Private money you mine on your own computer
Zecnero runs Zcash's shielded cryptography on a chain of its own. Payments between people are always shielded, and blocks are mined on ordinary CPUs.
- Latest blockExplorer →Height and time on the explorer
- HashrateExplorer →Over the last 120 blocks
- Nodes on the mapNode map →By city, every 15 minutes
- Latest postTestnet NU2: RandomX v2 and Orchard only
Why Zecnero
Shielded by rule.
Since NU1 the chain accepts no transparent payments. New coins from mining are the one exception, and they have to be shielded before they can be spent.
Hidden in the whole pool.
A shielded payment is checked with a zero-knowledge proof, so it hides among every note in the pool. Monero hides each input in a ring of 16, with 15 decoys.
Mined on CPUs.
Zecnero uses RandomX with its own parameters, rx/zecnero, which runs best on the processor in a desktop or laptop. Zcash's Equihash has been mined by ASICs since 2018.
Fair launch.
There was no premine and no sale. A 3% founder stream runs until the first halving, about 1.5% of the 21 million supply, and pays to a 2-of-3 multisig published before Mainnet. Kaito holds all three keys.
Its own network.
zecnerod is a fork of Zebra, the Zcash Foundation's Rust node. Zecnero sets its own consensus rules and network upgrades, and Zcash upgrades such as NU7 don't apply to it.
Everyone starts at block zero.
Nobody gets a quiet head start. Every block below the first halving pays 3% of its subsidy, 0.1875 ZMR, to a published founder script: 314,999.8125 ZMR in total, about 1.5% of the 20,999,993.5652 ZMR ever issued. The stream goes back into development and infrastructure. It is paid to a public 2-of-3 multisig (P2SH) address. Kaito holds all three keys, and any spending is posted publicly. That stream is the only allocation: no premine, no dev fund, and no height reserved for any miner. After launch the founder mines in the open, on the same rules as you.
Your CPU counts here.
Zecnero runs RandomX, which is built so the most efficient hardware for it converges on an ordinary processor. Dedicated RandomX hardware sold so far has shown little efficiency advantage over a high-end desktop chip. Renting hashpower is still possible, and a miner with most of the hashrate can censor and reverse recent blocks, so nodes refuse to reorganise more than 20 blocks, about 25 minutes of chain.
Full mining guide →curl -fsSL https://downloads.zecnero.org/install-miner.sh | bash
irm https://downloads.zecnero.org/install.ps1 | iex
It asks you to save your mining key, makes a wallet for your pool payouts (save its 24 words too), then mines on the official pool, pool.zecnero.org, about a minute later, with no node to sync. Choose solo instead to run your own node. Installed before? Run zecnero-miner update, then zecnero-miner mode pool. The mining guide explains what it does, walks Windows through WSL, and lists the downloads.
21 million. Then it stops.
Each block pays 6.25 ZMR, and that halves every 1,680,000 blocks, same idea as Bitcoin and Zcash. There is no tail emission waiting at the end. Issuance stops after 30 halvings at 20,999,993.5652 ZMR, and stays there.
Zcash privacy came along for the fork.
Zecnero is built from Zebra, the Rust node the Zcash Foundation maintains. Shielded addresses and zero-knowledge proofs carry over, so sending ZMR privately works the way Zcash users already know.
Every Zecnero payment is shielded. Transparent outputs exist only in mining rewards, which must be shielded before they can be spent. Mainnet enforces this from block 1, and the public testnet from block 16,529. Zecnero, Zcash and Monero compared.
Mine it from block one.
Every block from the first one is mined in public, by whoever is running a node. The code, the specification and the open issues are all on GitLab.