The Trust Layer for Web3

Vision

Web3 runs on promises. Projects ship roadmaps, hype launches, and announce milestones - but the people deciding whether to trust them have almost nothing verifiable to go on. Reputation is built from marketing and follower counts, not from delivery. The result is predictable: abandoned projects, broken promises, and communities that find out too late.

Zexus is an accountability layer for onchain projects. Every project carries a Trust Score built from real, auditable signals and adjusted by community votes on the milestones it actually delivers. Around that sits a social feed, watchlists, alerts, and prediction markets - so tracking a project, holding it accountable, and acting on what you learn all happen in one place.

ZXP, the platform points system, aligns everyone around honest participation: you earn it by contributing, stake it to weight your governance voice, and burn it as skin in the game when you vote or raise an alarm. Reputation on Zexus has to be earned and spent - it cannot be bought.

ZXP - Points, Not a Token

Off-chain by design

ZXP balances live in the Zexus database, not on a blockchain. There is no ZXP contract address, no liquidity pool, and no market. "Staking" and "burning" ZXP are internal accounting actions - they move points between states in our system; they are not onchain transactions and they never touch your wallet balance.

What your wallet is for

Your wallet is used only for identity: you sign in with it (Sign-In With Ethereum) so your reputation is tied to one account. Signing in costs nothing and never moves funds. ZXP itself stays entirely off-chain.

A balanced economy: faucets and sinks

ZXP is designed to circulate, not pile up. It enters through participation (faucets) and leaves through use and inactivity (sinks), which keeps the system from inflating into meaninglessness.

Epochs & Anti-Inflation

The protocol runs in 6-month epochs. A daily maintenance job (03:00 UTC) recalculates the staking APY and, when an epoch closes, applies a tiered retention burn before automatically advancing to the next epoch.

Tiered retention

At epoch end, each wallet's free (unstaked) ZXP is retained based on the activity it showed during the epoch. Hoarding without participating costs you; staying active costs you nothing.

Staked ZXP is never decayed - staking is itself proof of commitment. The burned amount is added to each profile's lifetime ZXP burned counter, which drives Burn Ranks.

Dynamic APY

Staking rewards are paid in ZXP at a dynamic APY with an 8% hard ceiling. The base rate is recomputed daily from the median participant balance so rewards stay sustainable as the network grows. At the start of every epoch the rate resets to the 8% ceiling.

Staking

Staking ZXP does two things: it earns rewards (APY) and it unlocks governance power. Both scale with how long a position has been staked, rewarding long-term alignment over mercenary capital.

Age multipliers

Rewards accrue continuously (fractional drip, down to 4 decimals) so even small positions visibly earn over time. Unstaking is subject to a cooldown window before the principal becomes available again.

Governance - Power Vote

Zexus governance is built around milestone confirmation. Projects post claims (e.g. "shipped X", "hit milestone Y"); the community confirms or disputes them, and the weighted outcome moves the project's Trust Score. Governance today is scoped to project accountability - it is not protocol treasury or parameter voting.

Vote weight formula

The square root deliberately softens whale dominance - doubling your stake does not double your vote. time_bonus follows the staking age multipliers (1.0x up to 2.2x from <30d to >=365d), so conviction over time is rewarded.

To prevent gaming, the time bonus uses the amount-weighted average age across all of a wallet's positions - you cannot anchor one tiny old position to boost a large fresh stake.

Eligibility & cost

Votes are confirm or dispute. Voting posts auto-finalize at their deadline, and the weighted result feeds directly into the project's Trust Score.

Trust Score

Every project carries a Trust Score from 0 to 110 - a living reputation number rather than a static rating. It has two parts: a baseline built from verifiable signals, and an ongoing adjustment driven by community milestone votes.

Baseline: six weighted categories

The baseline scores transparency and traction across six categories, each capped so no single dimension can dominate. GitHub activity is pulled live from the GitHub API; the rest is evidence-based and auditable.

Ongoing: the community cycle

Confirmed milestones raise the score; disputed or failed ones lower it. Every movement is recorded on the project's Trust Timeline, so the full history is auditable rather than a black box.

Predict Market

Predict Markets let the community put ZXP behind their convictions about project outcomes. They are parimutuel (pooled) markets:

• Each market has two outcomes, A and B, each with its own pool.
• One bet per wallet per market, minimum 1 ZXP, paid from your free balance.
• On resolution a 2% platform fee is burned; the remaining prize pool is split among winners pro-rata to their share of the winning pool.

Markets have a betting deadline; after it no new bets are accepted, and the outcome is resolved by governance.

Emergency Call

An Emergency Call is a community-funded alarm against a project - used to flag serious issues (rug risk, broken promises, security concerns) and rally a quorum.

When the pool is reached the call activates: the project's Trust Score is provisionally lowered as a visible "under review" flag, and the team has 48 hours to respond publicly - the window closing early the moment they do. The call then converts into a stake-weighted community verdict vote, and the result decides the outcome: Resolved (real but addressed - half the staked ZXP returned, Trust Score -10), Unresolved (real and neglected - stake returned with a bonus, Trust Score -20), or, with no quorum, a full refund and no penalty. A separate review can mark a baseless call a false alarm, burning the contributed ZXP. The provisional drop is reversed at resolution, so the net Trust Score change equals the final verdict.

