Zecnero Protocol Whitepaper

Abstract. Zecnero is a decentralized anonymous payment system derived from Zcash. It keeps the transparent payment scheme inherited from Bitcoin and the Sapling and Orchard shielded payment schemes,which are secured by zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge. It replaces theEquihash proof of work with RandomX-Zecnero, an instance of RandomX whose cache derivation usesits own salt, so that general-purpose processors are the most cost-effective hardware for producing blocks.Difficulty is set by an absolutely scheduled exponential algorithm. Issuance halves every 1 680 000 blocksand reaches zero after 30 halvings, for a total of slightly less than 21 000 000 ZMR. During the first halvingperiod, three percent of each block subsidy is paid to a founder script that is published before launch.There is no other allocation.This specification defines the Zecnero consensus protocol at launch. It is self-contained for every rulein which Zecnero differs from Zcash, and for the structure of the protocol as a whole. The internals ofcryptographic primitives that Zecnero uses without modification are specified by reference to the ZcashProtocol Specification.