[ANN][ZCD] Zycord | A P2P network of self-certifying state | Launching today! ✅

[thesimstoshi]

Zycord devlog – Oct 1 → Oct 4

v0.6.1 is out – download it and test: https://zycord.com/download/
The testnet relaunches on 5 Oct, 00:00 UTC, to rehearse the mainnet launch two days early.

✅ Release version v0.6.1
✅ Stabilization of seed nodes 1 through 4 and increased capacity of seed servers.
✅ 30-day slow start: the block reward starts near zero and ramps up to full
✅ Subsidy split in consensus: 94% miner, 3% founder, 3% community fund
✅ Same binary for testnet and mainnet
✅ Block 1 reveals a message committed in the binary – nobody can start the chain early
✅ Black box, public: a local devnet that runs 105 network tests, happy path and edge cases. Reproduce ours or write your own: https://gitlab.com/zycord-group/zycord-blackbox
✅ Desktop wallet: countdown to genesis, automatic resync from the cancelled chain, pool mining from Settings
✅ Hash counter in /metrics (!65). Thanks gabrielesor
✅ Announcement post and site updated to match the code

⚠️ Review continues until genesis; any fix ships before the 7th.

Audit the code and the rules: https://gitlab.com/zycord-group/zycord-node
Pools: start integrating now – unmodified XMRig mines over Stratum, and the testnet runs mainnet's rules from the 5th. Issues on GitLab.

🔜 Testnet genesis: 5 Oct 2026, 00:00 UTC.
🔜 Mainnet genesis: 7 Oct 2026, 00:00 UTC.

[thesimstoshi]

I created a dashboard so we can monitor network health together in real time during the launch.

https://lab.zycord.com/tools/network/

[shadow_69]

Thanks for the dashboard, handy for comparing against our own node. We have a node and a rx/2 miner running on the testnet, ready for the 05 Oct genesis, and will report anything odd we see after block 1. Good luck with the launch!

[thesimstoshi]

Zycord testnet: the first two hours

The launch rehearsal opened on 5 October at 00:00 UTC, running the same binary (v0.6.1) and the same rules as mainnet.

Summary: the network started on time, the three seeds stayed up and in agreement, difficulty adjusted on its own, and block time settled at the 30-second target.

Launch. Block 1 arrived at 00:00:01 carrying the launch message. No node mined before it. Only the launch node can produce block 1; it also found block 2. Together they paid 0.0007 ZCD.

Pace. The testnet deliberately starts at a low difficulty (~34 H/s), so the first 5 minutes produced 73 blocks. The adjustment raised difficulty about 470x in roughly 10 minutes, and since 01:00 the average block time has been ~32 s.

Code:

Blocks in 2 h      371 (target 240)
Hashrate           peak ~52 kH/s, now ~36 kH/s
Seeds              3/3 up, zero restarts, same state
Connections        peak 19 per seed, 0 refused
Reorgs             3, max depth 2, all in the first 40 min

Reward ramp. The block reward is at 0.090 ZCD, 0.44% of the way up. The first two hours issued 16.8 ZCD in total, against 5,040 ZCD at full reward, and the 73 fast blocks at the start paid 0.66 ZCD between them. Being first is worth almost nothing, as designed. The ramp tops out at 20.41 ZCD rather than 21 because the daily emission step-down already runs during the ramp.

Ready for mainnet? Launch, seeds, consensus, difficulty adjustment and the reward ramp are validated. The testnet did not draw the crowd of 1 October, so heavy simultaneous load, pools and transaction volume remain untested. Expect a fast start on mainnet too: difficulty needs a few minutes to catch up with the real hashrate, so the first blocks will come quickly, and the ramp makes them worth almost nothing.

Until then: keep your nodes and miners on the testnet, test pools over Stratum/XMRig, and report anything unusual here or on GitLab.

Live: https://lab.zycord.com/tools/network/

🔜 Mainnet: 7 October, 00:00 UTC.

[andremangra]

The rehearsal results look encouraging from a small Windows miner's perspective.

I’ve now finished preparing my v0.6.1 Windows RandomX setup for the October 7 mainnet launch.

