Is anyone still willing to pay after 7 years of waiting for the Aztec public sale?

Original Title: “Aztec Open Public Sale, Is There Anyone Willing to Pay After 7 Years of Waiting?”

Original author: 1912212.eth

Original source:

Reprint: Mars Finance

On November 13, the zero-knowledge privacy technology project Aztec announced the launch of the AZTEC token sale, with a total of 1.547 billion tokens for sale, accounting for 14.95% of the total supply, and the payment token is ETH. 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 $350 million FDV, about 75% lower than the implied network valuation based on the latest equity financing. Participants can mint soulbound NFTs to confirm their participation status.

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

The public sale will take place from December 2 to December 6, 2025, during which the tokens will be available for withdrawal and staking.

This sale does not have an airdrop segment and has not set up a special distribution mechanism. More than 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:

· The sorter and prover of the Aztec testnet

· ETH sole stakers, including selected StakeCat ETH operators, Obol Silver, Rocketpool, LidoCSM, and Stakers Union.

· zk.money user

· Active community members

· Uniswap traders (randomly selected 3000 from the active traders in the past 30 days).

· Nansen's Ice, North, and Star tiers.

In addition, it also includes the Genesis Sorter Node, and the top 200 high-quality node operators who performed outstandingly on the Aztec test network are also eligible to participate.

Auction method: Continuous liquidation auction agreement

Uniswap announced the launch of the “Continuous Clearing Auction Protocol (CCA)”, a customizable protocol for launching 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 has committed part of the token supply to the public sale and has set a duration and reserve price. Price discovery bidders place orders, and these orders 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.

Tokenomics

The Aztec white paper shows that the total supply of AZTEC is 10,350,000,000 coins, allocated 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 sale, 1.93% allocated to Phase 1 genesis sorter sales, 2.44% allocated to Bilateral sales, 2.64% allocated to Uniswap V4 liquidity pools, 4.89% allocated to future incentives, and 2.41% allocated to Y1 Network Rewards.

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

Token features include

· Staker of the sequencer: Tokens will be used to secure the network through the staking of Aztec validators (i.e., “sequencers”), who are responsible for generating blocks on the Aztec network. Token holders who do not operate sequencers can choose to delegate their tokens to sequencers.

· Governance: Token holders can participate in the governance of the Aztec network (“Aztec Governance”).

· Execution environment: If the network is upgraded in the future through Aztec governance to support smart contract execution environments, 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 can adjust the total supply of tokens, including annual issuance based on a maximum percentage increase;

· 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, and the foundation plans 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 ratio of ETH paid by the purchasers. The liquidity pool will be governed by Aztec, 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 of waiting

Aztec completed a $2.1 million seed round financing at the end of 2018, and in September 2019, it completed a new round of financing. Then, in January 2020, the Aztec Network launched its mainnet. With the surge of ZK zero-knowledge and L2, in December 2021, it completed a $17 million Series A financing led by Paradigm, with participation from prominent figures and organizations like Vitalik. Subsequently, 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 ability to deposit funds into the Aztec Connect contract from zk.money and other frontends (such as zkpay.finance), and will completely abandon the Aztec Connect contract after one year, with all Rollup functions ceasing. The person in charge responded that this decision was mainly for business reasons.

In May 2025, it launched its public testnet, which once attracted quite a few airdrop players. The recently announced token economics shows that Aztec has no airdrop share.

BTC has lost the support of 100,000 USD, and there are already signs of a bearish market. It remains to be seen how many players will be willing to pay for it. Perhaps the real test for Aztec is just beginning.