ZetaChain serves as a base public blockchain designed for omnichain, general-purpose smart contracts and messaging across any blockchain. It addresses the challenges of “cross-chain” and “multi-chain” usage, working toward making the crypto and global finance ecosystem accessible to anyone. ZetaChain promotes a genuinely seamless multi-chain environment where both users and developers can switch between blockchains and take advantage of what they offer-ranging from payments and DeFi to liquidity, games, art, social graphs, performance, security, privacy, and more.

ZetaChain is a decentralized, public blockchain network built using the Cosmos SDK and Tendermint Consensus. Many cross-chain approaches-such as bridges-operate with different trust assumptions and are often vulnerable to issues like centralized trust, with histories of exploits and hacks. In contrast, ZetaChain runs as a Proof-of-Stake blockchain, with all transactions and on-chain activity, including cross-chain transactions, remaining fully transparent, verifiable, and designed to work in a trust-minimized way.

Smart contracts can be launched directly on ZetaChain and can interact with connected chains by reading from and writing to them. ZetaChain is the only public blockchain that supports smart contracts with this functionality, introducing a new model for building applications.

ZetaChain’s coin, ZETA, is used to cover gas fees for ZetaChain smart contracts, and it also helps secure the PoS ZetaChain network through bonding/staking/slashing. ZETA is central to ZetaChain’s cross-chain transfers, swaps, message delivery, and security. ZETA is among the earliest multi-chain coins that is natively issued across multiple chains and layers.