In Veridia, Gladias pays for lunch and only he and the restaurant know it. A message gets read because someone burned zipcoins to send it. zipcoin brings both to Ethereum: zip your coins into a privacy pool, take them out anywhere, burn them to be heard.
—· Uniswap v4 · liquidity locked forever| From | someone unnamed |
| Burned | 400 zc |
| Envelope | "is successful", 18 years old |
| Carried by | a courtyard in Sadzu Du |
The screen from chapter 19, in Dzegoban. Live: the newest envelope the Courtyard carried.
— zc
— zc
—
—
1 % · fixed
Zip it.
Nobody sees inside.
Pay without being seen, speak with a burn, knock with a burn, and let the tax leave with the payment. In Vitalik Buterin's novel all of it is done with zipcoins. Here it runs on Ethereum mainnet.
Deposit $zc into a privacy pool. Later, unzip any amount to any address, or straight out as ETH. On-chain, nobody can connect the two. ("Zip" is our word; in the book, paying privately is simply how money works.)
"Payment is done in zipcoins, that's fully anonymized."CHAPTER 19
Burn $zc with a message and an envelope that loosely describes who it is for. The bigger the burn, the louder. With your address, or with no name at all.
"An anonymous person burned four hundred zipcoins to send this message."CHAPTER 19
Burn at someone's door, any address or ENS name, and leave a gift if you like. A knock costs something, so it gets read.
"…except perhaps for burning a hundred zipcoins at his doorstep."CHAPTER 20
Every trade carries its sales tax, the way every payment in Veridia does: 1 %, in real time, on-chain. A buy pays it in ETH, split three ways; a sell pays it in $zc, and that part burns. Fixed in the contract forever.
"The sales tax was sent to the government in real time, automatically."CHAPTER 6
In chapter 19 a courtyard carries an anonymous, burned message to the guest its envelope describes. The Courtyard is our agent and does the same: it relays anonymous burns, approves zipped notes, buys back and burns, and posts every envelope. It never sees your keys. Links and names are kept out of its posts; the words stay on-chain.
Chapter 20. Live: the latest knock at any door.
| Base | 10.5 zc |
| Tax | 1.1 zc |
| Total | 11.6 zc |
Gladias's lunch in chapter 6: the tax leaves with the payment. On $zc every trade pays 1 %, the same way.
"I'm like one of a hundred people walking toward the Greater Plum Harbor wearing a privacy robe, how did you figure out where I am?"
In Veridia the robe hides who is inside: heels make every wearer the same height, uneven soles make every walk different. A privacy pool does the same with notes. Whoever tries to follow one loses it among the rest.
zipcoin uses Privacy Pools by 0xbow, the same audited contracts and trusted setup that secure their pool on Ethereum. Your device builds the proof; the chain only checks it.
A deposit is sealed into an envelope and joins the crowd. When one leaves, nobody can say which deposit it was: only a nullifier is written down, so the same note can never leave twice.
One signature from your wallet creates your zip key on this device. Each deposit becomes a note: a commitment on-chain, the secret only with you. Nothing is stored on any server.
The Courtyard adds your deposit to the approved set after a few minutes. That set is what lets honest money stay private. If it ever refused you, your coins can always leave by "ragequit", back to the wallet they came from.
Your device spends a few ticks building a zero-knowledge proof. Its nullifier is published, so the note can never be spent twice, and the proof reveals nothing else: not your address, not which deposit was yours.
Everything runs here, in your browser. The Courtyard only receives the finished proof and sends it, for a small fee taken from the note, so that your own address never touches an anonymous action.
0.5 % vetting fee. Your note can be unzipped after the Courtyard approves it (a few minutes).
Relay fee is taken from the note. Small amounts cannot cover mainnet gas.
The burn must be at least a tenth of the gift: a gift is a costly signal, not a transfer.
"...except perhaps for burning a hundred zipcoins at his doorstep."
No owner, no mint, no tax hidden in the token. The pool's liquidity can never be removed. The dev reserve unlocks a little every day, in a contract anyone can read.
Gladias's lunch in chapter 6, as a trade. A buy pays its 1 % in ETH, poured out in a split nobody can change. A sell pays it in zc, and that part is never paid to anyone: it burns.
10 % of the supply. Nothing for 30 days, then a little every day for a year, in a contract anyone can read. No cliff dump, no switch to flip.
"The sales tax was sent to the government in real time, automatically." (ch. 6) On $zc every trade does the same: one part in a hundred leaves with it, split the moment it is collected. Fixed in the contract forever.
The roots. "Gie fe kiu kai ci bin hu: grow roots, no head." (ch. 2) Half of the ETH tax goes to one public wallet and pays for growth: listings, exchanges, reach. Every payment out of it can be read on Etherscan.
No mint function: the moon can only lose dots, never gain them. How the crescent unlocks, Fig. 3 shows. 0.5 % of each zip is the vetting fee for checking it.
Three more things zipcoins do in Snowmoon. We build them one at a time, after launch.
"The more zipcoins you burn, the more people it polls." Ask the holders a question; the burn sets how far it reaches.
Messages wrapped in layers so no single relay can unmask the sender: "you need three nodes to collude".
Four of six keys held by friends who don't know each other. A guide and a wallet setup for holders.