ZYNC Economics
ZYNC is open ownership — earned for verified activity, never sold, and money never buys it. Every number here is owner-ratified and contract-enforced: no prices, no projections, only the mechanisms that make the model work.
The flywheel
Emission bootstraps ownership before the protocol has organic revenue. Real brand-marketplace income sustains it. Emission then decays as revenue takes over — the two halves are sequenced, not simultaneous.
Three currencies, one protocol
ZYNC runs three distinct forms of value. They are not interchangeable — the firewall between them is the trust mechanism, not a limitation.
Values shown are illustrative — not live balances or prices.
Per-Space engagement
Earned inside a Space by completing its missions. Points stay within the Space that issued them — they are scoped, not transferable, and never convert to ZYNC or cash.
Real withdrawable USDC
Spendable value backed 1:1 by USDC. Earned when a mission offers a cash reward. Credits are real money you can use or withdraw.
Protocol ownership
The ownership layer of the protocol. Earned through verified activity — never sold by the platform, and money never buys it.
Supply & allocation
Total fixed max supply: 1,000,000,000 ZYNC — minted once at genesis. There is no mint role; the cap is a property of the contract, not a policy.
The five allocation buckets are genesis-immutable and sum to exactly 100%.
- Earn / emission55%· 550,000,000 ZYNC
- Treasury / ecosystem20%· 200,000,000 ZYNC
- Team & contributors15%· 150,000,000 ZYNC
- Backers5%· 50,000,000 ZYNC
- Initial liquidity5%· 50,000,000 ZYNC
- Earn / emission: Multi-year earn pool; Founding Phase is a front-loaded slice (~5% of total = 50,000,000 ZYNC).
- Treasury / ecosystem: Liquidity, grants, and operations.
- Team & contributors: 4-year vest, 1-year cliff.
- Backers: Early backers who supported the project's development; vested. ZYNC is never sold to the public.
- Initial liquidity: Seeds the ZYNC/USDC AMM pool; LP tokens are permanently retired (rug-proof).
Emission schedule
The earn bucket releases over time through a decaying weekly epoch schedule. The decay shape is exponential with a half-life of approximately 6 months (26 weekly epochs) bounded to roughly 2 years — front-loaded, then thinning fast.
Per-epoch budget formula: budget(epoch) = remainingEarnBucket × (ln 2 / 26). The first steady-state weekly budget is approximately 13,328,000 ZYNC, halving every 26 epochs. The geometric sum converges inside the 500,000,000 ZYNC post-FP earn pool by construction.
Emission is humanity-gated, GMV-coupled (a zero-GMV epoch emits zero — no dead-epoch emission), decaying, and idempotent on the source event. Accrual is calculated within ZYNC; a Merkle root is published as durable proof each epoch. Claims pay only the delta over a per-account high-water mark — replaying a leaf pays nothing.
All platform mission rules and rewards are published as durable proof before the window opens. No retroactive or surprise emissions.
Founding Phase
The Founding Phase distributes ownership early and wide, bootstraps the audience, and funds early operations through the pre-revenue gap.
Sub-pool ceiling: 50,000,000 ZYNC (5% of supply), carved from the earn bucket. Duration: 730 days from deploy — contract-enforced. When the sub-pool is exhausted or the clock runs out, the protocol moves to steady-state emission. The sunset cannot silently become permanent.
The daily mechanic: one verified act per UTC day → deterministic daily ZYNC. Not gambling — no loot box, no spin, no randomness. A streak multiplier raises your rate (capped). The daily act is chosen from a rotating 3-of-5 menu (Signal, Scout, Connect, Mission, Trade) so there is always an available option.
