How It Works

Six steps, two minutes. If you want the full protocol, byte layouts and the economics, that lives in the docs.

The loop

1. Your machine gets a puzzle

   The hash of a recent Zcash block, plus your own address. Nobody can know that block hash before it exists, so nobody can mine the collection in advance.

2. It grinds numbers

   Your GPU tries nonce after nonce looking for keccak256(address ‖ nonce ‖ anchor) below the target. Every attempt is an independent lottery ticket, grinding longer does not bring you closer.

3. You find one and pay

   A hash under the target earns you the right to the next character. You send one Zcash transaction carrying 16 bytes and the current epoch price.

4. The character is built right then

   Traits are drawn from your proof plus a value that could not be known while you were grinding. You see it the instant it lands. You cannot choose, and you cannot grind for a rare one.

5. The price and difficulty move

   Difficulty retargets every 8 characters against a plan of one every 30 seconds. The price doubles at each epoch boundary and stays flat in between.

6. Thirty percent comes back

   Thirty percent of everything we take, plus thirty percent of the 5% secondary royalty, buys characters back on the open market and burns them. Ten thousand can be mined. Barely half will survive.

What it costs

The price is fixed inside an epoch and doubles at every boundary. Each epoch is twice as long as the one before it, so the first doubling arrives after sixteen characters and the last takes thousands.

Prices are denominated in ZEC and fixed at genesis. The first thousand characters cost less than $31 each, and across them the price doubles seven times.

What you are mining with

Your share of the collection equals your share of the network's hashrate. Even eight cards holding a quarter of the network lose three rounds out of four, and a laptop still wins sometimes, because each hash is its own lottery.

Three things that keep it fair

Nobody pre-mines

The anchor is the hash of a recent Zcash block and expires after a 3–4 block window. You cannot grind solutions in a garage and dump them on launch day.

Nobody front-runs you

Your address sits inside the puzzle. Someone who copies your nonce out of the mempool computes a different hash and gets nothing.

No rig takes everything

Your personal mining history worsens your own target, so the more you win the harder your next one gets.

What we do not have

No token

Zcash cannot issue assets until ZSA ships, and ZSA is not in the November upgrade. There is no ZECHASH token and there will not be one. The buyback buys the characters themselves instead.

Trading goes through us

Holding and sending a character needs no trust: own the output, own the character. But an atomic swap of money against NFT needs a Zcash feature that does not exist yet, so on a trade our venue briefly takes custody. We would rather say that plainly than bury it.

Read the full documentation →