What Are Shards?
ZillHa Shards (ZHA) are the native currency of the ZillHa universe — mined on-chain, earned through play, and spent to unlock the worlds within. Every Shard that enters the economy was minted by a real block. Every Shard spent inside ZillHa was burned or returned to the treasury. Nothing is conjured. Nothing is infinite by fiat.
Shards are built on RandomX — a CPU-favored, ASIC-resistant algorithm that keeps mining accessible to players on everyday hardware. The chain runs at a 30-second block time, producing two blocks every minute around the clock.
Denomination Ladder
Every Shard is divisible down to a single ZEST — the irreducible atomic unit of the ZillHa economy. Thirteen decimal places of precision means microtransactions are native to the protocol.
Emission Schedule
The first year runs on aggressive 60-day halvings — six epochs that compress what many chains spread across years into a single founding season. After year one, the chain transitions to a slower 10% decay every 90 days until the permanent floor is reached.
Year 1 — Halvings Every 60 Days
Post Year 1 — 10% Decay Every 90 Days
After the founding year, each epoch decays the base reward by 10% until the 3 ZHA floor is reached — at which point emission holds steady forever. The chain never goes silent.
Daily Emission Reference — Epoch 1
Dynamic Emission — Burn-Linked Adjustment
The block reward is not static. Within each epoch it floats in real time, anchored to how much the network is actually burning. When players spend, miners earn more. When spending slows, emission contracts. The chain finds its own equilibrium.
| Condition | Burn Factor | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Burn = 50% of base reward | 1.0 | Emission unchanged |
| Burn > 50% of base reward | > 1.0 | Emission increases — max ×1.2 |
| Burn < 50% of base reward | < 1.0 | Emission decreases — min ×0.8 |
| No burn activity | 0.8 | Emission at floor pressure |
Fee Handling
Transaction fees are never paid to miners. Miners receive only the block reward — 100% of it, unsplit. Fees are captured separately on every block and divided between the treasury and the burn address. This preserves mining incentives across the full halving schedule while ensuring every transaction contributes to the network’s long-term health.
fees excluded entirely
coinbase output[1]
provably unspendable
Every coinbase transaction contains exactly three outputs: the full block reward to the miner, 50% of fees to the treasury, and 50% of fees to the burn address. The burn address is provably unspendable — all outputs sent to it are permanently destroyed and publicly auditable on-chain.
The Game Economy
Shards flow into ZillHa through mining and out through play. Every world you enter, every retry you attempt, every branch you unlock costs Shards. Some of those Shards burn. Some return to fund the worlds ahead. None are invented out of thin air.
- World entry cost
- Retry costs
- Branch unlocks
- Cosmetics
- Upgrades
The primary sink is world entry — the act of stepping into an authored world costs Shards commensurate with its length and tier. Secondary sinks reward persistence: retrying a failed path, unlocking a hidden branch, or acquiring something that marks your journey through the archive.
Difficulty Adjustment
The network targets 30-second blocks using LWMA-3 — a difficulty algorithm specifically suited to small networks with variable hashrate. When players connect to mine between sessions the chain adapts quickly and cleanly, without the wild oscillations that plague simpler algorithms on young networks.
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Algorithm | LWMA-3 |
| Window | 60 blocks (~30 minutes) |
| Target | 30 seconds |
| Blocks per minute | 2 |
| Blocks per day | 2,880 |
| Blocks per year | 1,051,200 |
Privacy & Protocol
ZillHa Shards inherits the full cryptographic stack of the CryptoNote lineage — every transaction is private by default. Amounts are hidden. Senders are indistinguishable from decoys. Receivers generate one-time addresses that cannot be linked across the chain. Privacy is not an opt-in feature. It is the base layer.
Cryptographic Layer
| Primitive | What It Does |
|---|---|
| Ring Signatures | Transaction inputs are indistinguishable from decoys — the real sender is hidden inside a ring of plausible signers |
| RingCT | Amounts are concealed using Pedersen commitments — no observer can read how much was sent |
| Bulletproofs+ | Zero-knowledge range proofs that verify amounts are valid without revealing them — no trusted setup required |
| Stealth Addresses | One-time addresses generated per transaction — the receiver’s identity is never linkable on-chain |
| CLSAG | Efficient ring signature scheme replacing MLSAG — smaller proofs, faster verification, same privacy guarantees |
Proof of Work
Mining on ZillHa Shards uses RandomX — an algorithm engineered from the ground up to be CPU-optimal and hostile to ASICs and GPU farms. Consumer hardware competes on equal footing. A player mining between sessions on a laptop is a legitimate participant in the network, not an afterthought.
Network Layer
| Feature | What It Does |
|---|---|
| Dandelion++ | Transactions propagate through a privacy stem phase before broadcasting — the originating IP address is obscured from network observers |
| I2P / Tor | Native support for anonymous routing layers — nodes and wallets can operate entirely within I2P or Tor for full network-layer privacy |