So what is XEN?
XEN is a project created by Jack Levin, one of the first employees at Google where he was infrastructure engeenier who built their first cloud, and built first six datacenters. He’s also an angel investor, biohacker, and founder of imageshack.com and other companies.
XEN, pronounced as “zen”, is a state of equilibrium and fairness between passing time and the number of people owning it. It’s based on the principle that each of us is their own bank, able to mint our own tokens in a trustless way. It’s kind of like a seed that is a generative principle of a tree growing its own fruits. This is a very important aspect in the mindset of a sovereign individual who always chooses independence over entrenched interests, so popular in a centralised world of finance and often ported to the cryptocurrency field.
The first principle of crypto
Unlike every token out there, XEN is based on the first principles initiated by Satoshi Nakamoto in his Bitcoin white paper. Just like bitcoiners, XEN owners practise self-custody, where every person retains full control and is responsible for his/her economic energy. There have been too many failures, driven primarily by the users who were too eager to give up control over their coins to an exchange or to other platforms in the name of security and to chase yield. The first rule of XEN is that “zen” masters are always in control of their keys, responsibly managing them.
The second principle of crypto
The second first principle of crypto as designed by Nakamoto is truth by consensus. I can trust you without having to share additional information with you because the underlying protocol is in charge of verifying all the information. XEN is an open source smart contract deployed on the Ethereum protocol. The code can’t be changed by anyone, and it’s verifiable and audited. The permissionless and trustless nature of XEN ensures that there are no middlemen in the equation. Everything happens on-chain without any off-chain governance rules that can somehow change the contract. XEN is entirely free of counterparty risk.
The third principle of crypto
XEN is a token minted for free, and its value stems from adoption growth, the amount of gas spent on the transaction, and the time between the claim and the mint. What rank you have and how long you wait to mint determines the quantity of your XEN. The difficulty to mint increases together with the number of people joining the network. Similarly to bitcoin, the minting difficulty is time adjusted. XEN’s initial inflation is very high due to the Early Adoption Amplifier (EAA) bonus and the Rward Amplificator (AMP). From a highly inflationary token, XEN will turn into a disinflationary one as more time passes by. In the end, it will arrive at a flat yearly emission rate that will be used to pay for the APY rewards to the stakers.
