No premine. No presale. No ICO, IEO or private round. No founder allocation, no airdrop. Every ZKAS was mined, starting at block one — and from the ZKrise upgrade, 100% of every block goes to the miner.
On a chain where balances are hidden by construction, most of this 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 and enforced by consensus, in ways anyone can verify without trusting us.
ZKas has never sold a single ZKAS. There was no ICO, no IEO, no presale, no private or seed round, no public token sale and no airdrop. No one ever paid a team for coins, and no coins were set aside for founders, investors or advisors.
The only way ZKAS has ever entered circulation is proof-of-work — mining. That is the entire distribution.
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. The launch, including the Bitcoin-anchored genesis height, was announced publicly on Discord, and mining opened to everyone at the same moment.
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.
Issuance is proof-of-work only — 60 ZKAS per block, to the miner. A temporary 5% development share was minted block by block alongside the reward (never a held balance, enforced by consensus and visible in the emission schedule from day one). It ends at the ZKrise upgrade — DAA 6,983,500, around 15 October 2026. From that block the entire subsidy goes to the miner, forever. Nothing was ever withheld as a premine.
The things that define an investment contract are simply absent. There was no investment of money in ZKas — nothing was sold; no common enterprise whose fortunes holders ride on; and no promise that anyone’s effort will earn holders a profit.
ZKAS is obtained only by spending electricity and hardware to mine it — the protocol pays the miner directly, with no issuer in between — exactly as one acquires a mined commodity. No team controls supply, no treasury was raised, and no one is obligated to build anything for holders. This describes how the chain works; it is not legal advice.
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, and the shielded pool runs Zcash’s Orchard circuit: its circuit description, parameters and verifying key are byte-identical to the audited upstream, and the node refuses to start with any other verifier. 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.