[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.

[shadow_69]

A small exchange on the cEVM, running in testnet (with a question for the devs)

After the dev's post about building rather than mining, I took it literally. Over the last two days I built and deployed a small ZCD/credits exchange on the Zycord cEVM, in testnet, with a registered sequencer behind it:

- Two contracts: a delta-first token ("Credito") and a "Mercato" with internal balances (delta cells: two certificates on the same balance in one block both apply, which the tests check), a constant-product pool (0.3 % fee) and a limit order book (price-time priority, 0.1 % taker fee, 6 fills and 12 list steps per certificate to stay under the 64 reads/writes).
- A sequencer registered on the Mercato (the admin form of register-sequencer) and announced in the on-chain directory: https://zycord.dcafrevolution.com (ZSI manifest on /, status on /v1/status).
- Swaps, orders, partial fills and cancels done through `zcd wallet intent`, found via the directory, applied in testnet blocks (10519 to 11676 if you want to look).
- A page that reads the sequencer and composes the wallet commands: https://zycord.dcafrevolution.com/app/ . Paste a persistent address and it shows your internal balances, shares and open orders. It signs nothing.

Testnet addresses:
Mercato 0x05cc436e1e14523fd5797e5dd3634b035a86318a51579a3bc0fc9f48bce96fbb,
Credito 0x057efb1c504e21a9d8d4e31c28b241573496221168d1b46c30e6b36c80c8250f.

Everything runs on v0.6.1; I checked the v0.6.2 diff and it does not touch the sequencer, the ZSI or intents, so nothing above changes. (And thanks for the mention on !72.)

Things I learned that may be useful to others building on the cEVM: one discipline per cell per execution; an exact read on a contract with a registered sequencer makes a plain certificate invalid, so deposits of the token go through the sequencer while ZCD deposits stay free; an intent bound must name a cell the call really writes (a bound on the order-book head only works when your order becomes the head); intents pay from one-shot addresses, and in my runs the wallet twice ended up with none it considered free (one was still held by an earlier attempt) until an ordinary payment left change in fresh ones.
Maybe that is expected; if not, I can describe it in an issue.

The question: the wallet's site connections sign `transfer`, `call` and `deploy`, not intents. So a page can show everything but cannot ask the wallet to sign a swap; the user has to copy a command into a terminal.
Would you accept a merge request adding an `intent` request kind to POST /v1/sign (quote shown on the approval screen instead of a certificate, sequencer URL subject to the same netguard rules as src= fetches, payer holds as in `zcd wallet intent`)? I estimate 700-800 lines in wallet/ plus tests. I would rather ask before writing it. If yes, I will open an issue on GitLab with the details.

As before: I write the code together with Claude (Anthropic), I review and run everything myself, and the sequencer is on a server I operate. The repository is not public yet; it will be once the code settles.

shadow_69 (Dario)