A few things I specifically wanted to see after October 1 now look much better: the testnet launched cleanly, bootstrap is significantly stronger, the chain remained stable, and the first real RandomX key transition at height 576 was crossed normally.

I also like what the 30-day reward ramp showed in practice. A fast start no longer gives the first miners a meaningful economic advantage while difficulty and connectivity settle.

For launch I’ll be going solo with the native RandomX miner. Pool/XMRig is still interesting for smaller miners like me in the longer term, but since the pool path wasn't exercised during the rehearsal, I prefer to keep the launch setup simple and use the path that has already been demonstrated.

My little Windows machine is ready for mission #2. 🙂

Good luck everyone — see you at genesis.

[thesimstoshi]

Yes andremangra, I'm very excited about the results. I think we hit every metric we set out to measure in this rehearsal.

The network is behaving very well. The early rush while difficulty caught up with the hashrate did not concentrate the coin the way it did on 1 October. The largest balances on the explorer make it clear: the reward ramp cut the coin exposed to that early concentration by 99.8%.

Code:

                          1 Oct          5 Oct
                          (no ramp)      (ramp)        Change
First 300 blocks          6,300 ZCD      11.0 ZCD      -99.83%
First 2 hours             ~9,450 ZCD     16.8 ZCD      -99.82%
Top 3 addresses           ~5,480 ZCD     ~10 ZCD       -99.8%
(first 300 blocks)

1 Oct is the cancelled mainnet; 5 Oct is the testnet rehearsal, same release plus the ramp.

On 1 October, the three addresses that dominated the start took ~5,500 ZCD in the first hours, while most people could not even connect. Today the same kind of head start is worth about 10 ZCD. Who finds the early blocks still depends on hashrate; what changed is how much those blocks are worth. Over the 30-day ramp, the coin goes to whoever keeps mining through the month, not to whoever showed up in the first minutes.

Explorer: https://testnet.zycord.com/charts


Now, about 14 hours later, the network is concentrating around those with the most hash power, yet without an initial advantage for anyone.

[shadow_69]

Follow-up from our testnet run (one node + one rx/2 miner, ~1.7 kH/s, solo over Stratum): 15 h 23 min from genesis, 124 blocks delivered, 120 in the canonical chain (4 orphans), 9 rejected shares.
The three RandomX key changes (heights 576, 1088, 1600) were crossed without trouble.
We also checked the published figures against our own node's copy of the chain: 73 blocks in the first 5 minutes, 371 in the first 2 hours and ~32 s average after the first hour all match, and every header target up to height 1617 equals what NextTarget computes.
Nothing odd to report.
One small note: with the ramp ending at 20.41 ZCD we get 10.67 ZCD for the first 300 blocks and 16.30 ZCD for the first 2 hours (11.0 and 16.8 would be a ramp toward 21); the -99.8% conclusion is unchanged.

See you at genesis.

[thesimstoshi]

Excited about today's launch. Best of luck to everyone with the launch.

If anyone wants to know more about the story behind the project, I gave an interview to Hashpower, here is the link https://hashpower.site/2026/09/23/zcd-developer-interview/

[darkko]

Less than 5 hours until the launch.
If you have any questions, the community is available to help:

https://t.me/+ufeCItfHJWU3ZjBl
https://discord.gg/8DXTADJ6Es


countdown: https://lab.zycord.com/tools/network/
twitch community live: https://www.twitch.tv/eliotbez

[thesimstoshi]

Zycord mainnet: the first two hours

Genesis: 2026-10-07 00:00 UTC. The figures come from the chain and the three seeds, compared with the cancelled October 1 launch.

Summary

• Block 1 arrived at 00:00:01, carrying the launch message.
  
• 350 blocks in 2 hours (target 240) from 49 addresses. No address mined more than 15% of the blocks.
  
• 1 orphan block and 2 reorgs of depth 1 (heights 4 and 58), both in the first 10 minutes.
  
• All 3 seeds stayed up. They filled up at around 50 minutes, and inbound capacity was doubled to 512.
  
• Miners earned 13.64 ZCD in the first two hours, against 9,166 ZCD on October 1.
  

