Simple, Fast, and Secure Omnichain Blockchain

With ZetaChain’s Omnichain Smart Contracts, build truly interoperable dApps that span multiple chains from Ethereum to Bitcoin and beyond. Access all of crypto from one chain
The crypto industry is rapidly innovating, growing, and expanding. New blockchains, and layers on top of those blockchains, pop up every day, making the industry more and more complicated for both developers and users.
Apps built on ZetaChain connect to anything in the crypto ecosystem, giving you simple, seamless, and secure access to all of crypto, as if it were all in a single place.
For app developers, choosing a blockchain ecosystem can feel daunting. With ZetaChain, you can rest easy knowing that you’ll have access to any blockchain. With Omnichain Smart Contracts, you can deploy your code once and future-proof your applications.
At a high level, ZetaChain is a Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchain built on the Cosmos SDK and Tendermint PBFT consensus engine. As a result, ZetaChain enjoys fast block time (~5s) and instant finality (no block confirmation needed, no re-organization allowed). The Tendermint PBFT consensus engine has been demonstrated to scale to ~300 nodes in production, and with future upgrades with BLS threshold signatures the number can potentially increase to 1000+. The throughput of transactions of the Tendermint consensus engine that ZetaChain uses can reach 4000+ transactions per second (TPS) under ideal network conditions [10]. Note that the cross-chain TPS cannot reach nearly as high because cross-chain transactions latency/throughput may be limited by external chain latency/throughput, TSS key-sign throughput, and various other factors such as external node RPC speed, etc. The ZetaChain architecture consists of a distributed network of nodes, often referred to as validators. Validators act as decentralized observers that can reach consensus on relevant external state and events, and can also update external chain state via distributed key signing. ZetaChain accomplishes these functions in a decentralized (without a single point of failure, trustless, permissionless), transparent, and efficient way. Contained within each validator is the ZetaCore and ZetaClient. ZetaCore is responsible for producing the blockchain and maintaining the replicated state machine. ZetaClient is responsible for observing events on external chains and signing outbound transactions. ZetaCore and ZetaClient are bundled together and run by node operators. Anyone can become a node operator to participate in validation provided that enough bonds are staked. See Figure 2 for a high level illustration. Validators: ZetaChain uses the Tendermint consensus protocol which is a partially synchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus algorithm. Each validator node can vote on block proposals with voting power proportional to the staking coins (ZETA) bonded. Each validator is identified by its consensus public key. Validators need to be online all the time, ready to participate in the constantly growing block production. In exchange for their service, validators will receive block rewards, and potentially other rewards such as gas fees or processing fees, proportional to their bonded staking coins.
Observers: Another set of important participants of ZetaChain consensus are the observers who reach consensus on external chain events and states. The observers watch externally connected chains for certain relevant transactions/events/states at particular addresses via their full nodes of external chains. The observers can be further divided into two roles: sequencer and verifier. The sequencer discovers relevant external transactions/events/states and reports to verifiers; the verifiers verify and vote on ZetaChain to reach consensus. The system requires at least one sequencer and multiple verifiers. The sequencer does not need to be trusted, but at least one honest sequencer is needed for liveness.
Signers: The ZetaChain collectively holds standard ECDSA/EdDSA keys for authenticated interaction with external chains. The keys are distributed among multiple signers in such a way that only a super majority of them can sign on behalf of the ZetaChain. Its important to ensure that at no time is any single entity or small fraction of nodes able to sign messages on behalf of ZetaChain on external chains. The ZetaChain system uses bonded stakes and positive/negative incentives to ensure economic safety.

https://www.zetachain.com/

https://www.zetachain.com/whitepaper.pdf