How it works

The pieces of the network, from the bottom up, without jargon where we can avoid it.

The chain

New blocks are found by miners who solve a proof-of-work puzzle. Coins are held in outputs, as in Bitcoin, so every transaction spends some outputs and creates new ones. The explorer shows all of it and stats shows the network's health.

Contracts

A contract is a small program stored on the chain. Zen contracts are written in F*, whose compiler checks a proof of how much computation the code can use before it is accepted. To put a contract on the chain its author locks a small amount of ZP for the time it should stay active (the cost is the size of the code times the number of blocks). People who use a contract pay nothing extra: no ZP is needed to call it.

Assets

Any contract can issue its own asset. The assets page lists every token on the chain with the contract that created it. Typical examples: a token sold for ZP, a named token like a test dollar, a token only one key may issue.

The community fund (CGP)

Each interval, holders can vote on how a share of new coins is paid out and which payouts are funded. Voting has two stages: nominating proposals, then voting on those that were nominated. The CGP page shows the stage and time left, and the history of past intervals.

Oracle

A chain cannot look up a price by itself. The oracle service reads prices from several public sources, checks that they agree, and writes one Merkle root of all of them into a transaction. Anyone can then prove that a particular price was part of what was committed. Contracts, such as a bet on a price, use that proof. This runs on the testnet.

Exchange

The Dex is a contract. Anyone can place an order between two assets; anyone can take it, wholly or in part, or cancel their own. There is no operator in the middle and no account to open. This too runs on the testnet.

Bridge

A prototype lets USDC from an EVM test network appear on the testnet as a token and return. It is a trusted-operator design for experiments, with reserves visible on a status page. Not for real money.