Timeline

Time	Height	What happened
00:00:01	1	Launch block
5 min	39	Difficulty already 21x genesis
10 min	72	Estimated hashrate ~0.23 MH/s
30 min	150	Difficulty 76x, ~0.66 MH/s, 41 addresses mining
40 min	185	First block from the first community pool
~50 min	~210	Seeds close to their 256 inbound limit
~1 h	~230	Limit raised to 512, one seed at a time
1 h 24 min	~285	Peak hashrate: 1.26 MH/s
2 h	350	Difficulty 135x, ~1.18 MH/s, reward 0.078 ZCD per block

Blocks and difficulty

Blocks	Average interval
1-100	8.4 s
101-200	18.8 s
201-300	30.3 s (target: 30 s)

The starting difficulty was below the hashrate that showed up, so the first blocks came fast. By around block 200, about an hour after genesis, the difficulty had caught up and blocks were arriving on target. On the testnet the same catch-up took 10 minutes, but there the starting difficulty was deliberately low. The longest gap between blocks was 225 s, at height 296.

Thanks to the 30-day ramp, the fast blocks paid almost nothing. At the end of the second hour the reward was 0.38% of the full reward (20.41 ZCD).

Network and seeds

• Connections across the three seeds: 318 at genesis, peaking at 786 at 73 minutes. This counts connections, not nodes, since one node connects to more than one seed.
  
• About 9 in 10 inbound connections came from nodes that do not accept connections. That is the zycordd default without --listen. Those nodes depend entirely on the seeds.
  
• Seed 1 filled its 256 slots at around 50 minutes and turned connections away until the limit went up. Part of those refusals were the same nodes retrying, including three banned nodes that retried every few seconds.
• Each seed restarted once to apply the new limit. Its connections dropped and came back within minutes: the total went from 782 to 499 and recovered to about 590.

A request to miners: if you can, run your node with --listen 0.0.0.0:9421 and open TCP port 9421. Every node that accepts connections takes load off the seeds and makes the network more resilient.

Compared with October 1 (first two hours)

	Oct 1 (cancelled)	Oct 7
Block 1	+6 min 19 s	+1 s
Blocks in 2 h (target 240)	450	350
Addresses mining at 15 min	12	35
Addresses mining in 2 h	23	49
Blocks from the largest address	35%	15%
Blocks from the top 3	77%	44%
Paid to miners	9,166.50 ZCD	13.64 ZCD
Received by the top 3	7,027.65 ZCD	6.26 ZCD
Orphans	8 (one 4-block reorg)	1

Total issuance in the two hours was ~14.5 ZCD: 94% to miners (13.64), 3% to the community fund (0.44) and 3% to the founder (0.44).

After the first two hours
The hashrate kept rising: ~1.5 MH/s over blocks 301-400, ~3.3 MH/s over blocks 401-533, and ~6.2 MH/s by height 688.

Concentration came back. Over blocks 434 to 533, a single address (027B004B...5542FD, first seen at height 422) mined 50 blocks, and the first community pool mined 33. That is 83% of the blocks from two participants. The ramp caps what that earns for now, at ~0.07 ZCD per block, but it is the main thing to watch. More pools and more small miners are what dilute it.

How this was measured

• Blocks come from the explorer index. Connections and per-minute hashrate come from Network Status.
  
• Hashrate is estimated from difficulty and is noisy over short windows.
• Orphans and reorgs are the ones the seeds observed.
• An address is not a person: a pool puts many miners behind one address, and one person can use several.

[aria.devcode]

⚡ The Zycord (ZCD) pool is online on AriaPool

The Zycord mainnet started on October 7 at 00:00 UTC and our pool has been mining since the very first block. Our first blocks are already unlocked on the chain.

Pool: zcd.ariabrain.com:3343
Statistics, guide and miner: https://pool.ariabrain.com/zcd.html

PPLNS, 3% fees, earnings credited upon block unlock (240 confirmations), minimum payment 1 ZCD. Your ID is your ZCD address, no registration required.

⛏️ Aria Energy ZCD 1.1.0, our CPU miner for Zycord. It integrates the Energy auto-tune engine; it configures itself to your processor at every startup and handles huge pages for you.
https://dl.ariabrain.com/zcd-dl/aria-energy-zcd-v1.1.0-linux-x86_64.tar.gz

⛏️ Happy mining everyone!

