Launching the Zama Creator Program: Starting with $53,000 per month for the best content creators

September 4, 2025

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The Zama Team

Introducing the Zama Creator Program: A new model for rewarding genuine contributions, on a monthly basis.

The current airdrop meta is fundamentally broken. Traditional token distributions optimize for the wrong metrics. Low quality AI-generated content drowns out real, genuine content. Sophisticated bot networks extract value while real creators struggle for recognition. Communities became transactional rather than collaborative. Unsustainable reward structures create disappointment and massive sell pressure on the token.

We've watched this pattern repeat across dozens of protocols. The result isn't just economically inefficient; it's actively harmful to any ecosystem's long-term development. So we decided to try something different.

The Zama Creator Program

Our goal is simple: work alongside our community to make Zama the dominant confidentiality layer for web3. As such, we designed the Zama Creator Program to be the opposite of an airdrop: rather than a one-off reward, we will reward the best content creators monthly, before and long after TGE.

Here's how it works:

Monthly Distribution: A prize pool is distributed each month to the top 100 creators. We are starting with $50,000 per month, with the goal to increase this over time.
Flexible payouts: Creators can choose to redeem their prize in either stablecoins or $ZAMA tokens according to their own preference. The first claim period will start after TGE, and then at the end of each month.
A substantial commitment: We have allocated a sizeable budget, and a significant portion of the total $ZAMA supply, to support these initiatives over the next five years. This includes funding for the creator program as well as upcoming developer and beta tester programs.
Public verifiability: Following the ethos of blockchain itself, we are making our creator program publicly verifiable. Each month, we will publish the leaderboard alongside the formula and parameters used to calculate it, so that anyone can verify the results.

A Public Algorithm Designed for Fairness

Our scoring system balances multiple factors to reward genuine value creation while preventing manipulation. This is our initial algorithm, inspired by how some of the best social media creator reward systemss are calculated:

Base Score Components:

Audience Quality: Logarithmic scaling of verified human followers (prevents simple follower buying)
Reach Impact: Square root of impressions (rewards broad impact while limiting impression farming)
Engagement Depth: Weighted interactions prioritizing meaningful engagement (quotes > retweets > likes)
Community Response: Smart engagement metrics that filter bot interactions

Dynamic Multipliers:

Engagement Quality: Higher multipliers for creators maintaining authentic engagement rates relative to their audience size.
Consistency Rewards: Activity multipliers that encourage regular, quality posting without overwhelming feeds.
Economic Efficiency: CPM caps prevent impression manipulation while ensuring fair reward distribution based on the advertising industry standard costs.

Full Formula:

We look at several factors:
- Quality followers: your smart followers (verified, active humans), not bots.
- Reach: how many people saw your posts this month.
- Meaningful interactions: likes, reposts, and quote posts (quotes count more).
- Engagement quality: healthy engagement rates are good; suspiciously high rates are capped or disqualified.
- Consistency: posting more often helps—up to a +40% boost.

Eligibility:
- To appear on the leaderboard and be cash‑eligible, you must publish at least 2 posts in the calendar month (UTC).

Anti‑gaming safeguards:
- If observed engagement rate is >20%, the score is 0 (disqualified for the month).
- Engagement is capped by reach: smaller reach gets tighter caps, so small accounts with unrealistically high ER don’t dominate.
- If your reported ER is >10% with <50k impressions, we apply a strong penalty.
- We also apply a $30 CPM cap on cash payouts (see below).

How your score is computed:
- We combine the factors above into a single score.
- More reach and smart engagement help; extremely high ER on low reach is dampened.
- Very high quote activity counts more than likes/reposts, but only within sane limits.

Rewards:
- Top 100 share a $50,000 monthly pool (claimable in $USDC or $ZAMA token at TGE).
- Payouts is based on score^α (a curved split; α currently 1.25).
- A $30 CPM cap applies to Top‑100 prizes; any excess is redistributed to uncapped winners.
- Ranks 101–250 receive an OG NFT unlocking alpha access.

BASE SCORE CALCULATION (v0.1):
# Terms & definitions:
- ER% = (likes + retweets + quotes) / impressions × 100
- SRM (Scale Rate Multiplier) = min(1, impressions / 100,000)
- SF = min(log10(smart_followers + 1), 3.0)
- IMP = sqrt(impressions)
- ENG = likes + 3·retweets + qW·quotes, with qW = 4 + 2·SRM (range 4–6)
- Observed engagement EngObs = max(ENG_raw, ER%×impressions) (robustness to under/over‑reporting)
- ER cap per reach: ER_cap = 1% + 4%·SRM (1–5%)
- EffEng = min(EngObs, impressions × ER_cap); Clamp = EffEng / EngObs (≤1)
- SENG = min(smart_engagement, 0.5 × EffEng)
- Reach‑efficiency term: QE = min(log(1 + impressions / max(followers,1)), 2.0) × SRM
- Posting multiplier: postMult = 1 + 0.02 × min(posts, 20) (max +40%)
- ER multiplier (bounded, no >1.0 boost): erMult = 0.90 + 2 × min(ER% / 100, 0.05) → ranges 0.90…1.00 (e.g., 0.5%→0.91, 2%→0.94, 2.5%→0.95, ≥5%→1.00)

Guards:
- If observed ER > 20% → finalScore = 0 (DQ).

