Frequently asked questions
Short answers, including to the questions a project would rather not be asked. The known problems are named here and in the whitepaper rather than left for you to discover.
These are the questions that actually get asked, answered the way they were answered in the launch thread. If yours is not here, ask it there — that thread is not self-moderated, so nothing in it can be deleted.
When exchange?#
Never asked for, never paid for, never announced. Mainnet has run since 2026-10-07 and every coin on it was mined; testnet coins are worth nothing by design. Where the mainnet coin trades is the market's business, not the author's — there is no company to sign a listing deal and no fund to pay for one. The project sells nothing: anyone offering you ZCD from the project, before a block was mined, or at a “presale” price is scamming you.
Are there pools?#
The project runs none and endorses none. The node solo-mines out of the box, and it can serve the Stratum dialect XMRig speaks (zycordd --stratum-listen), so external mining software can work against your own node. If pools appear they are third parties; apply the scepticism you would anywhere.
Bounties? Airdrop? Signature campaign?#
No, no, and no. Nothing here pays for promotion. If someone offers you Zycord for shilling, it is not coming from this project.
Is this another “1M TPS” chain?#
The claim is narrower and falsifiable: verification needs no state, therefore it parallelizes without bound, therefore per-node cost can fall as the network grows. The network ships with modest ceilings — at genesis 4,000 certificates and 2.5 MB per 30-second block, against a sequential gas target of 1,600,000 — and they rise only on sustained, applied usage, up to static capacities. Nobody, including the author, can raise them by decree. If your machine disagrees with a published number, post the figures.
How is this different from a “parallel EVM” like Monad or Sei?#
Those parallelize execution inside a node — every node still re-executes every transaction, so the state-I/O wall stays exactly where it was. Here validity is a pure function of a transaction's bytes, so verification splits across the whole network instead of being repeated by all of it, and the only sequential stage touches memory rather than a database. Different wall, not a faster car into the same one.
Why RandomX? Botnets will come.#
They will; every CPU-minable coin has fought them and this project does not expect to be the exception. The trade is taken with open eyes: a distribution skewed by botnets is still broader than one decided in a sale, and keeping the laptop you already own competitive is the entire reason RandomX exists.
What happens when transactions conflict?#
The later one in fold order is skipped, a fixed skip fee is burned from its deposit, and the block stays valid — nothing ever “fails” halfway. Payments, mints and tips use commutative deltas and cannot conflict at all; only exact-read contract state (order books, AMMs) contends, and that is what sequencers exist to serialize off-chain. They arrive with the machine in Era 1.
Why was my certificate skipped, and who paid?#
A certificate is skipped when, at its place in the fold, one of its declared reads no longer holds — usually because another certificate spent the same one-shot cell first, or a certificate it depended on landed in a later block — or when one of its deltas would overflow. Nothing it wrote lands. A fixed skip fee of 1,000,000 drops (0.01 ZCD) is burned from its deposit and pays nobody, not even the producer, and the rest of the deposit comes back. Whoever named the deposit pays: for a payment or a plain call you signed yourself, that is you, because you chose the reads; for a call served by a sequencer it is the sequencer, whose own balance deposits for the fill. A user never pays the skip of a fill, and the user's payment to the sequencer settles only if the fill applies. If the deposit itself could not be reserved, the certificate is dropped instead: nothing is charged and it can be sent again. The explorer shows each certificate's outcome and which declared read stopped holding.
What happened to underwriters, leases and the forced queue?#
They were in whitepaper v1.0 and are not in v2.0, which supersedes it in full. Insured certificates and underwriters gave way to a simpler rule: every certificate names a deposit cell that answers for it. Sequencer co-signatures and leases became intents, fills, receipts, pipelines and the fence counter. The forced queue, with its leases, quotas and delays, became the forced path, where inclusion is application. None of the removed machinery runs on mainnet or on the public testnet, and bonding stake is not part of Era 1 any more: it arrives with Era 2. Whitepaper §15 maps each change.
When do smart contracts arrive?#
At height 80,640 on mainnet — 28 epochs after block 0, about 4 November 2026 — when Era 1 activates in the release that already runs the network: the cEVM with a delta-first standard library pre-deployed, contract records with a sequencer and an admin, intents, fills and co-sequencing, the sequencer directory and the forced path. The height is a parameter frozen at genesis; reaching it needs no fork. The machine is a dialect of the EVM: Solidity, its compilers and its auditors carry over, while raw wallet compatibility is not claimed. On the public testnet Era 1 has been active since height 2,880, its first day, so it runs there for weeks before mainnet reaches the gate.
