Zenon Network & the Bad Seeds

9 min readDec 5, 2019

This is a rock’n roll story

At first, we were miners, and players. We could even play poker games with our Bitcoin client. We didn’t know where this could lead us, but it was highly politic: We were printing money. We were nerds, geeks, some arrogant beautiful losers. Those of us who saved our Bitcoin and didn’t buy too many pizzas became filthy rich, real fast. We kept mining, because it was fun after all, and we hoped for more. More fun, more money, and more of this spice that made you feel like you were part of the next biggest revolution of human history. We started to mine fun money; fruits, boobz, doge and Kanye West coins. Even some of those jokes worked out nicely. After Mark Karpelès crashed the entire space by playing God with Mt.Gox, a lot of people felt like the party was coming to its end. It was a dead dark end. Crypto was dead. Bitcoin was dead. There was no future for anything. Back to reality and the grind of the rat race. But the space didn’t die, the market didn’t die. It came back, and it came back with a new wave on interest we had never seen before. And soon the ICO madness started to drive everyone next Crypto Frenzy. This is where Zenon Network is making itself different.

And you don’t wanna miss the show

Zenon Network is aiming to build a dApp platform (zApp, as they say). The lightpaper is presenting a groundbreaking novel consensus called “Network of Momentum”. The Network of Momentum is a gossip protocol using three kind of nodes (Pillars, Sentries & Sentinels) in order to shard the network and maintain its metastability. A peer reviewed whitepaper is scheduled to be released sometime in December of 2019. Cardano, Algorand and Thundercore are among the only projects that went through proper academic reviews of their whitepaper(s). There are worse references and that’s it for the tech.

The Zenon Network team didn’t sell pre-minted tokens to Angel Investors and VC’s to make them dance the derisk dump on communities, they started a placeholder blockchain. The emission and distribution are based on a PoS (Proof of Stake) consensus and tied to the market forces. Fair. You want it, you can buy, you support it, you can stake.

Now here’s the big deal and the why we’re writing this: When we were told about Zenon Network, they told us about the legend behind it: This is linked to Jack Dorsey & Square Crypto. In fact, it could well be Jack Dorsey’s Square Crypto super-secret project. This could be the biggest thing in crypto since the ICO craze. Is the Illuminati back in town? We don’t know, this is crypto, anything and everything is possible. The way they decided to give the project to the community instead of selling themselves to a bunch of deep pockets make this project enticing and that’s what has brought us here. This is the early taste we were missing the past few years, a game that goes beyond flipping VC’s shitcoins, a game that brings us all back on stage.

In this first article we will drop everything we’ve found about the semiology (we are looking at both project narratives similarities, and question those).

In two upcoming ones, we will explore the sociology (where we will be looking at the Square Crypto and Zenon Network’s Github and Twitter followers), and the monetary (where we will try to follow the Zenon Network money, both BTC and ZNN).

Everything here is left for the community to investigate deeper. Everything here is speculation and nothing has been officially endorsed by the team.

Bring it on

Zenon Network and Square Crypto both have a Twitter account. They’re both only following halfin’s (Hal Finney) one and not following any other account. halfin’s Twitter account is the very first one that tweeted about Bitcoin in early 2009 and with an activity matching Satoshi’s one, this is a strong indicator and an important part of the crypto subculture (https://twitter.com/halfin/status/1110302988). Coincidence? Possibly…

Down the rabbit hole

Having an anonymous team is just the first step; the torch has to be passed to the community and that’s exactly what Zenon Network is trying to achieve. “Community” was Square Crypto’s third tweet, it was deleted later on. Square Crypto emphasis the community, Zenon Network too. Zenon Network hiring process is going through a Community Portal where community members can apply. This is the way they pass the torch, by building a community team while staying entirely anonymous. No central authority.

On the 21st of March, Jack Dorsey tweeted about hiring 3–4 crypto engineers and 1 designer. On the 15th of May, Zenon Tweeted about hiring 4 developers, 2 community managers, 1 content creator and 1 graphic designer.

