Tokenomics

Beginner

Here is how ZINC supply works, step by step.

1. There is a fixed lifetime supply of 6,538,000 ZINC, the most that can ever exist.
2. ZINC is not all handed out at once. New ZINC is created by mining, the same activity that powers each round.
3. The more SOL people deploy into rounds, the more new ZINC the protocol mints.
4. Mining gets harder over time. As the total supply grows, each round mints less ZINC, much like Bitcoin’s halvings slowly shrink the block reward.
5. So early activity earns ZINC faster, and the rate quietly tapers as the supply approaches the cap.
6. On the other side, fees from the game are used to buy ZINC and permanently destroy it (“melt”).
7. That buy-and-burn removes coins from circulation, working against new minting.

The short version: a hard cap on supply, mining that issues new coins more slowly over time, and fees that quietly burn coins back out.

Intermediate

Now the flows that move ZINC around.

1. Each round measures how much SOL was deployed into it.
2. That SOL volume feeds an emission curve that mints new ZINC for the round. The curve saturates, so doubling volume does not double the ZINC.
3. The round’s freshly minted ZINC is split into buckets. As an example split: roughly 75% goes directly to that round’s winners, about 20% seeds the Bonanza jackpot pool, with the remainder feeding the Stockpile pot and the Wildcat bonus.
4. Winners therefore earn ZINC on top of the SOL pot they already share.
5. Undistributed jackpot ZINC accumulates over time, raising the payoff of future wins.
6. Separately, a slice of every deploy is set aside as a buyback fee, collected in SOL.
7. The protocol periodically spends that SOL to buy ZINC on the market (buyback), then melts what it buys, burning it.

So SOL volume creates ZINC, ZINC is shared between players and prize pools, and fees flow back as a buyback that ends in a burn.

Advanced

The emission engine is a saturating bonding curve with a built-in halving.

1. Per-round mint follows roughly curve_max_round_mint · (1 − e^(−total_deployed / curve_saturation_lamports)). Small deploys mint near-linearly; large deploys flatten toward curve_max_round_mint.
2. curve_saturation_lamports sets where the curve reaches about 63% of its per-round ceiling, so beyond it extra SOL yields sharply diminishing ZINC.
3. A halving factor driven by curve_history_minted scales emissions down as cumulative minting passes successive thresholds, mirroring Bitcoin-style halvings.
4. curve_max_supply enforces the hard cumulative cap (6,538,000 ZINC); minting cannot breach it.
5. The combined effect: ZINC-per-SOL falls monotonically as cumulative supply grows.
6. Against issuance, melt routes ZINC into a shared deflationary sink. Buyback-fee SOL is swapped for ZINC, which is then melted and burned, and the sink also supports staking yield.
7. Net supply is therefore minting minus melt, asymptotically bounded by the cap.

Read treasury.total_zinc_minted and total_zinc_melted with the curve params to estimate the live rate.