Starthere.

What is a blockchain?

A blockchain is a database shared across thousands of computers — and once data is written to it, no single person or company can change it.

Transactions on a blockchain are:

• Cryptographically secured — you need a private key (a secret number) to send funds from your wallet. No password resets, no customer service.
• Permanent — once confirmed, a transaction cannot be reversed, deleted or altered.
• Permissionless — anyone can send a transaction. No bank approval, no KYC required at the protocol level.
• Publicly visible — every transaction is visible to anyone. This is great for auditability. It’s a problem for privacy.

Sanect is a blockchain. Its native currency is SNCT, and it adds one major feature on top of the standard blockchain model: optional sender privacy.

Why does blockchain privacy matter?

The property that makes blockchains trustworthy — permanent public records — creates a serious privacy problem.

Every transaction you have ever made, every wallet that has ever sent you money and every token you hold is permanently visible to anyone with an internet connection.

This is not hypothetical — blockchain analytics firms do it commercially. Every address you interact with becomes a data point in a graph that permanently links your activities. That creates real risks:

• Financial surveillance — governments, corporations or individuals can monitor your spending without your knowledge or consent.
• Targeted theft — a visible large balance makes you a target for social engineering and physical threats.
• Business intelligence leaks — competitors can infer your vendor relationships, payroll costs and and investment strategy from on-chain data.
• Discrimination — future recipients of your funds can see where they have been, and may discriminate based on that history.

Sanect’s shielded transfers break this graph. The payment is confirmed on chain, but the sender’s address is never revealed — mathematically guaranteed, not just policy.

How do zero-knowledge proofs work?

A zero-knowledge proof lets you prove you know something without revealing what it is. It sounds impossible; it is cryptographically real and has been in production for over a decade.

In blockchain terms, a zero-knowledge proof lets you prove:

• “I have funds I’m authorised to spend” — without revealing which funds or how much.
• “I know the password to this account” — without revealing the password.
• “This transaction is valid” — without revealing sender, receiver or amount.

Sanect uses a specific type of proof powered by Noir — Aztec’s zero-knowledge language — proven with UltraHonk on the Barretenberg backend. Its key property: no per-circuit trusted setup. Older systems needed a ceremony whose secret randomness had to be destroyed — anyone who kept a copy could forge proofs. Barretenberg’s universal, already-public SRS eliminates that vulnerability entirely.

When you send a shielded transaction, a Noir zk-SNARK proof is generated in your browser. The chain can verify the proof is correct — confirming the transaction is valid — without ever learning who sent it.

What is a wallet and how does it work?

A wallet is a pair of cryptographic keys. Your public key — also called your address — is what you share so others can send you tokens. Your private key is the secret that proves you own the address and authorises every transaction you send.

When you create a wallet it generates a seed phrase — a sequence of 12 or 24 English words that encodes your private key in a human-readable format. If you lose your device, you can recover the wallet by entering the phrase in any compatible app. But anyone who has your seed phrase has full control of your funds — there is no recovery mechanism beyond it.

Every transaction on a blockchain costs a small gas fee, paid to the validators who process and confirm it. On Sanect, gas is paid in SNCT and is extremely low — the minimum gas price is 1 gwei, so a standard transfer costs a fraction of a cent.

MetaMask is the most popular wallet for EVM chains like Sanect. It is a browser extension that stores your keys locally, signs transactions when you approve them and manages your connection to different networks. Sanect works with MetaMask out of the box — the staking dApp adds the network automatically when you connect. Any EVM wallet (Rabby, Frame, OKX, Coinbase Wallet, Trust) works too; there is no extra seed phrase to manage.

• Never share your private key. No legitimate service, support agent or team member will ever ask for it. If someone asks, it is a scam.
• Use a hardware wallet for large amounts. Devices like Ledger or Trezor keep your keys offline, making them immune to browser-based attacks.
• Check every transaction before signing — always check the recipient address, amount and network before confirming in MetaMask. Malicious sites can disguise harmful transactions.
• Keep the seed phrase offline. Write it on paper and store it somewhere physically secure. Never save it in a notes app, email or cloud storage.

How does staking work?

Proof of stake replaces mining’s energy cost with economic collateral: validators lock tokens as a guarantee of honest behaviour.

Proof of work (used by Bitcoin) requires miners to solve computationally expensive puzzles to validate transactions, which consumes enormous amounts of electricity. Proof of stake — used by Sanect, Ethereum, Cosmos and most modern chains — replaces that energy expenditure with tokens locked up as collateral.

Sanect uses delegated proof of stake. You don’t need to run a validator — delegate SNCT to one and they run the infrastructure. Your tokens stay yours — they are never transferred to the validator — and you earn a proportional share of the rewards they produce. Validators earn from block rewards (inflation) and transaction fees, and set a commission they keep before distributing the rest to their delegators. A validator with 5% commission passes 95% of rewards through.

Slashing is the penalty mechanism that keeps validators honest. If a validator double-signs a block (tries to create two conflicting blocks) it loses 5% of its staked tokens. If it goes offline for an extended period it loses 0.01%. These penalties apply to the validator and its delegators equally — which is why choosing a reliable validator matters.

When you unstake there is a 21-day unbonding period. During this time your tokens earn no rewards and cannot be transferred. The delay is a security mechanism: it ensures validators who misbehave can still be slashed even after they attempt to withdraw, and it prevents rapid stake-migration attacks against the network.

Anyone can also register as a validator (mainnet minimum self-delegation is 1,000 SNCT); the top 50 by stake form the active set and earn block rewards.

What can you build on Sanect?

Sanect is not just a blockchain — it is a full ecosystem of products, all live on mainnet. Seven core products compose together from one wallet.

1. DEX (decentralised exchange) — a Uniswap V2 fork for swapping tokens directly on chain. Provide liquidity to trading pairs and earn a share of swap fees. 15 trading pairs are live, including SNCT, USDC, USDT, WETH, WBTC and ten more bridged assets.
2. Staking — delegate SNCT to validators to secure the network and earn inflation rewards. A 50-validator active set with ~400 ms block times. Manage everything from the staking dApp with MetaMask.
3. .snct names — human-readable addresses. Register names like alice.snct, bid in sealed-bid auctions for premium names and trade them on the built-in marketplace. Reverse records let dApps display your name instead of 0x7cB6…02E.
4. Shielded transfers — the privacy pool. Shield SNCT into a private balance, send it to anyone without revealing your address, and unshield back to a public balance. Powered by Noir zk-SNARKs with browser-based proof generation — no trusted setup.
5. Bridge — Hyperlane-powered cross-chain bridge connecting Sanect to Ethereum mainnet. 14 assets: USDC, USDT, WBTC, WETH, DAI, LINK, UNI, AAVE, MKR, COMP, LDO, SHIB, PEPE and CRV. One canonical synthetic per asset — no confusing .eth/.bsc suffixes.
6. LP farm — MasterChef-style liquidity mining. Four incentivised pools (SNCT/USDC, SNCT/USDT, SNCT/WETH, SNCT/WBTC) share 100M SNCT over five years. TVL-tiered emission caps stop small pools being over-rewarded.
7. Governance — on-chain proposals and voting with your bonded SNCT. Submit proposals for parameter changes, community-pool spending or protocol upgrades. Every vote is recorded permanently on chain.

These products are designed to compose together. A typical flow: bridge USDC from Ethereum, swap it for SNCT on the DEX, stake half to earn validator rewards, shield the other half for private transfers, register a .snct name and vote on governance proposals — all from the same MetaMask wallet, all earning airdrop points.