Zen Protocol is a blockchain platform designed to support real financial products, offering automation and freedom from central control. It addresses various challenges faced by existing blockchain platforms and introduces innovative solutions. Here’s an overview of what Zen Protocol is and the problems it aims to solve:
Verified contracts. One of the challenges addressed by Zen Protocol is the competition for resources used to secure money transfer in smart contracts. Zen introduces verified contracts that come with proofs about their execution time and functionality. These proofs enable faster compilation and execution, ensuring that contracts never consume resources unless they execute successfully.
Contract lifestyle. Zen contracts follow a pay-per-block lifecycle model, where they pay miners for every block in which they are active. This approach optimises resource usage, as only contracts that can affect the blockchain are cached in memory, and miners are incentivized for caching them.
Chain Security: To secure the blockchain’s transaction history, Zen utilizes a proof of work (POW) mechanism. This ensures that miners invest genuine and indisputable resources, providing security, open access, and incentive compatibility. The POW mechanism helps address concerns related to miner centralization, which is vital for decentralized platforms.
Assets. Zen Protocol supports multiple asset types, and assets can be unlocked with digital signatures. It enables the creation and usage of assets in contracts, facilitating their integration with the Zen-based Lightning Network and other blockchains.
Light client security. The platform prioritises light client security, allowing users on less powerful devices to obtain a good level of security without relying on a centralised source of information. Zen employs techniques like Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) and additional commitments to enable efficient verification of transactions and contract activity.
State control. State control in Zen Protocol is designed to be clear and immutable. Contracts store their state in transaction outputs, and their source code remains unchanged. This simplifies the reasoning about smart contracts and grants rights through cryptographic authentication or possession of tokens.
Overall, Zen Protocol aims to provide a robust blockchain infrastructure that supports real financial products, offers tight integration with Bitcoin, ensures contract verification and efficiency, mitigates miner centralization, enables multiple asset types, provides light client security, and establishes clear state control for smart contracts.
