Developer-Friendly Ecosystem

Zenith Network recognizes that a thriving ecosystem of decentralized applications is essential for achieving mainstream adoption. To that end, ZTH is designed to be a developer-friendly platform, providing the tools, resources, and infrastructure necessary to build sophisticated and user-friendly dApps with ease. This commitment to empowering developers is reflected in several key design choices.

• Substrate Framework: ZTH leverages the power and flexibility of the Substrate blockchain framework. Substrate provides a modular and customizable foundation for building blockchains, allowing developers to tailor the runtime environment to their specific needs. By building on Substrate, ZTH benefits from its battle-tested codebase, extensive tooling, and vibrant community, significantly reducing the development effort required to launch new dApps.

• PolkaVM: Efficient and Flexible Smart Contracts: At the heart of ZTH's developer experience is PolkaVM, a high-performance virtual machine based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture. RISC-V's open and efficient design ensures fast execution speeds, while its widespread adoption across various hardware platforms guarantees broad compatibility. For projects migrating from Ethereum, PolkaVM includes an EVM compatibility layer, allowing developers to port their existing Solidity codebases without significant rewriting or re-auditing. This seamless migration path lowers the barrier to entry for established projects and accelerates the growth of the ZTH ecosystem. Furthermore, PolkaVM's architecture is designed to support future advancements in cryptography, including zero-knowledge proofs, ensuring that ZTH remains at the forefront of dApp innovation.

• Native-First SDK with Batteries Included: ZTH is committed to providing a native-first developer experience, recognizing that native applications offer superior performance and user experience compared to web-based counterparts. The ZTH SDK will be designed to empower developers to build seamless dApps for mobile and desktop platforms. It will come "batteries included," providing a comprehensive suite of tools and libraries for common functionalities, such as encryption, key management, hardware wallet integration, and access to ZTH-specific features like verifiable offchain workers. The SDK will also include bindings for iroh, a state-of-the-art distributed file storage system, enabling dApps to handle large datasets in a crypto-verifiable way. While prioritizing native development, the initial SDK release will also support web browsers through technologies like WebAssembly and WebRTC, ensuring accessibility for web-based dApps.

• WebRTC and nQUIC: Modern Networking Stack

  • Utilizing nQUIC, an improved version of HTTP3/QUIC, for secure and efficient node-to-node communication.

  • Employing WebRTC to allow web browsers to act as light clients, improving accessibility for web-based dApps.

  • Implementing UDP hole punching techniques to facilitate direct peer-to-peer connections behind NATs.

• Cap'n Proto RPC: Optimizing for Resource-Constrained Devices

  • Using the Cap'n Proto RPC protocol for efficient communication, particularly for IoT and embedded devices.

  • Leveraging Cap'n Proto's zero-copy decoding and promise pipelining to minimize overhead and improve responsiveness.

  • Implementing local service discovery mechanisms (mDNS, UPnP, UDP broadcast) to allow devices to easily find and connect to ZTH nodes.

Through these features, ZTH empowers developers to create a new generation of dApps that are not only functional but also user-friendly, performant, and scalable. By providing a robust and intuitive development environment, ZTH aims to foster a vibrant ecosystem of innovative decentralized applications that can compete with and surpass their Web2 counterparts.