ZAN

ZAN is the Web3 infrastructure brand of Ant Digital Technologies, a subsidiary of Ant Group, the Hangzhou-based fintech company behind Alipay. The platform launched on September 8, 2023, and is headquartered in Hong Kong — a deliberate choice to operate within a regulatory environment more receptive to public blockchain activity than mainland China. ZAN's stated goal is to become foundational infrastructure for the Web3 developer ecosystem across Asia-Pacific and globally.

Node Service

ZAN's core offering is its Node Service: a JSON-RPC and WebSocket gateway to 20+ blockchain networks spanning 47+ mainnet and testnet environments. Supported chains include Ethereum, Solana, BSC, Polygon, Arbitrum, Base, Bitcoin, Sui, TRON, TON, zkSync, Fantom, NEAR, and Hyperliquid, among others. Developers choose between shared access and single-tenant dedicated nodes; dedicated nodes remove rate limits and guarantee throughput.

The platform uses a credit-based billing model. A free tier provides 300 million credits per month, auto-renewing for active accounts. Paid tiers — Growth, Pro, and Enterprise — add higher throughput, dedicated nodes, and SLA guarantees. ZAN claims 99.9% uptime through multi-zone deployment and intelligent routing, and states response times under 30ms in Asia-Pacific deployments.

Additional Node Service capabilities include a Contract Indexer for customized on-chain data views, Chain Alert webhooks for event-driven applications, and gRPC streaming for Solana, Sui, and TRON — reducing connection overhead compared with polling-based approaches.

Solana Trading Boost

ZAN operates a dedicated Solana transaction acceleration service targeting time-sensitive use cases: DeFi swaps, liquidations, NFT minting, and MEV-seeking trades. The mechanism is Stake-Weighted Quality of Service (SWQoS), which routes transactions through ZAN's validator-adjacent nodes, bypassing the public gossip layer used by standard RPC calls and giving priority proportional to staked SOL.

ZAN also integrates with the Jito Block Engine, which the company states covers more than 95% of Solana's staked validator volume. Together, SWQoS routing and Jito integration underpin ZAN's claim that 95% of transactions submitted through Trading Boost confirm on-chain within one second. An optional MEV protection mode routes transactions through private Jito channels, guarding against front-running and sandwich attacks. Pricing is tip-based: users include a SOL tip as a priority bid, and the tip is only consumed when the transaction successfully lands on-chain.

ZAN's Solana nodes are deployed across data centers in Singapore, Hong Kong, Germany, and North America, reducing geographic latency for submitters across regions.

Smart Contract Review

ZAN Smart Contract Review (SCR) is an automated security auditing tool for blockchain contracts. It runs 150+ static analysis detection rules, AI-powered fuzz testing, and an optional formal verification mode that uses mathematical proof to confirm contract behavior — typically completing within approximately one hour.

Developers can submit contracts via direct file upload, GitHub repository URL, or blockchain explorer address for already-deployed code. A VS Code extension integrates SCR into the local development workflow. ZAN states its security work is backed by 20 patents and 50 papers at top-tier security conferences, though those figures come from ZAN's own press materials.

Agent Time / x402

ZAN has built an AI agent payment gateway based on the x402 protocol, an open payment standard initiated by Coinbase. The Agent Time product allows autonomous AI agents to pay for API access without human intervention, account registration, or OAuth flows. Authentication is wallet-based: agents sign requests using a MetaMask (EVM) or Phantom (Solana) wallet, and settlement occurs in USDC on either Base or Solana.

A single credit purchase grants access across all ZAN APIs under the x402 standard. ZAN names Claude, GPT, Cursor, and Cline as supported agent integration targets. The service supports 30+ networks and is designed to sit between AI agents and data or compute APIs without requiring a traditional subscription layer.

ZK Acceleration (PowerZebra)

ZAN's PowerZebra product offers hardware-accelerated zero-knowledge proof generation. The company claims up to 50x kernel speedup and 5x end-to-end acceleration compared with standard CPU-based prover stacks, and has posted benchmark results on the EthProofs leaderboard with a 3.4-second proof generation time. These figures come from ZAN's own submissions and press releases rather than independent audits.

Compliance Tools

ZAN offers KYC and KYT (Know Your Transaction) services targeting real-world asset issuers and regulated financial institutions. KYC covers document verification, liveness detection, and risk scoring; KYT adds AML-style transaction monitoring. HashKey Group was an early adopter, implementing ZAN's compliance layer in April 2023, before the public ZAN platform launch.

Context

ZAN's position within Ant Group provides access to enterprise relationships and technical infrastructure from AntChain, the enterprise blockchain arm that held approximately 26.5% of China's blockchain-as-a-service market in 2023. CoinTelegraph and the South China Morning Post have each reported that structuring ZAN as a separate brand also serves Ant Group's goal of separating its Web3 activities from its core financial entity as that entity pursues a financial holding license in China. ZAN's CEO as of August 2024 is Cobe Zhang Chenguang, who gave a technical presentation on ZAN's infrastructure at Solana Breakpoint 2024.

The company reports more than 2 billion API requests processed per day and more than 100,000 registered developers across 20+ countries. These are self-reported figures without independent verification.