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One new blockchain company, Zen Protocol, is tackling these points head-on. By concentrating on one idea: building a blockchain for finance.
Zen Protocol is a platform built for finance. We designed Zen to solve a real problem: trading assets without relying on third parties.
Our team is based in Tel Aviv, with backgrounds in maths, finance, design and marketing. Some of us have been involved in the Bitcoin space since 2011, and we’ve been creating tools to make Bitcoin better since 2013. the team aim to create a secure, flexible network that gives users control of their own assets, with no bank or trusted intermediary necessary.
In 2016, we began work on Zen Protocol. When Ethereum’s “theDAO” contract was hacked, it became clear to us that a platform designed for financial uses, like creating assets and granting rights, could provide much more security than was available at the time. Since then, we have been working on a new architecture that makes finance on the blockchain safe, fast, and useful.
Zen Protocol uses an all-new codebase, with built-in tools that stop bugs from ever making it into the smart contracts you use on the platform. Zen will let you create and trade any sort of financial asset, with a modern system for using real-world data, and with links to the Bitcoin network. All of this is running right now in our testnet.
The smart contract language has the same Zen-like focus on finance. It makes the bugs and vulnerabilities of existing blockchains much easier to protect against, integrating a mechanism for creating “formal proofs” – pieces of code that guarantee how contracts behave. Users who don’t know anything about programming or smart contracts can look at an asset and see what it does: from vanilla options to interest rate swaps, just about any sort of financial product can be created and proven in this way, displaying guarantees about collateral, price, and any other characteristic.
Zen Protocol’s native token doesn’t just give voting rights – it also lets users activate their smart contracts, putting them “on to the blockchain”. The team think that this is a natural step for a blockchain aiming at storing valuable assets, tying together an important use of the protocol and the one asset that gets “mined” using real work.
Our crowdsale began on the 30th of November: over two thirds of tokens have already been sold.
Here are a few key points about Zen:
Safe. The Zen Protocol uses a custom language, ZF*, that lets developers prove their contracts work correctly. Not only does this make contracts safer, it reduces development cost by accelerating testing and due diligence.
Fast. Contracts are “proof of cost”, meaning that they show how long they take to run before they enter the Zen blockchain. This lets Zen Protocol can compile contracts, making them much faster than contracts on other blockchains.
Useful. We’ve implemented an architecture for Zen that makes it easy to create and trade real-world assets. Any kind of asset or token on Zen Protocol is compatible with any contract, and oracles link products on Zen to any sort of data from the outside world.
Check out our blog, pitch deck, and Telegram group, and view full details of the crowdsale. For inquiries about partnerships and other co-operation, contact us at [email protected].