We are happy to make two very important announcements, the release of the details of Znodes and a reduction in Founders’ rewards!

Znode Requirements

Znodes allow for incentivized nodes to host a complete version of the blockchain and help to ensure nodes are sufficiently powerful to process and verify computationally intensive Zerocoin transactions. Unlike other coins’ masternodes that process privacy transactions, Znodes are trustless, meaning you don’t have to trust them to keep your anonymity or to hide how your funds were anonymized. This is because the Zerocoin protocol relies on zero knowledge proofs and cryptography to ensure that results can always be independently verified.

We have finalized the specifications required for a Znode so our community can prepare themselves:

1000 XZC

A computer or VPS with a fixed IP address

1 GB of RAM

Enough disk space to store the blockchain (25gb is recommended for the moment)

Typically a VPS of this specification costs around USD5 to run a month per node and you can head on to Vultr, Linode, or DigitalOcean to obtain a basic VPS when Znodes are launched.

We are currently testing Znodes on our testnet and are set to launch at the end of November-first week of December 2017. We are working with exchanges and pools to ensure a smooth transition for the hard fork required. We will also give instructions for people to run their own testnet Znodes in the next few days.

Founders’ Rewards Reduction: Giving Back to the Community

Currently, 20% of each block (10 xzc) for the first four years of Zcoin (after which there will be no more rewards) are given to our seed investors, founder and a bounty wallet to fund the team. This worked out to be a total of 10% of total supply.

This is broken down as follows:

Poramin Insom (Founder and Lead Dev): 2 XZC

Seed Investors: 6 XZC

Team and Bounty Wallet: 2 XZC

Total: 10 XZC

With the launch of Znodes, Poramin Insom, Roger Ver, Tim Lee and the other seed investor have agreed to reduce their rewards by half towards Znode’s share of the block reward and also an increase to the Team and Bounty wallet!

This will allow the team to remain sufficiently funded so that we can invest in hiring more developers and deploy additional marketing. The new Founders’ Rewards after the Znode hard fork will be as follows:

Poramin Insom: 1 XZC

Seed Investors: 3 XZC

Team and Bounty Wallet: 3 XZC

Total: 7 XZC

This means that now the Founders’ Reward has been reduced from 20% of each block to 14% of each block with Poramin and the other seed investors all taking a 50% cut. As before, all Founders’ Rewards will cease after 4 years (of which 1 year has already elapsed).

Update (Dec 2018): With our move to a 5-minute block time, rewards where cut in half but reward frequency was doubled, so rate of emission remains the same.

Economics

Nodes will be allocated 15 XZC per block or 30% of the block reward. The frequency of each Znode receiving its block reward is dependent on the number of active and qualified Znodes. To understand how Znodes get paid, visit here.