From spec to mainnet.
Zecnero has not launched. There is no mainnet, no testnet and no released software — the node, the miner and the wallets are all still being built. Nothing on this page has a date, and none is implied by the order. Work happens in the open on GitHub.
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Spec / 2026.0.3-draftDone
Protocol specification
The consensus rules are written down as a set of changes to the Zcash protocol specification at NU6: proof of work, difficulty, issuance, the founder stream, network identity and chain selection. It is a draft, and several parameters in it are still undecided.
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M0Done
Fork and baseline
Zebra pinned to release v6.3.0, built, and its test suite run once to establish a baseline before any consensus change.
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M1In progress
Chain identity
Network magic, ports, consensus branch identifier, address encodings and activation heights. Zcash funding streams and the development fund lockbox are removed, Sprout is made unreachable, and only version 5 transactions are accepted.
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M2Planned
Proof of work
RandomX with the Zecnero salt, the 140-byte header input, the block hash kept separate from the proof-of-work hash, and the key schedule that rotates every 2,048 blocks.
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M3Planned
Difficulty, emission and the founder stream
aserti3-2d anchored at genesis, the timestamp bounds, the halving schedule, the consensus rule that every block below the first halving pays the founder script, and the 20-block limit on reorganisation.
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M4Planned
Mining
A miner that understands rx/zecnero and the Zecnero header layout, and the bridge that turns the node’s block templates into jobs it can take.
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M5Planned
Testnet infrastructure
A public testnet with a seeder, an explorer, a light-wallet server, a command-line wallet and reproducible builds. The wallets, the indexers and the provers all move to the fixed Orchard circuit together; nothing reaches users until that whole path agrees.
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M6Planned
Pool and hardening
A mining pool with shielded payouts, a review pass over every consensus change made for Zecnero, fuzzing of the header and proof-of-work parsing, and checkpoint tooling.
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GenesisNot scheduled
Mainnet
The genesis block commits to a recent Bitcoin block, which bounds how early any Zecnero block could have been produced. From that moment anyone may mine, and no height is reserved for anyone. The launch happens only after a public testnet has run with independent miners.