Additional penalty:
- if ER% > 10 and impressions < 50,000 → multiply score by 0.30.

Score:
- engageBlock = ( (ENG × 0.7) × Clamp + (SENG × 150) ) × SRM^1.5
- baseScore = (SF × 500) + (IMP × 10) + engageBlock + (QE × 120)
- finalScore = baseScore × erMult × postMult

Eligibility filter:
- Row excluded from leaderboard if posts < 2 or impressions ≤ 0.

Payouts (Top‑100 only):
- Curved weighting: each winner gets share ∝ (finalScore)^α, currently α = 1.25.
- $30 CPM cap: maxPrize = (impressions / 1000) × $30.
- If capped, we redistribute excess proportionally among the uncapped Top‑100 using the same weights.
- Ranks 101–250: OG NFT (no cash).

REWARDS:
- Curved weighting: each winner gets share ∝ (finalScore)^α, currently α = 1.25.
- $30 CPM cap: maxPrize = (impressions / 1000) × $30.
- If capped, we redistribute excess proportionally among the uncapped Top‑100 using the same weights.
- Ranks 101–250: Zama OG NFT.

This is version v0.1 of our creator economy. We expect to iterate based on:

Community feedback and suggestions
Algorithm performance data
Ecosystem development needs
Improvement of AI bots

We will conduct a monthly review process to adjust the algorithm, get feedback from the community, and integrate diverse optimizations.

Supporting Emerging Creators

We recognize that algorithmic systems, however fair, can favor established creators. To address this, we're allocating an additional 6% on top of the monthly prize pool (so $3,000 on top of the initial $50,000) for exceptional content from emerging creators.

These will be curated manually by the Zama team, where we will reward the top 3 best educational content on X, and the top 3 best community building content on Farcaster.

Getting Started

The program is live. Creators can get started today on The Zama Creator Program Page, and on Guild.xyz. While you don’t need to register to get started and share about Zama, we will ask creators to register on Guild when the claim period comes.‍

Ready to participate? Get started on: http://zama.ai/programs/creator-program
Questions and feedback? Reach out to us on X @zama_fhe‍
Don't wait! Start sharing on X about the Zama Creator Program: click here

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Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.If two parties have some sort of dealings, then each has a memory of their interaction. Each party can speak about their own memory of this; how could anyone prevent it? One could pass laws against it, but the freedom of speech, even more than privacy, is fundamental to an open society; we seek not to restrict any speech at all. If many parties speak together in the same forum, each can speak to all the others and aggregate together knowledge about individuals and other parties. 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I cannot here selectively reveal myself; I must always reveal myself.Therefore, privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems. Until now, cash has been the primary such system. An anonymous transaction system is not a secret transaction system. An anonymous system empowers individuals to reveal their identity when desired and only when desired; this is the essence of privacy.Privacy in an open society also requires cryptography. If I say something, I want it heard only by those for whom I intend it. If the content of my speech is available to the world, I have no privacy. To encrypt is to indicate the desire for privacy, and to encrypt with weak cryptography is to indicate not too much desire for privacy. Furthermore, to reveal one's identity with assurance when the default is anonymity requires the cryptographic signature.We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence. It is to their advantage to speak of us, and we should expect that they will speak. To try to prevent their speech is to fight against the realities of information. Information does not just want to be free, it longs to be free. Information expands to fill the available storage space. Information is Rumor's younger, stronger cousin; Information is fleeter of foot, has more eyes, knows more, and understands less than Rumor.We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do.We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to write it. We publish our code so that our fellow Cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Our code is free for all to use, worldwide. We don't much care if you don't approve of the software we write. We know that software can't be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can't be shut down.Cypherpunks deplore regulations on cryptography, for encryption is fundamentally a private act. The act of encryption, in fact, removes information from the public realm. Even laws against cryptography reach only so far as a nation's border and the arm of its violence. Cryptography will ineluctably spread over the whole globe, and with it the anonymous transactions systems that it makes possible.For privacy to be widespread it must be part of a social contract. People must come and together deploy these systems for the common good. Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one's fellows in society. We the Cypherpunks seek your questions and your concerns and hope we may engage you so that we do not deceive ourselves. We will not, however, be moved out of our course because some may disagree with our goals.The Cypherpunks are actively engaged in making the networks safer for privacy. Let us proceed together apace.Onward.Eric Hughes9 March 1993