The Transparency Liability of Token Operations

Public blockchains are transparent by design. For retail participants, that is a feature. For institutions, it is a structural liability.

Today, every vesting schedule, airdrop allocation, and distribution event is visible to every trader in real-time. When a major investor receives a distribution, the market can see it. When a team unlock occurs, algorithms are positioned before the transaction settles. Analysis across 5,000+ token unlock events shows prices drop 7–15% within days of unlocks exceeding 1% of circulating supply. Keyrock data shows 90% of tokens underperform the market within 30 days of a transparent release, with average price drawdowns reaching 17% within 72 hours of a major supply event.

This structural mismatch has become one of the biggest barriers preventing institutional capital from moving fully onchain. And it has a solution.

What Changes

Zama has acquired TokenOps, the enterprise-grade token lifecycle management platform powering over $2 billion in token distributions, vesting, and compliance operations across the industry.

Through the acquisition, TokenOps integrates Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) across the full token lifecycle via the ERC-7984 confidential token standard.

Issuers can now execute vesting schedules, airdrops, and distributions with allocations, release curves, and recipient identities encrypted onchain.

The outcome:

• For fund managers: Major investors receive and manage distributions without broadcasting their positions. Signaling risk and front-running exposure are eliminated.

• For compliance teams: Every operation remains fully auditable. Regulators can be granted selective access to encrypted data, meeting Basel and MiFID standards without public disclosure.

• For issuers: Strategic playbooks stay private. Token operations execute on public blockchains with the confidentiality institutions require offchain.

Production Ready

The technology is not in development. Two major deployments in 2026 validate the approach at scale.

• $KAIO: The institutional RWA protocol created by WebN Group and Nomura's Laser Digital deployed FHE-powered confidential distributions of $KAIO. For KAIO’s partners, including BlackRock, Hamilton Lane, and Brevan Howard, FHE-powered distribution was the only viable path to launching on a public blockchain without exposing private fund data.

• $ZAMA: Zama will distribute its own token confidentially to team and investors through TokenOps' confidential vesting infrastructure on Ethereum, running on the same system now available to every issuer.

TokenOps Continues as an Independent Brand

Following the acquisition, TokenOps operates as an independent brand. Its confidential token lifecycle solutions remain available to every issuer across chains. Additional features will expand the platform from distribution management to full portfolio management for recipients over time.

"Privacy was the number one demand we could not meet with transparent infrastructure. Joining Zama allows us to replace information leakage with institutional-grade security."

Fabio Mancini, Co-Founder and CEO of TokenOps.

“In the legacy onchain world, transparency was a bug disguised as a feature. For an institution, a transparent ledger is an open book for competitors. Our goal is to make confidentiality the default state for every financial transaction onchain. Unlike solutions using opaque private chains, Zama adds privacy to existing public chains, enabling financial service providers and asset managers to operate onchain with the same level of confidentiality and compliance as they are used to offchain.”

Rand Hindi, Co-Founder and CEO of Zama.

“Public blockchains have been missing a critical piece of institutional infrastructure: privacy. With over $5 billion under management and significant token positions across the portfolio, we know firsthand that one of the biggest challenges at this scale is avoiding signaling risk when moving allocations to exchanges or executing OTC. Confidential transfers and OTC swaps bring onchain markets closer to how serious capital actually operates. Zama is leading the way in building the privacy layer this industry needs, and this is a very meaningful acquisition.”

said Paul Veradittakit, Managing Partner at Pantera Capital.

Closing the Glass House

The future of finance will not run on fully transparent infrastructure. It will run on programmable confidentiality.

Zama is the architect of the Confidential Layer that makes public blockchains safe and profitable for global capital.

Companies get the compliance they require. Regulators get the auditability they need. Capital gets the confidentiality it deserves.

Token lifecycle management is now part of that infrastructure.

Additional Links

• To learn more about confidential token operations for your organization, reach out to the team at zama.org/contact.

• Read the latest KAIO case study 

• Tokenops website

• Tokenops on X

• Zama on X