ZKas combines Kaspa’s BlockDAG and kHeavyHash with Zcash’s shielded transaction technology.
| Property | ZKas | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Privacy | Mandatory | Every payment is shielded. |
| Speed | 1-second target | Fast BlockDAG settlement. |
| Security | Kaspa merged mining | kHeavyHash work secures both networks. |
| Proof system | Orchard + Halo 2 | Validity without revealing value. |
| Network | Privacy | Speed | Consensus / mining |
|---|---|---|---|
| ZKas | Mandatory | 1-second target | GHOSTDAG · kHeavyHash · Kaspa merged mining |
| Kaspa | Transparent | Fast BlockDAG | GHOSTDAG · kHeavyHash |
| Zcash | Optional | ~75-second target | Proof of work · Equihash |
| Monero | Mandatory | ~2-minute target | Proof of work · RandomX |
60 ZKAS is created per launch block: 57 to the miner and 3 to development. The reward halves every three months — the schedule is deliberately front-loaded, with most supply minted in the first year — then settles on a two-step perpetual tail: 6 ZKAS/block from about month 10, stepping down to 0.6 ZKAS/block from month 24, forever. No supply cap; the tail funds security.
Amounts, senders and recipients stay hidden.
Payments settle on a 1-second target.
The same mining work can secure ZKAS.
No presale, no founder allocation, no airdrop. Every ZKAS in existence was mined, starting at block one.
On a chain where balances are hidden by construction, that would normally be impossible to check — a shielded premine is invisible. So ZKas doesn’t ask to be believed. It is settled in the genesis block itself, in ways anyone can verify without trusting us.
Genesis nominally issues 1 ZKAS and pays it to a one-byte script consisting solely of OP_FALSE. No signature or witness can ever satisfy that script, so the genesis output can never be spent — by anyone, including its authors. The ledger starts at an effective balance of zero, not at an allocation.
This is transparent data, not shielded — readable straight from the genesis coinbase payload, with no viewing key.
The genesis coinbase carries this tag:
That is the height and block hash of Bitcoin block 959,713. A Bitcoin block hash cannot be known before that block is mined, so embedding it proves ZKas genesis was built after that moment — the same construction Bitcoin used with its newspaper headline. It rules out the usual way a “fair launch” is faked: a chain mined privately in advance, then republished with a backdated genesis.
ZKas launched with no low-difficulty start and no difficulty ramp. Genesis was cut at a real target — roughly 50 TH/s at one block per second — and ordinary difficulty adjustment governed the chain from block one. There was no interval in which insiders could accumulate cheaply against a deliberately easy chain.
Shortly after launch the network was supported by K1Pool, which pointed hashrate at ZKas and helped the young chain reach a healthy, well-distributed difficulty quickly.
The launch — including the Bitcoin-anchored genesis height — was announced on Discord, so participants could verify the anchor themselves rather than take the launch time on trust. Mining opened to everyone at the same moment.
That is not a premine. It is minted block by block alongside the miner’s 95%, enforced by consensus rather than by holding a pre-existing balance, and visible in the emission schedule from the outset. Changing the share or its recipient requires a coordinated binary upgrade — both are compile-time consensus constants.
What is and isn’t auditable. How much the fund has ever received is exactly computable by anyone — 5% of a public emission schedule. What it has since spent or sold is shielded, like every other wallet on this chain; that is a real trade-off of mandatory privacy, not an oversight. Orchard supports selective disclosure: publishing the fund’s viewing key would make it permanently watch-only public without any protocol change.
Mainnet has been live since late July 2026; earlier public test chains were wound down before this Bitcoin-anchored genesis was cut, and this genesis is final — no reset is planned. The novel core — Orchard shielded state kept consistent under GHOSTDAG’s parallel, after-the-fact block ordering — is specified in the whitepaper and covered by the consensus test suite, but has not yet had an independent external audit. Every end-user wallet is non-custodial (the seed stays on your device; the daemon gets a viewing key only). Run what you can verify.