A founding pass — Member, or the higher Member+ — buys utility and standing: raised action limits, early access, and priority wherever members wait. It never grants ZYNC, never holder income, and never a faster earning rate — two members doing the same verified work earn the same ZYNC, pass or no pass. Earning caps are per-credential and identical for every member: joining multiple Spaces does not multiply your cap.
| Pass | What it grants | What it never grants |
|---|---|---|
| Member | Permanent founding standing, raised action limits, early access to new features, priority wherever members wait, the founder's chest, and the founding frame on every card. | ZYNC, holder income, or a faster earning rate. |
| Member+ | Everything in Member, carried further: higher limits, the most prominent founding standing, a voice in the protocol's direction, founding-only surfaces, and a bounded number of Member passes to gift. | ZYNC, holder income, or a faster earning rate. |
Revenue
The protocol earns from real activity: flat campaign fees paid by sponsors, and fees on a community's optional launch. Nothing here is generated from token sales — ZYNC is never sold.
That revenue supports ZYNC itself rather than paying people for holding it. No holder is paid for holding; it remains protocol support, not member income.
The support leg of the revenue split is how that support reaches the asset; the precise parameters are governance-set. The principle is fixed: value reaches ownership by strengthening the protocol layer, never by distributing it to holders.
The fee switch launches at 0% (OFF). While off, 100% of protocol revenue goes to the treasury for operations. Only governance (the Timelock) ramps it — revenue starts strengthening the asset only once income is durable. No promised future number.
Governance
A held ZYNC balance carries full ERC20Votes weight. Vote weight is the balance alone — no lock, no multiplier, no position to manage. What a member earned is what they vote with.
All privileged contracts (launch factory, fee hub, emission parameters) are Timelock-owned. No founder EOA holds admin authority on any surface. The platform never signs a governance transaction.
Voting and delegation cost members nothing; USDC fees are covered automatically. ZYNC governance has one permanent home, and the reward rails never split it.
Earned, never sold
There is one route to ownership: earn it. Verified activity anywhere on the platform earns ZYNC — the daily ritual, missions inside any community, and referral rewards drawn from the founding sub-pool. During the Founding Phase, the earliest verified activity earns at the highest rate.
The platform never mints ZYNC for sale and never sells it — money never buys ownership. No purchase, not a pass and not a tier, grants ZYNC or a faster rate of earning it. Two members who do the same verified work earn the same ZYNC.
What money buys is membership. The Member and Member+ founding passes grant standing, access, and priority — utility a member feels daily, never ownership. That line is what keeps a pass a membership rather than a security, and keeps open ownership genuinely open.
Anti-fraud
Mass-farming ownership is the central threat. It is addressed by a layered stack — no single layer is expected to be perfect; together they make farming economically unattractive.
The stack: humanity gate on every real-value accrual (the canonical predicate, floor = verified); a member-controlled embedded Wallet required to earn or hold; per-credential earning caps identical for every member, pass or no pass; a global daily drain cap; the 50,000,000 ZYNC sub-pool ceiling; vesting (6–12 months) on large earned ZYNC; deterministic non-random daily reward (no loot box, no variance to grind); operator-cut slashing on the marketplace side.
Accepted residual: multi-credential farming (many unlinked credentials each under the per-credential cap) is a named, accepted trade-off. The humanity gate bounds it per-credential; cross-credential linkage mitigations live in the anti-fraud domain.
Transparency as the moat
ZYNC shows quantity and realized USDC — never a speculative ZYNC→USD price, portfolio chart, or forward-looking value metric. This is not a limitation; it is the trust mechanism. The Wallet view and the revenue pool are the product.
The deliberate exception: launch tokens, which are tradable community coins, do show value (curve pre-graduation, market post-graduation) — explicitly framed as moving. ZYNC ownership is different by design.
Every value figure — a Credit earned, a support fact, a ZYNC grant — opens a durable receipt in one tap: the human story first, then the proof (earning window, Merkle proof, inclusion proof, confirming transaction). Progressive disclosure, not buried footnotes.
The earning moment is calm, not casino. No loot box, no spin, no chance affordance exists anywhere in the product. When a verified action becomes an owned share, the confirmation is the grant, the balance before and after, and an explicit durable receipt.