USDn: The Gas Currency
USDn is what eth_getBalance returns and what gas is paid in. It has 18 decimals. One USDn is meant to be worth one US dollar.
On the testnet
USDn is test money. It is created at genesis for the faucet (10,000,000), the Incentive Pool (1,000,000) and the validators (100 each); there is no other minting on the testnet yet (attested minting is phase 2). New USDn reaches a user through the faucet key or through mining shares. It is worth nothing and will not carry over to a mainnet.
On the mainnet design
| Operation | How |
|---|---|
| Mint | A user deposits USDC/USDT (or wires fiat to the issuer). The ten validators observe the deposit; once seven attest it, the block proposer includes a system transaction that credits the native balance. No private key holds a mint capability; the validator quorum does, on-chain, with an audit trail. |
| Redeem | The user calls redeem(amount, destination) on the USDn vault contract, which burns native USDn and queues the redemption. The issuer releases the stable coin on the other chain. |
| Reserve proof | reserves ≥ totalSupply − pendingRedemptions is checkable at any block; the redemption queue is on-chain. |
The protocol never mints USDn on its own. There is no block subsidy. See No Native Token.
Why gas in dollars matters
- Budgets. An AI agent, a game, or a payment app can plan: a transfer is 0.021 USDn, a swap around 0.15 USDn, today and in a year.
- No gas-token bootstrap. On other chains a new user must first buy the gas token somewhere. Here the unit of account and the gas unit are the same dollar you already think in.
- No reflexive loop. Chains with a native gas token get more expensive to use precisely when they succeed. NetZero Chain's fees do not depend on demand for a token, only on the EIP-1559 base fee, which has a floor and rises only under real congestion.
Fee mechanics
- EIP-1559 fee market.
maxFeePerGasandmaxPriorityFeePerGaswork as on Ethereum. - Base fee floor: 1,000 gwei USDn. The base fee cannot fall below it. This is what makes a transfer cost at least about two cents and keeps state bloat from being free.
- No burn. The base fee goes to the block's fee sink together with tips, and is split 50/40/10 like everything else. See Fee Accounting.
- Gas limit 30M per block, 3 second blocks.
Legal note
A dollar token offered to the public in the EU is an e-money token under MiCA. The mainnet issuance model (an authorised issuer, or wholesale minting to KYC'd partners) is decided before any mainnet, not on the testnet. Nothing described here is an offer of anything.