Zenon

Zenon (ZNN) is a decentralized network dedicated to building new tools for a strong digital ecosystem in future. The Zenon network seeks to enable everyone to move value instantly around the world, in a simple, secure way without any fee. 

Decentralized alternatives gradually aim to overcome existing restrictions and drawbacks of skepticism against centralized services. However, it is challenging to create and maintain DApps due to slow and inefficient storage and processing speeds. Also, developers need time to become acquainted with new programming languages to build these apps as they constantly need to upskill to stay relevant in the market. As a result, current decentralized solutions are challenging to scale up and prohibit active participation from developers and users.

Zenon intends to redefine the contemporary status of DApp platforms. The network allows execution of multiple transactions while maintaining the decentralized fabric. The cryptocurrency acts as a store of value and allows for the development of zApps. These applications essentially create an ecosystem that allows developers to construct new applications from scratch or convert current applications to Zenon's decentralized architecture. zApps aim to increase flexibility, scalability, and performance and explore new revenue streams, reduce costs, and attract developers to the Zenon ecosystem. 

The whitepaper proposes a new decentralized architecture named the Network of Momentum (NoM) that uses virtual voting for consensus to construct zApps. NoM provides the tools necessary to build, develop, and administer the decentralized world. This approach hopes to attract developers, inventors, and entrepreneurs who want to commercialize their intellectual assets. Four key actors built the Network of Momentum, namely:

Running on the Binance Smart Chain, ZNN is the native utility token of the platform. ZNN is used as locked collateral to create Pillars, Sentinels, and Staking. The Zenon Token standard (ZTS) aims to give developers and consumers a versatile and secure way to issue and handle tokens. ZNN tokens are simple to use and allow creating and managing of tokens almost instantaneously, without the need for any coding expertise. 

The whitepaper is titled “Network of Momentum-leaderless BFT dual ledger architecture,” and the draft version was released on March 31, 2020.

Staking on the Zenon network requires nodes to lock a fixed number of tokens. Staking enables users to gain different network roles, such as Sentinel and Pillar nodes. Staking is done for a fixed period. At the start of each staking cycle, all nodes in the network calculate their stake weight. The overall stake during that period determines the virtual voting procedure. Pillar nodes with high stakes make judgments within the consensus algorithm to settle transactions. Nodes can unlock the stake at any time; however, consensus nodes must wait for a period known as the "unstaking period." Nodes execute all transactions relevant to locking, delegating, and unlocking stakes.