What are the eras, and which one is live now?#
Era 0, mine and pay, is live on mainnet: proof of work, native assets, one-shot and persistent addresses, both fee markets, the subsidy split and the sealed treasury. Era 1, the machine, activates at height 80,640 (about 4 November 2026) and is already live on the public testnet. Era 2, proof of stake, opens bonding at epoch 182 (height 524,160, about 7 April 2027), starts a ramp of 90 epochs once active stake holds 10% of supply for 30 epochs, or at epoch 273 at the latest, and then switches block production from proof of work to stake. Era S, confidential payments, would come only after independent audits and an adversarial public testnet, and is not part of the current specification. Era 2 and Era S each ship as their own release by hard fork. What lies past every node verifying every certificate is set out in the whitepaper as a direction, not a specification. The table is in the companion document.
When does proof of stake arrive, and what happens to mining?#
In three steps, each a consensus rule of Era 2. Bonding opens at epoch 182, about 7 April 2027: anyone with 1,000 ZCD can bond it to stake, and a smaller holder can delegate to a pool, while mining goes on producing every block and taking the whole producer's share. The ramp starts once active stake, delegations included, holds 10% of supply for 30 epochs, and at epoch 273, about 7 July 2027, at the latest. For 90 epochs that pass its gate, every block is still mined but also carries the signature of a staker drawn by stake, who takes a share of the producer's subsidy that starts at 1/180 and rises by 1/180 with each epoch that passes, so mining keeps at least half until the end. A block mined without that signature is valid, and its producer's share and priority fees are burned. At the switch, the first block of the next epoch, mining ends: a staker drawn for each 5-second slot produces the block, and a day pays the same subsidy as before, a sixth per block. It comes no later than epoch 363, about 5 October 2027, unless the gate pauses it. A delegator's coin never leaves its address and is never burned for a pool's fault; the one fault punished is a key signing two blocks for one slot, and it costs only that key's own bond. Wait 20 blocks for finality before the switch and 120, ten minutes, after it. Whitepaper §11 has the rules.
What is a sequencer, and can it steal my funds?#
A sequencer is an ordinary server, usually run by an application's team, that a contract chooses to serialize the calls that read its state exactly — an order book, an AMM. You do not build a certificate against such a contract: you sign an intent naming the call, a window of at most 8 blocks, bounds on the outcome and the payment the sequencer is owed. The sequencer executes it, answers within milliseconds with a signed receipt, and publishes the result as a fill. It cannot steal your funds. It cannot change what your intent does, only when it lands; a result outside your bounds cannot apply; and a fill built on false inputs is skipped at the sequencer's own expense. It is trusted for liveness, never for safety. What it can do is see its application's order flow first, which the design states openly, and stop serving you, which is what the forced path is for. Payments never need one: transfers are guarded deltas, which no sequencer gates.
What if a sequencer disappears or censors me?#
You leave by the forced path, which asks nobody's permission: zcd wallet intent --fallback does it for you when the sequencer is unreachable, drops your intent or lets its window close, and zcd wallet open-intent does it by hand. It is slower and costs the network fees in full, but it works against any contract. The contract itself stays alive: its delta methods need no sequencer, and its admin, or its own code, can bind a new sequencer through the same path. A forced certificate that sets the contract's cells moves its fence counter, so the fills the old sequencer built over that state can no longer enter. Censorship costs the censor fees and users, and costs the network nothing.
What is the forced path?#
The slow path that needs no sequencer. You sign an open intent — an intent with no sequencer named, funded by your own one-shot payers — and relay it to the network. A block producer executes the open intents it chooses against the state at the end of its block and appends the results as forced certificates, the last in the block. Inclusion is application: there is no queue, no lease, no quota and no waiting period. A block carries at most 16 of them, each with at most 4,000 derivation units of parallel budget, which is why every exit a contract offers must fit in that budget. Your payment covers the fees: the base fee is burned and the rest goes to the producer. A call that reverts still lands, as FORCED_FAILED: your payers pay, your change comes back, and nothing else is written. It arrives with Era 1. Whitepaper §8 has the whole mechanism.
