ZAN

ZAN is a Web3 infrastructure and services platform operated by Ant Group Digital Technologies, a subsidiary of Ant Group — the Hangzhou-based fintech conglomerate known for Alipay. Launched officially in September 2023 at the INCLUSION Conference on the Bund in Shanghai, ZAN provides enterprise-grade blockchain infrastructure, developer tooling, and compliance services to decentralised application builders and financial institutions entering Web3.

The platform addresses a common challenge in blockchain development: the difficulty of simultaneously achieving reliable node access, security assurance, regulatory compliance, and high-performance transaction execution. Rather than requiring teams to source these capabilities from multiple providers, ZAN consolidates them under a single product umbrella backed by Ant Group's financial-grade technology stack.

Node Infrastructure

ZAN's primary offering is its node service, which delivers RPC connectivity via HTTPS and WebSocket to over 47 blockchain networks including Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin, TON, Polygon, Arbitrum, Base, and Sui. The infrastructure processes more than two billion requests per day. An intelligent routing engine monitors node health in real time and dynamically redirects traffic to ensure continuity, supporting a 99.9% uptime SLA for enterprise customers. The platform co-locates infrastructure near validator nodes, enabling latency that averages under 30 milliseconds across the Asia-Pacific region.

New developers can access ZAN Node Service through a free tier offering up to 150 million requests per month without a credit card requirement, while enterprise deployments receive formal service level agreements and dedicated hardware options.

Solana Infrastructure

ZAN has built a dedicated Solana infrastructure suite targeting high-frequency DeFi trading, arbitrage bots, and institutional transaction flows. The platform offers both shared and dedicated Solana node configurations. Dedicated nodes include gRPC and Shredstream access for direct real-time block capture, customisable hardware allocations (CPU, RAM, disk), archival node support, and VPN/VPC private access with end-to-end encryption. Validator co-location achieves round-trip times as low as two to five milliseconds in optimal conditions, with approximately 95% of transactions reaching confirmation within one second.

ZAN's Solana Trading Boost feature operates across three tiers — Standard, Turbo, and Prime — and integrates Stake-Weighted Quality of Service (SWQoS) and Jito block engine routing to improve transaction delivery rates during network congestion. Dynamic priority fee calculation, proactive congestion forecasting, automatic retry logic, and backup node switching address reliability at the execution layer.

For MEV protection, ZAN offers a private mempool for stealth transaction submissions, dynamic routing with decoy trade obfuscation, pre-trade simulation for slippage and MEV risk analysis, and a dedicated monitoring dashboard.

Smart Contract Security

ZAN's Smart Contract Review (SCR) product provides automated vulnerability scanning using over 150 detection rules, AI-enhanced fuzz testing, and formal verification capabilities. For comprehensive assurance, ZAN's Expert Audit service delivers professional manual security reviews with remediation guidance. These offerings serve development teams seeking to identify and address vulnerabilities before deployment.

Identity and Compliance

ZAN Identity delivers KYC and eKYC services powered by AI-driven document authentication and liveness detection, incorporating facial recognition biometrics for high-throughput identity verification. The accompanying ZAN Know Your Transaction (KYT) service provides transaction monitoring for ongoing compliance needs. These products serve exchanges, DeFi protocols, and financial institutions operating in regulated jurisdictions. ZAN's partnership with Mysten Labs (the team behind Sui) demonstrates institutional adoption: ZAN provides KYC infrastructure for Sui-based initiatives alongside official RPC node services for the Sui network.

Zero-Knowledge Proof Acceleration

ZAN PowerZebra is a hardware-accelerated zero-knowledge proof service for applications requiring intensive ZK computations — common in Layer 2 networks, private transaction systems, and verifiable computation use cases. The service targets kernel operation performance improvements of up to 50x compared to software-based ZK computation.

AI Agent Payments

ZAN Agent Time, built on the x402 protocol, serves as an on-chain payment gateway for AI agents, enabling USDC transactions without requiring user registration. The product reflects ZAN's positioning at the intersection of autonomous AI systems and blockchain payment infrastructure.

Custom Blockchain Deployment

ZAN Appchain enables teams to deploy application-specific blockchains with custom parameters, targeting projects that require dedicated throughput guarantees and governance configurations outside of shared public networks.

Team and Background

ZAN is led by CEO Zhang Hui and COO Cobe Zhang. The platform draws on AntChain Open Labs for its technical foundation, including the open-source TrustBase stack and applied research in multi-party computation (MPC), zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP), and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). Ant Group's experience operating financial infrastructure at scale informs ZAN's architecture, particularly its emphasis on uptime guarantees and compliance tooling less common among pure-play blockchain infrastructure providers.

Ecosystem Position

ZAN describes itself as Asia-Pacific's preferred Web3 RPC provider and has publicly positioned itself as aiming to occupy a role in Web3 analogous to what major cloud providers occupy in traditional software infrastructure. Its Solana-specific investments — Jito routing, SWQoS integration, MEV protection, and Shredstream access — go beyond generic node service offerings and reflect a design oriented toward DeFi-native workloads. Developers building trading bots, arbitrage systems, and high-frequency DeFi applications on Solana represent ZAN's primary target users for its blockchain-specific acceleration tiers, while its compliance and security products address the needs of institutional participants entering the broader ecosystem.