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. 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. Anyone selling you ZCD today is scamming you: mainnet genesis has not happened.
Are there pools?#
None exist at launch and none are official. The node solo-mines out of the box, and at genesis difficulty that is the sensible way in. 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 at about 90 certificates per second and the ceiling only rises on sustained real usage — nobody, including the author, can raise it by decree. The measured numbers are in §15 of the whitepaper, with the source to re-run them. If your machine disagrees, 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, its fee is burned, 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 application sequencers exist to serialize off-chain — they activate at the same height as the machine.
Are there smart contracts at launch?#
Yes, in the genesis binary — active from height 80,640 (about day 28), four weeks after block 0, and after BOND at height 40,320 (about day 14) so that bonded underwriters exist before contracts do. Same binary, no fork: the heights are consensus parameters frozen at genesis. The machine is the parallel cEVM, with a delta-first standard library pre-deployed. Solidity, its compilers and its auditors carry over; raw wallet compatibility is not claimed. On the public testnet the same two heights fall on day 1 and day 3, so it is exercised there weeks before mainnet reaches it.
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, and the binding constraint at high throughput); bodies are chain data, so a block producer at the top of the capacity curve is datacenter-class on bandwidth alone; sequencers see their own application's order flow first — its MEV is captured by the application, explicitly; verification sampling is roadmap, not launch; the cEVM in the genesis binary widens the surface that has to be right the first time, with no pause button to fix it later; and §12 lists the confidential-payment open questions by name.
Is there a Discord or a Telegram?#
Community channels are welcome and will be built by the community — volunteers are wanted for exactly that. But none of them is official, by design: a chat has an admin, and an admin can silence people and erase history. Every official announcement goes in the forum thread, signed with the project key, and nowhere else. If someone in a chat says “official announcement” without a signed post in that thread, it is a lie.
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 allocation to dump, no operator load-bearing for safety — and a forced-inclusion path that keeps the network alive even if every operator 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 allocation or an investor round?#
No, and it is checkable rather than promised. zcd genesis prints allocations 0, and you can run it yourself against the published parameter file before the network exists. The treasury accrues 3% of every block subsidy into a cell that has no key, no address and no quorum at genesis and cannot be opened before Era 2; if nobody ever shows up publicly to claim it, the coins are simply never issued. A premine is an allocation — coins, an address, and a key that exist at genesis and belong to someone. Genesis here contains none of the three.
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?#
It waits, and that is the intended way to use it. The node 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 found before mainnet costs nobody anything.