Blog
Updates, thoughts and dev notes from the ZeiCoin project.
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 — 0.16 is shaping up to be a significant release, and migrating to it last month allowed me to remove two dependencies from the codebase and opened 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.