Support pool community : https://discord.gg/pw9eBB5J5C

[ocean1223]

What a joke—emissions won't return to normal for a month? They can keep it for themselves. ---Don't delete my post; witness this drop to zero.

[gabrielesor]

Mainnet mining capability snapshot — what does mining Zycord look like on a single reference machine?

I wanted to put some numbers behind a simple question:

What does mining Zycord currently look like for a single, ordinary consumer-class reference machine?

I ran a live measurement against the current mainnet using the node's native mining counter and the public Zycord network data.

The result is published as a reproducible snapshot rather than just a hashrate number.

At the time of observation, the reference machine represented about 0.0723% of the network hashrate, roughly 1 part in 1,383.

One result I found particularly useful for understanding the scale: under the observed network conditions, the statistical probability of finding at least one block exceeded 50% after about 8 hours.

That is not a prediction or a guarantee. It is a probability derived from the measured local/network hashrate ratio and the protocol block interval, assuming that relative hashrate remains approximately constant.

The full report contains the measurement method, formulas, public data sources, exact observation boundary, limitations, provenance information and the SHA-256 of the accompanying raw snapshot.

Open the full Zycord Mining Capability Report + raw snapshot

The raw snapshot is published alongside the report so that the reported calculation can be independently inspected and reproduced.

Snapshot SHA-256:

Code:

77f6788af073f586371c66105676f642f6482b4d76a811c5914547a5e5209707

Comparable measurements from other machines or configurations would also be useful for comparison.

[darkko]

What a joke—emissions won't return to normal for a month? They can keep it for themselves. ---Don't delete my post; witness this drop to zero.

Funny.

Your post wont be deleted. It'll get old very well.

The rules of the relaunch was a community consensus.

Thank you for looking into the Zycord project, doors will always be open.

Darkko
Zycord Community

[thesimstoshi]

The report is excellent gabrielesor.

The hashrate is indeed high for a home computer, but I believe we’ve achieved the goal of broad distribution, given that 24 hours to mine a block is feasible for an ordinary desktop. This will allow small-scale miners to participate in the network during the initial weeks.

As the difficulty ramps up, machines with greater computing power will enter the mix; this is expected, and things will become more challenging.

I’d also like to mention that the cEVM has been released on the testnet, so we can already test smart contracts. The mainnet will launch the cEVM in about 28 days.

I’m bringing this up because it’s a great time to start testing dApps.

[shadow_69]

Comparable measurement, as requested in #73: two small machines, one node on a Raspberry Pi.

Setup: Surface laptop (i7-11370H, 7 threads, huge pages) at 2,480 H/s and a Lenovo AMD 3020e (2 threads) at 745 H/s, both pointed at our own node on a Raspberry Pi 4 (wired, outbound only, 4-5 peers). Total 3.2 kH/s, our own RandomX v2 miner, no dev fee.

Solo, first 8 hours after genesis: 3 blocks at heights 42 (00:05 UTC), 263 and 530 (03:06 UTC), all canonical, 0 rejected shares at the node. That is well above expectation and came while the network was still below 1-3 MH/s; after 05:00 nothing more, as the network went to 6-8 MH/s. At the current 4.8 MH/s our share is 0.066% (1 in ~1,500), so the expected time per block in solo is now ~12 h, in line with #73.

At 10:30 UTC+2 we moved both miners to a pool: same expected return minus the fee, but a credit every few minutes instead of a lottery every 12-24 h. For a machine this size that is the realistic way to stay in the network for the whole ramp.

Two observations for the project:
- Our Pi node's peer count dropped from 5 to 1 for a few seconds at 00:18 UTC and recovered on its own; that matches the seed restarts for the 512-slot limit in your report. No reorg seen by our node beyond depth 1.
- The RandomX key the pool sends for the current epoch is identical to the one our node serves, so switching between solo and pool needs no dataset rebuild. Worth stating in the mining docs, since miners with --prewarm-style options will see it as a "new seed" only because of the reconnect.

Thanks to the team for the detailed 2-hour report, and to gabrielesor for the snapshot: having two independent measurements of the same thing is exactly what makes these numbers credible.

Good luck to everyone mining,
shadow_69