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 until DAA 6,983,500, when the development share ends. 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.
Every payment is an Orchard shielded transaction with a Halo 2 zero-knowledge proof — amounts, sender and recipient are hidden by construction. No transparent mode exists to opt out of.
A GHOSTDAG BlockDAG orders parallel blocks on a ~1-second target, so shielded payments confirm in about a second — settlement speed with no single-chain bottleneck.
ZKAS shares Kaspa’s kHeavyHash proof-of-work: merge mining points Kaspa’s hashrate at ZKAS too, so the same hashes secure both chains at no extra energy.
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.
The miner keeps 100% of every block. There is no premine and no investor allocation — issuance is proof-of-work only. ZKas funded its build with a small, consensus-enforced share minted block by block (never a held balance, visible in the emission schedule from the outset); that ends at the ZKrise upgrade (DAA 6,983,500, ~15 October 2026), after which the whole subsidy goes to the miner, forever.
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.
