Why does ZeiCoin exist?
ZeiCoin started as a weekend project to test AI-assisted development tooling. What I didn't expect was how quickly I'd realise I was a decade behind even the basic features of a modern blockchain. I built a toy blockchain first, then started adding one feature at a time on top of it. There were nearly a few rm -rf moments, and probably three to five major refactors along the way.
This project is not meant to be a serious cryptocurrency. It's a test platform for exploring new blockchain technology and AI-assisted development in the Zig programming language. Zig is still early in its development and its standard library continues to evolve. Zig 0.16 is shaping up to be a significant release, and migrating to it recently removed two dependencies from the codebase while opening the door to ML-DSA encryption support.
Why Zig? Curiosity, mostly. And the compiler is genuinely fast. I'm not sure this project would have been possible without the fast compile times. Blockchain is far more complex than I expected. A toy implementation can be built with an LLM over a weekend, but getting to MainNet quality will require considerably more time and effort. That's part of what makes it interesting.