ZAMA Jumps About 74% in a Week as Traders Rotate From ZEC-Led Privacy Run to FHE Plays

KuCoin Flash data show ZAMA/USDT trading at 0.08364 USDT at press time. From the mid-September breakout zone near 0.048 USDT, ZAMA has risen about 74% in roughly one week. The token printed a period high of 0.09281 USDT, briefly taking the peak gain to nearly 93%. KuCoin logged around 93.57 million ZAMA in 24-hour turnover, equal to about 7.72 million USDT, with the session range spanning 0.07303 to 0.09281 USDT. The surge comes as privacy-themed assets move back to the center of market attention. Zcash (ZEC) kicked off the initial leg, drawing liquidity into the privacy narrative. A CoinMarketCap market note said ZEC climbed about 69% over seven days and hit its highest level in eight years, lifting broader demand across privacy-related tokens. As ZEC's advance broadened, investors started hunting for privacy infrastructure viewed as more responsive to market cycles and offering a wider set of use cases. ZAMA has been among the beneficiaries of that shift. The sequencing suggests a meaningful slice of incremental ZAMA demand may be rotation out of the ZEC-led privacy trade—a thematic spillover, not evidence of direct fund flows between identifiable on-chain addresses. ZEC's rally helped validate that privacy can attract sizable liquidity, after which attention expanded from private digital money toward encrypted computation, confidential DeFi and institutional data protection. Zama targets a different lane than traditional privacy coins. Zama Protocol positions itself as a blockchain confidentiality layer built on fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) that can be deployed across existing layer-1 and layer-2 networks. FHE enables smart contracts to compute on encrypted data without exposing the underlying information. Balances, transaction sizes and positions can stay private while outcomes remain verifiable on-chain. That setup addresses a key obstacle for institutional participation in on-chain finance. Many institutions are unwilling to disclose position sizes, trading direction, portfolio allocations or strategies, while still requiring auditability, compliance controls and access to on-chain liquidity. By shielding sensitive data while preserving verification and control functions, FHE extends privacy beyond anonymous transfers into asset management, payments, lending, stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets. Recent product updates also coincide with the move. On September 15, Zama expanded its confidential DeFi offering from a single cUSDC yield vault to 16 curated vaults spanning five asset classes: USDC, USDT, WBTC, AUSD and TGBP. The first confidential yield venue accumulated more than $40 million in shielded assets within seven weeks. Zama also rolled out the Confidential Swap Protocol, enabling swaps of confidential assets without revealing trade intent or transaction size. On September 17, the project introduced confidential DeFi incentives. Rewards can now be computed from encrypted balances and distributed via confidential transfers, keeping positions, reward amounts and yield strategies private. Together, confidential deposits, yield generation, swaps and encrypted rewards form a more end-to-end private DeFi workflow. ZAMA is used to pay protocol fees and support network security. Zama runs a delegated proof-of-stake design operated by FHE coprocessors and key-management nodes. The initial validator set includes 18 active operators: 13 key-management nodes and five FHE coprocessors. Protocol fees are burned, while token issuance funds staking rewards. Overall, ZAMA's roughly 74% weekly climb reflects more than a single-day spike. Sector liquidity from the ZEC-led privacy run has spilled over into adjacent themes, while product catalysts—16 confidential yield vaults, more than $40 million in shielded assets, confidential swaps and encrypted incentives—have reinforced the FHE narrative. ZAMA appears to be benefiting from both privacy-sector rotation and rising interest in institutional-grade encrypted computation.