Kucoin Listing Q&A
4. What are the pain-points that the project is trying to solve?
Zenon Network is working to solve some of the most fundamental issues facing decentralised networks. Unlike corporate web3, it achieves true decentralisation through its fair launch and by decoupling coinbase incentives from governance. It also eliminates transaction fees by tokenizing network bandwidth which is rewarded to those who help secure the network. Zenon is a hybrid PoW and PoS network, and aims at helping solve Bitcoin scaling by leveraging taproot as well as acting as a standalone L1 that uses Bitcoin’s PoW as root consensus. Rather than competing with Bitcoin as the hardest most secure currency, Zenon seeks to complement and add value to the Bitcoin ecosystem.
6. Who are the target users? (e.g. to the business partner or to the customers etc.)
Creators, operators, and users of mass-scalable, decentralized & centralized digital services in need for a feeless and trustless foundation that recycles the security and censorship resistance provided by bitcoin.
7. Please describe the main competitors of your project and provide us with your comparison with other products.
Unlike all corporate web 3 Layer 1 networks like Ethereum, Solana, Avax etc., Zenon
- had a 100% egalitarian genesis distribution without insider allocations for anyone
- the project is not funded by VCs or a token sale but the anonymous founding developers themselves
- has a dual-coin architecture (ZNN & QSR) and us a hybrid PoW/PoS coin which creates incentives for progressive decentralization. This eliminates the self-compounding oligarchy of validators in PoS networks.
- has introduced Plasma (as originally coined by Joseph Poon) which fully eliminates network fees while preventing spam
- has embedded smart contracts and oracle functionalities on the protocol-level (unlike other L1s which only have VM runtime based smart contracts and no oracle functionality)
- was designed from the ground up in the original cypherpunk ethos of Bitcoin and is 100% community-driven through its own, on-chain accelerator program
- acts as a standalone L1 while simultaneously functioning as a L2 scaling solution for Bitcoin by recycling its PoW security for interoperable, trustless sidechains and feeless zBTC on top.
8. Please briefly describe the technical characteristics of the project and its business model features.
Zenon uses a dual-ledger architecture (Block-lattice + Meta-Ledger/DAG). Network participants have to lock up and burn high amounts of coins to run infrastructure in order to be eligible for protocol emissions. ZNN is used as a native currency and as collateral for validator infrastructure. QSR is tokenized transaction throughput and enables feeless transactions. Validators have to burn or lock-up QSR as additional collateral. These mechanisms create a trade-off between additional governance power vs maximization of ZNN and prevent validator nodes from compounding their say in the network without additional skin in the game.
9. Please describe the current and/or potential major partnership with your project
Zenon has a community fund set aside which includes the possibility to offer vested Pillars (major validator nodes) to strategic partners. All partnerships are community-driven.
10. Please provide a detailed project roadmap (i.e., technology and commercial development)
Please see on the zenon.network landing page. There will be one large network upgrade in November to transition from Alphanet to the fully-fledged network.
11. What level of development have you already achieved? (e.g., MVP/Alpha/Beta/Testnet/Mainnet)?
Transition from a placeholder chain (PIVX fork) to Alphanet launch in November 2021 after 4 years of network development. Full mainnet launch is scheduled for end of 2022.
Page 2:
6. If you have checked any applicable features in the previous question, please describe each applicable feature and how it is associated with the token/coin.
Governance: Validator nodes (Pillars & Sentinels) have to lock up large amounts of ZNN to participate in the network consensus and earn protocol emissions. In addition, delegators can add weight to Pillars’ voting power and influence their chances to find a momentum block and earn consensus validation rewards.
Staking rewards: Non-validating network participants can delegate ZNN to validator nodes (Pillars) who share part of the pillar rewards with them. Also, Stakers can lock up ZNN for 1-12 months to help secure the network. In exchange, they can earn QSR, the second network coin which is used for feeless transactions by fusing it to plasma (and back).
Payment: ZNN is the main network currency and will likely be the most used asset to purchase and pay for any service in the Zenon network ecosystem.
Liquidity: ZNN is used to create liquidity pools (together with another coin/token) for autonomous market-making used by DEXs. LPs receive part of the protocol emissions (ZNN & QSR) in exchange for providing liquidity.