Today we turned that vision into FLAT — a real token on Meteora pools via pump.fun. Pair against our memecoin and you take a piece of the pool named FLAT. Zcash already has a stablecoin called $ZAI; we bought over 15k of it to seed the first liquidity.
At zero the redemption rate never moves and FLAT is just wrapped ZEC. Turn it up and the protocol works harder to hold the line — and holders earn or pay a larger rate to make that happen.
- Realized volatility, annualized
- ZEC101%
- FLAT12%
- Deepest drawdown
- ZEC-67%
- FLAT-11%
- Worst single day
- ZEC-14.5%
- FLAT-1.6%
- Days spent within 5% of target
- ZEC25
- FLAT353
A 2.5% tax sits on the token. Every holder takes a cut of those fees through the pool — not a treasury, not a team wallet.
- SeedOver 15k $ZAI bought to open the first liquidity.Seed transaction
- Why nowThe Zcash pool on Solana had sat unused for nine months. That gap is what made this possible.Idle pool on Solscan
- The cut2.5% tax. LPs in the FLAT pool receive their share of every swap.Open a vault
How a vault works
FLAT is a collateralized debt position, the same shape Maker used for DAI and Reflexer used for RAI. You are the issuer of your own FLAT, and you can always buy your ZEC back.
Deposit ZEC
Bridge ZEC to Solana and lock it in a vault you control. Nobody else can move it, and nothing is rehypothecated — the collateral sits until you take it back or you get liquidated.
Mint FLAT against it
Draw FLAT up to 69% of your collateral's value. There is no borrow fee and no interest schedule. The only cost of the loan is the redemption rate, which is sometimes negative, meaning the loan occasionally pays you.
The redemption rate does the stabilizing
The protocol tracks one number — the ZEC/FLAT pool's time-weighted price — and adjusts what one FLAT is worth in ZEC terms. Above target, the rate goes negative: minting gets cheaper, holding gets slightly costly, supply expands, the price settles. Below target, it runs the other way.
Repay, or be closed out
Return the FLAT and your ZEC unlocks. Let the ratio fall under 145% and keepers close the position for you, taking an 8.5% penalty out of the collateral. That penalty is the entire liquidation business — there is no auction house and no protocol treasury taking a cut.
Why there is no vote
The redemption rate is a proportional–integral controller. It reads the gap between market price and redemption price, integrates it over time, and turns one dial. The gains are set at deployment and cannot be changed, so there is no governance seat worth capturing and no committee whose opinion about the price of ZEC has to be trusted. If the controller is wrong, it is wrong in public and in the same direction for everybody.
What we gave up to get here
Stable assets are widely held to permit only two of three properties. Most protocols protect capital efficiency because they are building a unit of account for financial markets. FLAT is meant to be spent, so it gives that one away.
Kept: decentralization. Putting a fiat-backed token at the centre of the system would hand the whole thing to whichever company issues it and whichever government licenses them. Holders would stop being Zcash users and start being that company's customers.
Kept: stability. Not a peg — a floating target that moves slowly and predictably. In the simulation above, a year that took ZEC through a 40-plus percent drawdown passes through FLAT as a few percent.
Given up: capital efficiency. Every FLAT is backed by at least $1.45 of ZEC at mint. That is expensive, and it is the honest price of not having anyone to trust.
Why it isn't pegged to the dollar
Most people who want a stable token are not expressing a view on the United States. They want to send someone a hundred of something and have it still be worth a hundred when it lands. The dollar is the familiar unit for that, not the required one.
Building a decentralized token that tracks the dollar requires knowing the price of ZEC in dollars, and that number does not exist on-chain. Getting it there means an oracle, and every honest oracle design eventually reduces to a vote among a set of reporters. A vote is a thing that can be bought, subpoenaed, or quietly captured. It is exactly the kind of softness that a money built for censorship resistance should refuse to depend on.
So FLAT reads only prices the chain can see for itself: the ZEC/FLAT pool, time-weighted. The cost of that choice is that FLAT is denominated in FLAT. Its purchasing power against groceries drifts with ZEC over long horizons. What it removes is the week-to-week noise that makes it absurd to quote a rent payment or a freelance invoice in cryptocurrency.
The flatcoins that came before — RAI, HAI, Rico — performed well and were barely used. We think the reasons are specific rather than fundamental. They launched while the dollar's dominance still felt permanent. They were pitched to people optimizing yield rather than people sending money home. And none of them were private.
Why we shipped it on Solana first
The original proposal argues that this mechanism belongs inside Zcash itself, enshrined at the protocol level rather than bolted on as a token standard. We agree. We also think that argument is much easier to make once somebody has run the controller against real money instead of a spreadsheet.
Enshrining anything in Zcash is a multi-year conversation, and for good reason — the debate over shielded assets showed how carefully that community guards the base layer against becoming a platform for other people's tokens. A fork gives us somewhere to be wrong cheaply.
Solana was the practical choice: blocks fast enough that a time-weighted price is a meaningful signal rather than a lagging one, liquidation costs low enough that keepers will bother with small vaults, and enough existing liquidity to bootstrap the self-referential ZEC/FLAT pair the controller depends on.
What we lose is the part that mattered most. FLAT balances on Solana are public. We are treating this deployment as a proving ground for the controller, not as the destination — if the mechanism holds, the argument for building it natively, and shielded, gets a great deal stronger.
Parameters
Set at deployment. The controller gains are immutable; there is no admin key that can change them.
| Collateral | Bridged ZEC (wZEC), SPL Token-2022 |
|---|---|
| Minimum collateral ratio | 145% |
| Maximum draw at mint | 69% of collateral value |
| Stability fee | 0% |
| Liquidation penalty | 8.5%, paid to the keeper |
| Redemption rate bounds | −40% to +40% APR |
| Controller | Proportional–integral, gains fixed at deploy |
| Price signal | ZEC/FLAT pool, 6-hour time-weighted average |
| External oracles | None |
| Governance | None after launch |
What could go wrong
This is a new mechanism holding real collateral. These are the failures we consider most likely, in roughly that order.
The bridge
wZEC is the weakest link in the system and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Native ZEC cannot move to Solana without a custodian or a bridge, and a bridge failure is a total loss of collateral regardless of how well the controller performs.
A manipulated price signal
Removing the oracle moves the attack surface into the pool. A six-hour time-weighted average is expensive to push, but it is not impossible to push, and it gets cheaper as pool depth falls. Thin liquidity is the condition under which this design breaks.
The controller is unproven at scale
Oracle-free flatcoins remain an open research question. The simulation on this page is a model, not a track record. A sufficiently violent move in ZEC can outrun the rate bounds and let FLAT drift well away from target.
Extractable value around liquidations
Keeper competition is a race, and races on a public chain get reordered. We think this is a manageable cost rather than a reason not to build, but it is a cost, and it is paid by the borrowers being liquidated.
No privacy here
Every vault, balance, and transfer on this deployment is visible. If you need the privacy properties of Zcash, hold ZEC.
Where this came from
flatcoin is an implementation of a proposal that isn't ours. The design goals — full decentralization, no honest-majority oracle, no fiat peg, and a collateralized debt position as the underlying shape — are argued far more carefully in the original writeup than we have room for here.
ZAI: a shielded stability primitive →Zcash Community Forum
flatcoin is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by the Electric Coin Company, the Zcash Foundation, or the author of the ZAI proposal. Nothing here is financial advice.