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

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