On the 15nd of May Zenon Network tweeted about their first hire process going well.

On the 22nd of May, Square Crypto tweeted about being really close to their first hire. The individuals hired are still unknown. Merely trying to match up the dates for the hiring announcements.

Zenon Network is planning to deploy pillars directly outer space. Either this is real or just metaphorical, there are some matches again. On the 3rd of May, Square Crypto tweeted about Elon Musk, just one day before SpaceX tweeted about the Dragon being on its road to the International Space Station.

Here we go

In early April, Square Crypto tweeted about “roving pillar of shimmering blue light” & “thousand floating eyeballs”. Two days later, they tweeted something intriguing about a whitepaper “staring back at you”.

The whitepaper, no idea, but for the Zenon Network’s visuals matching Square Crypto tweets, we thought again that everything could have been all made afterward so we first tried to find old archived versions of their website and Bitcointalk post (https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://zenon.network). Unfortunately, we were unable to find any past archived versions.

However (and much more simple) a Bitcointalk announcement allows you to see both the post and the last edit dates as we wanted to know if the project and its semiology was already all about pillars, sentinels, sentries and satellites before Square Crypto started to tweet. Guess what? It was. Zenon Network Bitcointalk announcement is from the March 29 (2019), the Square Crypto first tweet about Pillars and floating eyeballs is from the April 2 (2019).

We saw some tweets from Square Crypto strangely match the Zenon Network project narrative and visual identity. We even saw that Zenon Network might have come up with these before Square Crypto even started to tweet. But there is more; Let’s have a deeper look at the dates and see what we can get out of these.

Square Crypto was registered on Twitter on March 2019.
Square Crypto first tweets are from late March 2019.
Zenon Network Bitcointalk post is from the 25th of May 2018.
The zenon.network domain was registered in April 2018. (https://www.domainiq.com/domain?zenon.network)
Zenon Network was registered on Twitter on May 2018.
Zenon Network first tweet is from the 20th of March 2019. A few hours before Square Crypto tweets a waving hello.

2018. Vortex is a massive Bitcoin OG. He opened a poll about the Lightning Network apps name. Another interesting match.

During the July 2019 AMA on Twitter, Moneyball said that protocols are considered design-centrics. Improving Bitcoin design, improving Lightning Network design, etc.. And there is no permisionless protocols without its native tokens to incentive good behaviours.

The devil’s in the details

Scammy craps and low end amateurs projects usually uses only CloudFlares and build their websites on Fiverr cheap graphisms and generic code. Zenon Network website has a clear well written code, is based on unique graphisms and animations. It also uses CloudFlare but uses StackPath to serve JavaScript contents, which is also used by Square Crypto’s website http://squareup.com

That’s it for the tweets and riddles. The most intriguing part isn’t the guessing game nor the matches alone but the fact that Zenon Network might not have just copied Square Crypto to build up something. They were ready with all the Square Crypto narrative and semiology long before Square Crypto started to tweet about “roving pillar of shimmering blue light” and “floating eyeballs”.

From Satoshi to Dorian Nakamoto. Zenon Network plays around too. For a Zenon pizza day?

What now?

There are upcoming momentums (no pun intended) that might be extremely significant for the project. If we look at Zenon Network itself, their lightpaper is of a much higher standard than the usual anonymous crypto team ones. Whoever was there in 2017 knows what we’re talking about, no need to wake up these painful memories. This one is more than well written. It’s clean, it’s interesting and their ideas are well referenced in a disciplined academic fashion. Whoever wrote this is well aware of the current debate within the cryptography space and has a decent background: https://zenon.network/res/lightpaper.pdf

The full whitepaper is due within a few months and will go through a full academic peer review before being distributed through “a set of official academic channels”. There are only a very few projects that goes through such processes where your research can be cornered, unproven, and their bold claims destroyed by former researchers: Zenon, we’re waiting to see what you’re made of!