Aztec public sale, quick overview of auction details and tokenomics.

Written by: 1912212.eth, Foresight News

On November 13, the zero-knowledge privacy technology project Aztec announced the launch of its AZTEC token sale, totaling 1.547 billion tokens, which accounts for 14.95% of the total supply, with ETH as the payment token. Regarding the sales mechanism, the project stated that it will prioritize real-time price discovery and fair participation opportunities. The starting price is set at a $350 million FDV, which is approximately 75% lower than the implied network valuation based on the latest equity financing. Participants can mint soul-bound NFTs to confirm their participation status.

Registration and bidding for early participants will begin today (November 13th) at 3 PM (CET). Early participants will enjoy a day's exclusive early access before the bidding opens to the public. On December 1st, AZTEC will be distributed to contributors and genesis bidders, and on December 2nd, all NFT holders will be able to participate in the auction bidding.

The public auction will take place from December 2 to December 6, 2025, during which time the tokens can be withdrawn and staked.

This sale does not have an airdrop phase and does not set up a special allocation mechanism. Over 300,000 addresses have been whitelisted, and these addresses will qualify for the first-day bidding. The sale is open to global users, including U.S. citizens.

Contributor Qualification Certification Rules

Participated in one or more of the following:

• Aztec Testnet's Sorter and Prover
• ETH solo stakers, including selected StakeCat ETH operators, Obol Silver, Rocketpool, LidoCSM, and Stakers Union.
• zk.money user
• Active community members
• Uniswap traders (3000 randomly selected from active traders in the past 30 days).
• Nansen's Ice, North, and Star levels.

It also includes the Genesis Sorter nodes, and the top 200 high-quality node operators who performed well on the Aztec testnet are also eligible to participate.

Auction method: Continuous liquidation auction agreement

Uniswap announced the launch of the “Continuous Clearing Auction Protocol (CCA)”, which is a customizable protocol for initiating liquidity and issuing tokens on Uniswap v4. The protocol was designed in collaboration with Aztec, which provides a ZK Passport module for private and verifiable participation.

The team commits a portion of the token supply to a public auction and sets a duration and reserve price. Price discovery occurs as bidders place orders, which are split in the auction block, with each split order being settled at the determined market price.

At the end of the long-term liquidity auction, the tokens will be distributed and a Uniswap V4 liquidity pool will be created at the discovered price.

Token Economics

The Aztec white paper shows that the total supply of AZTEC at genesis is 10,350,000,000 coins, distributed as follows: 27.26% allocated to investors and early supporters, 21.06% allocated to the core team, 11.71% allocated to the foundation, 10.73% allocated to ecosystem grants, 14.95% allocated to Phase 2 public auction, 1.93% allocated to Phase 1 genesis sorter sales, 2.44% allocated to Bilateral sales, 2.64% allocated to Uniswap V4 liquidity pool, 4.89% allocated to future incentives, and 2.41% allocated to Y1 Network Rewards.

The total proportion of token sales is 21.96%, corresponding to 2,272,500,000 tokens. This portion of tokens will be owned by token holders and the foundation at launch.

Token features include

• Staker's Pledge: Tokens will be used to secure the network through staking by Aztec validators (i.e., “Stakers”), who are responsible for generating blocks on the Aztec network. Token holders who do not operate a staker can choose to delegate their tokens to a staker.
• Governance: Token holders can participate in the governance of the Aztec network (“Aztec Governance”).
• Execution Environment: If the Aztec governance upgrades the network in the future to support an execution environment for smart contracts, the tokens will be used to pay transaction fees on the Aztec network.

12 months after the start date of the token sale (November 13, 2025)

• Aztec governance allows for adjustable total token supply, including annual issuance up to a capped percentage;
• If the execution environment is enabled, transaction fees may be adjusted through a self-regulating mechanism similar to Ethereum EIP-1559.

After the token sale is completed, the Uniswap v4 liquidity pool may provide secondary market liquidity, with the foundation planning to inject 273 million tokens into the pool. The token sale contract will automatically inject the corresponding tokens into the liquidity pool based on the proportion of ETH paid by the purchasers. The liquidity pool will be governed by Aztec governance and will be locked in an immutable smart contract for at least 90 days after launch, after which the restrictions can be lifted through governance voting. In addition, the tokens may be listed for trading on other decentralized trading protocols or centralized exchanges.

7 years waiting

Aztec completed a $2.1 million seed round financing at the end of 2018, and in September 2019, it completed another round of financing. Subsequently, in January 2020, the Aztec Network launched its mainnet. Amid the wave of ZK zero-knowledge and L2, in December 2021, it completed a $17 million Series A financing, led by Paradigm, with participation from notable figures and institutions including Vitalik. Then, in December 2022, it completed a $100 million Series B financing, led by a16z.

However, the luxurious venture capital lineup did not bring about the growth of the agreement.

In March 2023, Aztec Network announced the gradual shutdown of the DeFi privacy bridge project Aztec Connect. It will disable the depositing of funds into the Aztec Connect contract from zk.money and other front-ends (such as zkpay.finance), and will completely abandon the Aztec Connect contract after one year, ceasing all Rollup functionalities. The person in charge responded that this decision was primarily due to commercial considerations.

In May 2025, its public testnet was launched, attracting quite a few airdrop players at one point. The announced tokenomics this time shows that Aztec has no airdrop allocation.

BTC has lost the 100,000 USD mark, and the market has shown signs of turning bearish. It remains uncertain how many players will be willing to pay for it; perhaps the real test for Aztec has only just begun.