Aztec’s Token Sale Could Mark a New Era
Olivia Capozzalo & Camila Russo
December 05, 2025
Happy Friday, Defiers!
Today’s big story:
- Aztec’s token sale using Uniswap’s Continuous Clearing Auction raises nearly $60 million
In other news:
- First SUI ETF debuts on Nasdaq
- Citadel calls for DeFi regulations
- Lighter announces spot trading
Read more below! But first, please give our sponsors some love; they make this newsletter possible.
In the third episode of our Avalanche Ecosystems mini-series, we explore one of crypto’s biggest trends: real-world asset (RWA) tokenization. From land records to treasuries and equities, Avalanche enables institutions to create true on-chain assets and not just wrappers.
With insights from Ava Labs, Balcony, Grove, and Dinari, we explore how Avalanche is powering the next wave of RWA innovation.
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📈 Markets in the Past 24 Hours
| TICKER | VALUE | 24H | |
|---|---|---|---|
 | Bitcoin | $90,580 | -2.56 % |
 | Ethereum | $3,109.8 | -3.08 % |
 | XRP | $2.08 | -3.10 % |
 | BNB | $889.66 | -2.37 % |
 | Solana | $135.21 | -5.50 % |
Today’s Big Story
Aztec’s Token Sale Could Mark a New Era for Onchain Fundraising
Just a year ago, memecoins were the cultural center of gravity in crypto. No-code launchpads were the place to be: A couple of clicks for the issuer, a roulette wheel for the buyer, and a token backed by nothing but a meme.
The Aztec’s token sale –which has been running all week and ends tomorrow– is the antithesis of that era.
And its success may signal the beginning of something deeper: token sales rebuilt to fund teams building “real” products. “Real” meaning, products that can bring value to users, beyond satisfying something resembling a gambling addiction.
Aztec chose to launch its $AZTEC token using Uniswap’s new Continuous Clearing Auction (CCA) — a mechanism specifically designed to slow down the sales process, according to Hayden Adams in an interview with me yesterday (podcast episode coming out soon!)
Here’s how it works: Teams commit a portion of their token supply to a public auction and set the duration of the sale and floor price. Investors determine how much of the token they want to buy and the highest price they’re willing to pay. CCA places those bids across all auction blocks, incentivizing investors to bid early, as the price can only increase from the floor price. Each block clears at the identified market price. At the end of the auction, tokens are distributed and a Uniswap v4 pool is created at the discovered price.
This is an inversion of 2024’s meta. The industry has become exhausted by the speed, the hollowness of memes, and, especially, the extractive games played in those markets.
With CCA, Uniswap is trying to make it impossible to front-run and pump and dump, Adams said. In theory, the model will attract higher-quality projects that want to raise funds to build something meaningful and are not looking to flip a token for a quick gain.
Fully Onchain. Transparent. Open to Anyone.
The Aztec sale might be the most important crypto fundraising experiment in a long time, because of what it isn’t:
- No backroom allocation
- No cabals with insider knowledge sniping the token early and dumping it on the rest
Instead, it’s onchain, transparent, and open to anyone – including U.S. users. Participants complete a sanctions check, but they can do so with ZKPassport, verifying identity locally on their phone without sending personal data anywhere.
It’s worth noting that while Aztec is selling roughly 15% of its token supply in this sale, the team, investors, and foundation control nearly 60%. The project has raised $119 million in three previous funding rounds.
As of today, there are $57M worth of bids across 15,734 unique wallets, with half a day to go.
A Privacy L2
So what does Aztec actually do? Aztec is building a privacy-preserving Layer 2 for Ethereum, which allows users and developers to interact onchain without exposing sensitive data. The team is developing a programmable privacy system that uses zero-knowledge proofs to encrypt both transaction data and smart contract logic. Aztec is architected around a dual-execution model: private execution using Aztec’s Noir language for encrypted smart contracts, and public execution when transparency is desired.
The long-term vision is to unlock a “trillion-dollar private economy” onchain, one where individuals, companies, and institutions can use Ethereum with the confidentiality they expect from traditional finance.
The $AZTEC token underpins the Aztec network, serving as the staking asset for sequencers, the governance token for protocol upgrades, and potentially a future fee token if enabled by governance.
These are the sale mechanics:
- 1.547B tokens sold (14.95% of supply)
- Floor FDV: 98,493 ETH ($298M)
- 100% of tokens sold are unlocked via governance vote on Feb. 11, 2026
Fundraising was DeFi’s first killer app. ICOs cracked open global capital markets, but they collapsed because of misaligned incentives, zero accountability, and regulatory heat.
Uniswap’s CCA, with Aztec as its first example, shows a different path. If Aztec is any indication, maybe this time around, we could see a wave of more serious projects choosing open markets again. Not because they can’t raise privately, but because they get better outcomes by raising onchain. For individual investors, it’s a chance to own meaningful projects at the seed stage, hopefully, in a way that doesn’t feel like they’ve been fleeced at the casino.
It’s too early to say whether Aztec and CCA really are the first of a new wave of onchain fundraising, but I’ll stay optimistic and hope it is.
With love,
Cami, founder of The Defiant
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🎬WATCH
More Than Wrappers | RWAs on Avalanche | Ecosystems, Ep. 3
In our third episode of the Avalanche Ecosystems mini-series, we dive into one of the most important trends in crypto: tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs). From land records to treasuries, private credit, and publicly traded equities, Avalanche is enabling institutions to not just issue onchain wrappers, but to create the real thing. It's tokenization the right way.
With interviews from Luigi D’Onorio DeMeo and Morgan Krupetsky (Ava Labs), Dan Silverman (Balcony), Kevin Chan (Grove) and Gabriel Otte (Dinari), we explore how Avalanche’s architecture is powering a new wave of RWAs across finance, government infrastructure, and consumer applications.
Watch the mini doc here:
This content is part of a media partnership between The Defiant and Ava Labs
Top News in the Past 24 Hours
- 21Shares Launches First Leveraged Sui ETF on Nasdaq 21Shares’ 2x leveraged Sui (SUI) ETF launched on the Nasdaq amid rising institutional interest in the asset.
- Why it matters: This marks the first U.S. ETP tied to the Sui ecosystem; the SEC is still reviewing 21Shares’ separate application for a spot SUI ETF
- Citadel’s Call For SEC to Regulate DeFi Protocols Divides Crypto Experts Citadel Securities recently submitted a letter to the U.S. SEC calling for decentralized finance platforms and tokenized U.S. stocks to be regulated like traditional exchanges and brokers. Why it matters: The letter has divided experts across the broader industry, reflecting ongoing questions around how regulators should approach DeFi.
- Lighter to Introduce Spot Trading Lighter, the leading decentralized perpetuals exchange by trading volume, is set to launch its highly anticipated spot trading feature this week, debuting with ETH. Why it matters: Lighter flipped Hyperliquid in terms of perp volumes earlier this quarter after it unveiled a $68 million raise.
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