Zecnero

Five decisions for Mainnet

By Zecnero ·

Orchard is Mainnet’s only shielded pool. The official pool takes 1% on Mainnet and has no cap on its share, and Kaito holds the three founder keys. The proof of work is being finalized on the testnet. What changes for testers now.

Five decisions about Mainnet are made. Nothing changes on the testnet today, and one of them reaches it at its next network upgrade: from NU2 the testnet is Orchard only, as Mainnet is. This post says what each one means for Mainnet, and what testers, miners and exchanges testing on the testnet can do now. Testnet coins have no value.

The proof of work is being finalized on the testnet

Mainnet uses the same proof of work as the testnet: RandomX with Zecnero’s own salt. Any released xmrig-zecnero mines it, and so do the outside miners that already mine the testnet. Upstream RandomX has added version 2 changes, and the program version Mainnet runs is being finalized on the testnet. Mainnet is planned for December.

Mainnet is Orchard only

From its first block, no Mainnet transaction, coinbase included, has a Sapling spend or a Sapling output. Orchard is Mainnet’s only shielded pool. This is a Mainnet rule from block 1, not a network upgrade, and it changes no branch identifier.

  • Receive with a unified address. On Mainnet a unified address starts with nu1… and carries an Orchard receiver and nothing else. A Sapling address (ns1…) is still a valid encoding, but no Mainnet transaction can pay it, and wallets will say so.
  • Payments stay shielded. As on the testnet since NU1, only coinbase transactions have transparent outputs: the miner’s reward and the founder output. Every other transaction pays Orchard, change included.
  • Mined coins still go to transparent addresses. A solo miner, or a pool that pays from the coinbase such as Rabid Pool, is paid to a transparent address (N1… on Mainnet). After 100 blocks the coins can be spent, and only into Orchard. Wallet 0.3.2 keeps a transparent mining address, marked as coinbase only, and moves its coins into Orchard in one step.

Orchard needs no trusted setup, and one pool means one set of rules for wallets, exchanges and reviewers to get right. The cost is that all shielded value on Mainnet sits in one pool: a flaw in the Orchard circuit, like the one Zcash corrected in NU6.2, would have no second pool to move to. The specification states this risk.

The testnet becomes Orchard only at NU2

The testnet follows Mainnet at its network upgrade NU2, expected on Monday, November 2, 2026, at a height announced with the release on Friday, October 30. From that height no testnet transaction, coinbase included, has a Sapling spend or a Sapling output, so Sapling coins still in a wallet then can no longer be spent. Until then Sapling keeps working there, and the official pool still takes Sapling logins. The release moves the services to the Orchard paths Mainnet needs:

  • the official pool takes unified logins and pays them in Orchard, and in its last payout round before NU2 it pays every Sapling balance in full;
  • zecnero-miner sets up a unified pool login;
  • the wallet shields mined coins into Orchard by default, shows the unified address first, and moves Sapling coins to Orchard with one command. That wallet replaces 0.2.2 as the recommended wallet.

Until that release, keep your Sapling pool login. If you already run wallet 0.3.0-beta, receive to its unified address (nutest1…) and shield with zecnero-wallet shield --pool orchard. If you are testing an exchange integration, build deposits on unified addresses with an Orchard receiver: Mainnet has no Sapling deposits and no transparent ones, and from NU2 neither has the testnet.

The official pool: 1% on Mainnet, no cap on its share

The official pool, pool.zecnero.org, takes 0% on the testnet. On Mainnet it takes 1% from the first block: 1% of the reward of each block it finds, that is the subsidy less the 3% founder stream, plus the block’s transaction fees. The fee is taken before the rest is split among the pool’s miners by their shares. It goes to the pool’s fee address and funds the pool and its infrastructure. Other pools exist, and solo mining pays no pool fee.

There is no cap on the official pool’s share of the network. Its share is on the pool page at all times, under Network hashrate, and in its API (networkShare in /api/stats). The pools page lists the other pools. Mining on another pool, or solo, spreads the network’s hashrate.

The founder keys

The founder stream is written into consensus: every block below the first halving pays 3% of its subsidy, 0.1875 ZMR, to a published founder script. That is about 1.5% of all ZMR ever issued. On Mainnet it is a 2-of-3 multisig (P2SH) address, published at least a week before launch, and Kaito holds all three keys.

  • What the 2-of-3 protects against: one lost or stolen key. Any two keys spend, so losing one loses nothing, and one stolen key cannot spend.
  • What it does not protect against: it does not stop Kaito from spending, since Kaito holds all three keys.
  • The address is fixed in consensus for the whole stream and is never changed. Any spending is posted publicly. The stream goes back into development and infrastructure, and the testnet rewards and bug bounties are paid from it at Mainnet.

Questions

Ask in Discord. The roadmap shows what is left before Mainnet.

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