[ANN][ZCD] Zycord | A P2P network of self-certifying state | First week PoW! 🔥

[thesimstoshi]

A  note

I spent years studying Zycord's technology: the architecture, the paper, prototypes, validation. What I studied least was the launch and mining, and 1 October showed it. I'm studying it now.

A few things I want to make clear for anyone arriving:

Mining at home is hard. With the attention the project has drawn, an ordinary computer is now a very small share of the network. gabrielesor and shadow_69 measured this here in the thread. You can still find blocks, but the return is small, and a pool makes it steadier.

Part of the network's hashrate probably comes from people renting it on hashrate marketplaces. As a reference, 1 MH/s of RandomX goes for around US$35-40 a day there. Producing the same hashrate at home would take about 300 ordinary machines and cost far more in electricity alone. That is what home mining is up against.

Zcash's launch is also worth studying: price, supply and demand. It's a good case to compare with Zycord.

The emission schedule. The reward rises in a straight line until day 30, so daily emission grows a lot over the month:

Code:

Emission on day 1        ~980 ZCD
Emission on day 30       ~57,800 ZCD
Total at end of ramp     ~882,000 ZCD
Total around day 45      ~1.76 million (2x)
Total around day 60      ~2.6 million (3x)

You don't need many coins to build. The testnet is free and the cEVM is already open there. Deploying a contract on mainnet takes a small amount of ZCD, which home mining covers.

On my side, I'm focused on decisions I still need to study: the community fund, the technical scope of the next stages, and planning. There's a lot of study and planning under way, and I'll bring each proposal here when it's ready.

[gabrielesor]

Thanks. I'm aligned with your framing: this looks like a privacy gap in the wallet, not a consensus issue.
Full investigation and supporting evidence:
https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/6066089
I'll keep contributing constructively when I can.

[winnerwinnerchickendinner]

Zycord devlog — Sep 5 → Sep 10

⚠️ Mainnet genesis moves from September 15 to October 1. Testnet is relaunched on the 15th.

The GitHub ban took the infrastructure and the open issues with it — work that was already mapped out had to be rebuilt from scratch, and that cost us the schedule. We migrated the code to Codeberg, but their policy does not accept crypto projects; we are migrating again, this time to GitLab.

✅ RandomX v2 validated
✅ XMRig mines here, validated and tested end to end
✅ Node sync: problems identified and fixed
✅ Desktop wallet: improved interface
✅ Testnet test round validating the system working as a whole
✅ Explorer: the faucet actually works now (it did not before)
✅ Site: improvements

🔜 cEVM moved up to Era 0. The FAQ in this thread says there would be no contracts at launch, and the reason was the usual one: with no admin key there is no pause button, so everything that ships in genesis has to be auditable in full. That reason has not changed — what changed is that the cEVM came further along than expected, and it came without giving up quality or security. It enters Era 0 because it reached the standard genesis demands, not because the standard was lowered.

In practice: you can write, test and run contracts from the start of the network — real use for the token, and the door open to anyone who wants to build an application in here from day one.

Interested in seeing the use of RandomX v2, is there a plan to write it for academics in a paper?

[thesimstoshi]

Interested in seeing the use of RandomX v2, is there a plan to write it for academics in a paper?

It was a recommendation from the Monero community; I spoke with a few people while implementing it.

I think there is an academic opportunity here.

[thesimstoshi]

Zycord devlog – Oct 5 → Oct 9

v0.6.2 is out – download it and update: https://zycord.com/download/
Recommended for everyone mining with the built-in miner.

✅ Release version v0.6.2
✅ Faster built-in miner: the RandomX VM pool now reuses the VM with a warm cache, and the dataset uses huge pages. Measured +47% at 4 threads and +19% at 12 on a 12-thread laptop.
✅ New --mine-large-pages flag, on by default. Linux: reserve pages with vm.nr_hugepages=1100. Windows: grant "Lock pages in memory". The startup log says which memory the miner got
✅ Desktop wallet: live hash rate, your odds of finding a block in 1h / 24h / 7d, and mined rewards shown as "maturing" the moment the block is found, not 240 blocks later (!75)
✅ Matured rewards now appear as one "Mining reward" per block, not merged into a single receipt
✅ Payout address rotation for privacy: now a setting, off by default, and it actually rotates, even while the wallet is locked
✅ Node: mining_hashrate in /metrics and a new /maturing route for pools and explorers
✅ arm64 fix: the difficulty test no longer fails on Apple Silicon (!72). Thanks dario
✅ Mainnet checked across all public seeds: no fork, every seed on the same chain

⚠️ Big rigs (Xeon/EPYC): XMRig with huge pages over the node's Stratum is still the fastest way to mine; the built-in miner now closes much of that gap.

Audit the code and the rules: https://gitlab.com/zycord-group/zycord-node
Issues and MRs on GitLab.