If you hold tokenised gold on Ethereum today, anyone — a competitor, a stranger, an ex-business partner — can look up your balance, your full transaction history, and everyone you've ever paid. That has never been true of any conventional way of holding wealth. A depositor at a regulated brokerage doesn't have their account balance posted publicly. The brokerage knows them. Counterparties see what they need to settle. Tax authorities receive what the law requires. Everyone else sees nothing.
Public blockchains quietly deleted that default. Zeracle is our attempt to restore it.
Zeracle is a protocol for holding, transferring, and spending a diversified basket of commodity-backed tokens — tokenised gold and silver, Bitcoin, and stablecoins — with encrypted account state.
Three ideas define it:
Confidential by default. Your balance, your transfers, and your history live as encrypted state on Aztec, a zero-knowledge Layer 2 on Ethereum. Only you can read them — and anyone you deliberately authorise.
Auditable where it matters. The reserves backing every token sit in a contract on Ethereum that anyone can inspect, in real time. You don't have to trust an attestation; you can read the collateral yourself.
Compliant at the edges. Every deposit and withdrawal passes through KYC, AML, and sanctions screening. Confidentiality applies between the endpoints, not around them.
That combination — private accounts, public reserves, regulated entry and exit — is exactly the shape of a traditional brokerage relationship. The difference is that no institution sits in the middle. The custody is a smart contract, and the contract contains no function that lets anyone — including us — freeze a holder's account or move reserves outside the normal withdrawal pipeline. That's not a policy; the function does not exist.
Zeracle's token, ZRCL, is not a dollar-pegged stablecoin. It's a claim on a diversified basket: tokenised gold and silver, Bitcoin, and established stablecoins, held at target weights with automatic rebalancing.
The reasoning comes straight from portfolio theory: assets that aren't correlated with each other produce a basket that is far less volatile than any component. Gold barely moves with stablecoins; Bitcoin barely moves with silver. The result targets roughly four percent annual volatility — dramatically calmer than any single commodity, without depending on one issuer, one currency, or one custodian. Stable enough to save in and spend from, honest enough not to promise a peg it doesn't have.
Traditional banks take deposits, put them to work, and keep most of the return. Zeracle inverts that: every depositor is automatically a co-owner of the liquidity pool.
When the protocol charges fees — a small percentage on deposits, withdrawals, and transfers, capped at one percent by an immutable contract constant — sixty percent of every fee flows back to holders, in proportion to their share of the pool. No staking, no lock-ups. Collecting your accrued share is a single claim transaction.
And because "trust me, the yield is X" is exactly the kind of claim this industry should retire, the displayed APY isn't a projection or a marketing number. It's computed by the reserve contract itself from a trailing window of actual fees, readable by anyone directly from on-chain state. When there isn't enough history to measure honestly, the app shows a dash instead of a number.
There's a hard engineering problem lurking inside private payments: zero-knowledge proofs take too long to generate on a phone for anyone to wait at a point of sale.
Zeracle's answer, Instant Pay, works like a prepaid card. You lock funds into a private escrow once. After that, paying a merchant takes two steps — scan their invoice QR, confirm the amount — and no proof at all at the moment of sale. Each payment is a one-time cryptographic signature; the escrow contract guarantees the merchant in real time that the funds exist and can't be double-spent. The heavy cryptography happens at the two ends of the period, on your schedule, not at the counter while a queue forms behind you.
This is live in the app today, end to end — payer flow, merchant dashboard, offline fallback included.
Protocols that can change anything can take anything, so Zeracle uses controlled upgradeability with permanently locked economics. Code can be fixed and improved, but four floors are immutable in the contract: the one percent fee cap, the ninety-five percent minimum reserve ratio, a forty percent cap on any single asset's share of the basket, and the absence of any custodial withdrawal function. Upgrades that would violate them are rejected.
Zeracle is live on testnet — deposits, private transfers, withdrawals, yield claims, and Instant Pay all working end to end — with mainnet gated on audits and stability criteria rather than a marketing date. We'll be writing here regularly about how it's built: running a full zero-knowledge execution environment inside a browser, why our first APY formula was embarrassingly wrong, what it took to fit a cryptographic payment into a QR code, and the rest of the build log.
If the design interests you, the whitepaper covers the full architecture — the confidentiality model, the basket, the economics, and the honest limits of what the system does and doesn't protect.
The holders are the bank. We think that's worth building.
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