Zycord documentation

Everything published about Zycord, in reading order — the design argument, the engineering specification, and the operator guides for actually running it.

Zycord is a proof-of-work network in which every transaction — called a certificate — carries the state it read and the state it wrote. Verifying one is therefore a pure function of its bytes: no disk, no history, no shared state, and no bound on how many machines check it at once. The chain never executes anything. It orders certificates and commits them with a deterministic fold that applies each certificate whose declared inputs still hold, and skips the rest.

These pages are the documentation for that system: the design argument, the engineering specification, and the operational guides for running it. They are written from the same sources the reference implementation is built from, and where any of them disagrees with the repository, the repository is right.

Start here#

Run it#

Reference#

The shortest useful path#

If you want to be on the network today rather than read about it, this is the whole of it. The public testnet is running now; it is the same consensus rules as mainnet under a different chain id.

# Build the binary that can join a RandomX network.
# `make build` produces a devnet-only binary -- see Installation, "Two tiers".
make build-randomx

# A payout address. The node never sees the key behind it.
./bin/zcd-randomx wallet new --out miner.json

# Join, and mine to yourself. Coins come from mining; on testnet there is
# also a faucet at zycord.com/faucet/ for a first, small balance.
./bin/zycordd-randomx --testnet --dir ./testnet \
  --mine --payout $(./bin/zcd-randomx wallet address --key miner.json)

Start it whenever you like, including before a network's first block is due: the node refuses to build a block its own clock has not reached, says how long the wait is, and begins mining on its own. There is nothing to schedule and nothing to restart. The full version of this is Public testnet, and what it costs to run is under Mining.

What is authoritative, and what is only explanation#

This matters more here than on most projects, because the network has no admin key and therefore no way to correct a mistake after the fact. The documents are ranked, and the ranking is not a formality:

Where any two disagree, the more precise one wins and the disagreement is a bug worth reporting. No number written by hand in the explanatory layers is a source of truth; it is generated from code, asserted by a named test, or an illustration that nothing else may cite.

Check it yourself#

For a project whose author will not vouch for it in person, nothing here is worth more than what you can check without asking. The protocol is a directory of files: the parameter files that are frozen at genesis, and golden vectors giving every fold, block and validity rule its own case. An implementation that passes them is a peer, not a fork.