 2026 was itself the first initial coin offering on Ethereum to use FHE to keep bids encrypted and prevent front-running – the auction raised approximately $121 million.
ZAMA’s value capture mechanism is a burn-and-mint equilibrium model where all protocol fees are paid in ZAMA and immediately burned at the point of use – direct deflationary pressure tied to network usage.
Privacy and DeFi in the limelight
Over the past year, privacy-focused cryptocurrencies like Zcash and Monero have offered extraordinary returns to their holders. The narrative seems to be continuing this year as well, with the most recent example being ZANO.
Institutions like Galaxy Digital are diving deep into the DeFi space, as it unveiled Curator Vaults on July 16 to expand institutional DeFi access. Earlier this month, on July 1, Symbiotic launched Core V2 to expand shared collateral across DeFi.