What are the known problems?#
Named in the whitepaper rather than left for you to discover: the spent-address registry grows forever (shared with every nullifier-set design); bandwidth and storage at high throughput are a declared open problem, because bodies are chain data and every node carries every byte; sequencers see their own application's order flow first — its MEV is captured by the application, explicitly; the forced path is slower and dearer than a sequencer, and a producer can grief a hot contract by about a block, paying for it; under proof of stake the chain is as secure as a conventional proof of stake, and rewriting history with keys since unbonded is barred only by the checkpoints each release pins; and the cEVM widens the surface that has to be right the first time, with no pause button to fix it later. §13, Accepted risks, lists them all by name.
Is there a Discord or a Telegram?#
Yes. The Discord and the Telegram are run by the community, and they are where the community is being built. Official announcements are different: every one is signed with the project key and posted in the forum thread. If a message in a chat calls itself an official announcement, look for the signed post in that thread; when in doubt, check BitcoinTalk.
Who are you?#
Simstoshi. That is the whole answer, and it is the point: nothing in this design requires trusting the author. No admin keys to abuse, no premine to dump, no operator load-bearing for safety — and a forced path that keeps every contract reachable even if every sequencer disappears, author included. Every official release and announcement is signed with E724 39CE DD85 11F9 D607 550B 87FD 60D5 EB4A 0B29.
Is there a premine, a founder share or an investor round?#
No premine and no investor round, and both are checkable: zcd genesis prints allocations 0, rebuilt from the parameters embedded in the binary. No coin existed before block 0, and block 0 paid none. There is a founder share, written into consensus: every block subsidy pays 94% to the miner, 3% to the founder's address until epoch 1,095 (three years) and 3% to the treasury, which takes 6% after that. The split applies to the subsidy only, never to fees. Over its three years the founder's share sums to less than 2% of the supply issued before the tail.
How is ZCD issued?#
Only as block subsidy. It starts at 21 ZCD per block, is constant within an epoch of one day, 2,880 blocks, and steps down at every epoch boundary by a fixed integer rule, E(n) = max(tail, E(n−1) − floor(E(n−1) / 1054)), so it halves about every two years. The first 86,400 blocks (30 days) are a ramp: the reward rises in a straight line from near zero to the schedule, and the roughly 907,917 ZCD it withholds is never paid back. From epoch 4,376, about year 12, the subsidy stays at a perpetual tail of 0.33 ZCD per block, by which point about 61.8 million ZCD will have been issued. From the switch to proof of stake a block comes every 5 seconds and pays a sixth as much, so a day pays the same. Against the tail run the base-fee burn of both fee markets and the burn of every skipped certificate, so net issuance can be negative under load. zcd emission --height N prints the subsidy and its 94/3/3 split at any height.
What is the treasury, and who controls it?#
Nobody, yet. The treasury is the protocol address's own balance: no key hashes to it, no certificate can debit it, and genesis names no quorum. It takes 3% of every block subsidy from block 1. The protocol has no way to spend it at all: a spending path can only come with a later upgrade, with signers chosen by the community and not by the founder, and the launch commitment is that none comes before height 259,200, about 5 January 2027. For the first three years there is a stewardship proposal — five seats with public charters, 3 of 5 to spend, 4 of 5 to replace a holder or touch the reserve — and it is a proposal for community review, not a consensus rule: nothing in it binds until node operators adopt an upgrade that pins a key set. The text is in the companion document.
How do I verify that a binary is really yours?#
Do better than that: verify it is really the published source. Rebuild the tag and compare hashes — if they match, the question of who built it stops mattering. The procedure is Verifying a download. Note that the -randomx archives are cgo and cannot be byte-reproduced; that tier is stated explicitly rather than blurred.
Can I mine on a GPU or an ASIC?#
RandomX is designed to make that unprofitable relative to a CPU, which is the whole point. Mine on the machine you already own. Budget about 3.3 GiB of RAM for a mining node and about 1 GiB for one that only verifies — the numbers are here.
What happens if I start my node before genesis?#
Mainnet and the public testnet are both past genesis, so today this concerns only a network that has not opened yet. The node waits, and that is the intended way to use it: it refuses to build a block whose timestamp its own clock has not reached, prints how long is left, and begins mining on its own. It peers and syncs throughout. There is nothing to schedule and nothing to restart.
Is the testnet coin the same as the mainnet coin?#
No. The public testnet has its own chain id, its coins are worth nothing by design, and it can be reset from genesis. It exists to measure mainnet's behaviour — which is why it carries mainnet's gas schedule unchanged.
Where do I report a security issue?#
In SECURITY.md, which states the disclosure process. The project would rather have the report than the benefit of the doubt, and a defect reported privately costs far less than one found in the field.