ZYNC Economics
ZYNC is open ownership: earned for verified activity and never sold. Money never buys it. Every number here is owner-ratified and contract-enforced. This page explains the mechanisms without making price or return projections.
The flywheel
Emission bootstraps ownership before the protocol earns fee revenue. The planned long-term model uses Sponsor Campaign and Community Launch fees as emission decays.
- Earn ZYNC (emission)
- Users own
- Retention + virality ↑
- Audience grows
- Brands pay (revenue)
- Revenue supports protocol operations
Three currencies, one protocol
ZYNC runs three distinct forms of value. They are not interchangeable, and keeping them separate protects the rules for each one.
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.
Testnet Credits (mock USDC)
The Beta uses mock stablecoins with no real-world value. The production model backs Credits 1:1 and makes them withdrawable.
Protocol ownership
The ownership layer of the protocol. Earned through verified activity, never sold by the platform. 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.
Emission schedule
The earn bucket releases over time through a decaying weekly epoch schedule. The decay is exponential, with a half-life of about 6 months (26 weekly epochs) over roughly 2 years. It starts high, then thins 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), 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, enforced by contract. 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 earns deterministic daily ZYNC. No loot box, spin, or randomness. A capped streak multiplier raises your rate. The daily act comes from a rotating 3-of-5 menu (Signal, Scout, Connect, Mission, Trade), so an option is always available.
A Member or Member+ founding pass buys utility and standing: raised action limits, early access, priority, and one separate member chest every eight hours. The chest requests 1 ZYNC plus a streak freeze from the finite Founding sub-pool; the freeze is added only while inventory has room and never blocks ZYNC. Missed windows never accrue, and the ordinary 60-ZYNC daily and 365-ZYNC lifetime caps still bind. The pass purchase itself credits no ZYNC and never raises the base earning rate. Earning caps are per credential and identical for every member: joining multiple Spaces does not multiply them.
Founding passes add utility, standing, and a finite capped member chest. They do not add holder income or a faster base rate.
Member
- What it grants
- Permanent founding standing, raised action limits, early access, priority, the eight-hour member chest, and the founding frame on every card.
- What it never grants
- A direct ZYNC purchase, holder income, or a faster base earning rate.
Member+
- What it grants
- 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.
- What it never grants
- A direct ZYNC purchase, holder income, or a faster base earning rate.
Revenue
The protocol earns flat Campaign fees paid by Sponsors and fees on a Community's optional Launch. None of this revenue comes from selling ZYNC.
That revenue supports the protocol instead of paying holders. Holding ZYNC does not generate Member income.
If governance activates it, the support leg of the revenue split is how 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) can raise it. Revenue starts supporting ZYNC once income is durable. This page makes no promise about a future rate.
Governance
The planned network-governance model gives held ZYNC balances ERC20Votes weight without a lock or multiplier.
The Governor and Timelock contracts are deployed on Base testnet, and the indexer mirrors their events. No public on-chain proposal or vote transaction surface is implemented yet.
Space-local governance in the Beta is separate and Points-weighted. Public ZYNC voting and delegation remain Planned.
Earned, never sold
There is one route to ownership: earn it. Verified activity anywhere on the platform earns ZYNC through 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 prices or sells ZYNC. A pass payment credits no ZYNC and never raises the base earning rate. Member and Member+ separately unlock the published member-chest ritual: a fixed 1-ZYNC request from the finite Founding sub-pool every eight hours, with no catch-up for missed windows and the same ordinary caps.
Money buys membership, not a balance or yield. The member chest is a fixed, capped utility benefit rather than a price-proportional allocation, recurring income, or promise of return; verified contribution remains the open base ownership rail.
Anti-fraud
ZYNC uses several controls to raise the cost of farming ownership across many accounts.
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); Campaign fees stay locked until final verification and terminal settlement.
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.
How ZYNC shows value
ZYNC shows quantities and settled stablecoin amounts. In the Beta, those stablecoins are test assets with no real-world value. It does not show a speculative ZYNC→USD price, portfolio chart, or forward-looking value metric.
Launch tokens are the exception. These tradable community coins show changing value: curve before graduation, market after. ZYNC ownership is different by design.
Every value figure, whether a Credit earned, a support fact, or a ZYNC grant, opens a durable receipt in one tap. It shows the human story first, followed by the earning window, Merkle proof, inclusion proof, and confirming transaction.
When a verified action becomes an owned share, the confirmation shows the grant, the balance before and after, and a durable receipt. ZYNC does not use loot boxes, spins, or chance-based rewards.