No single party decides the outcome - not the project, not the Zexus team. The staked community adjudicates by vote; the manual review exists only as a last-resort backstop. All amounts scale with an admin-controlled factor, so thresholds can be tuned as ZXP activity changes without a code change. Watchers of the targeted project are notified in-app and via Telegram at each stage: opened, activated, responded, verdict open, and resolved.

Community Burn Pool

The Burn Pool is a shared, monthly co-op goal. Every ZXP burned through normal activity (votes, emergency calls, predict fees) adds to one collective pool. When the community crosses a tier, everyone receives a staking-APY bonus for the rest of the month.

The pool resets at the start of each calendar month. End-of-epoch decay burns are excluded, so the pool reflects genuine activity. This turns burning ZXP from a purely individual cost into a positive-sum, cooperative game.

Seasons

Each calendar month is a Season. Season XP is the amount of ZXP a participant earns during the month - from rewards, daily check-ins, governance verdicts, referrals, and onboarding. It is computed live from the transaction ledger, and the top 50 are ranked publicly.

Seasons give newcomers a fair, recurring shot at recognition: the board zeroes out every month, so standing reflects recent contribution rather than lifetime totals.

Burn Ranks

A wallet's lifetime ZXP burned earns a permanent rank badge, displayed on the profile. Burning is the truest signal of conviction, so it is what ranks reflect:

Earning ZXP

ZXP enters circulation through participation, never purchase:

Onboarding rewards (7 ZXP total) are claimable within the first 7 days after a wallet registers.

Sybil Resistance & Anti-Abuse

Because reputation is the product, resisting fake accounts and farming matters more than almost anything else. Zexus layers several defenses:

• No cash incentive: ZXP has no monetary value and cannot be sold, which removes the core reason to farm it at scale.
• Square-root vote weighting: splitting a stake across many wallets yields less total power than keeping it together, so Sybil swarms are penalized by design.
• Voting gates: a minimum of 10 ZXP staked plus a 48-hour account age is required before a wallet can vote.
• Skin in the game: each first-time vote burns 1 ZXP, so spamming votes has a real cost.
• Anti-anchoring: vote weight uses the amount-weighted average age of all positions, so an old dust position cannot juice a fresh whale stake.
• One-time, time-boxed onboarding: onboarding rewards pay once and only within the first 7 days; the daily check-in is capped at 1 ZXP per day.
• Invite-code gating during early access limits how fast new accounts can appear.

Architecture & Security

Zexus is a web application, not a smart-contract protocol. The split between off-chain and onchain is intentional and explicit:

Security

• SIWE authentication: actions are signed with the wallet, and the server derives the acting address from the verified session - never from request bodies.
• Admin and write routes are guarded server-side.
• Telegram notifications: opt-in alerts for ZXP earned, Emergency Calls, Predict wins, and watched-project activity.
• Invite-code gating during the early access phase.

Closed Test Phase Report

Ahead of any public launch, Zexus ran a five-day closed test phase (June 5-10, 2026) - a deliberately small, invite-only cohort of hand-picked external testers on Base Mainnet. The objective was simple: prove that every core mechanic - community verdict voting, staking and rewards, Predict markets, Emergency Calls, and Telegram notifications - works end-to-end with real users under real conditions.

Participation

Sybil defenses behaved exactly as designed. The 48-hour account gate, the stake-to-vote requirement, and batch-pattern detection isolated 11 throwaway wallets - including two clusters created seconds apart - which were excluded from every metric. No farmed account reached the voting threshold.

Mechanics validated

Issues found and fixed

• Fixed the right-sidebar scroll.
• Fixed the daily check-in button.
• Fixed comment flicker on submit.
• Fixed mobile scroll on the staking page.
• Fixed ZXP balance refresh after a Predict bet.

Early tester feedback averaged 7.5 / 10 overall (8.0 for UI, 7.3 for usability), with the Predict market singled out as a standout. Remaining open items - mobile polish, Telegram check-in reminders, and username display on profiles - are tracked for the public launch.

Roadmap

Q2 - The Genesis & Alpha

• Official announcement and waitlist open
• Genesis Program onboarding (10 founding projects)
• Alpha: Voting, Trust Score, MVP
• Sybil filter and reputation integration

Q3 - Growth & Mainnet

• Public mainnet launch (Base / Arbitrum)
• Zexus Points Engine (ZXP) full launch
• Genesis Tier: Wave 2 projects

Q4 - Global Expansion

• Advanced governance and DAO delegate tools
• Zexus Analytics API for launchpads
• Sleuth partnership: onchain detectives

Risks & Disclaimers

• Alpha software: Zexus is in active development, provided "as is" without warranties. Features, parameters, and balances may change or be reset.
• ZXP has no monetary value: it is a points system, not a token or investment. Nothing in this document is financial, legal, or investment advice.
• No entitlement: holding ZXP grants no claim, airdrop, or right to any current or future onchain token.
• Trust Score is informational: it is a community and evidence-based signal, not an endorsement, guarantee, or recommendation. Always do your own research.
• Wallet responsibility: you are responsible for the security of your wallet and keys. Onchain transactions cannot be reversed.
• Jurisdiction: you are responsible for ensuring your use of Zexus complies with your local laws. See the Terms of Service.

Glossary