🧱 Vaults and Shielded Settlement

The Vault is the heart of Zor’s accountability layer. It verifies proofs, manages payments, and enforces fairness — all inside trusted hardware.


🧩 Roles of a Vault

  1. Verification – validate relay receipts and ACKs.

  2. Accounting – deduct gas from users and credit relays.

  3. Settlement – issue shielded ZEC payouts to verified relays.

  4. Governance – report balances and state roots to the DAO.

Each Vault runs inside a hardware enclave, which prevents any tampering or data leaks. Even the operator can’t read user balances or transaction details.


💰 Proof-Before-Pay

Zor’s Vaults don’t rely on faith. They rely on math. A relay only gets paid once its proof chain has been validated — not before.

This means:

  • Failed relays earn nothing.

  • Fake receipts get slashed.

  • Honest relays are paid automatically and privately.

All settlement happens in Zcash’s shielded pool, ensuring that even payments remain unlinkable.


🧮 Internal Roots

Each epoch, the Vault maintains three Merkle roots:

  • balance_root — user and relay balances.

  • bond_root — active bonded nodes and slashed stakes.

  • zcert_root — registered ZCerts for verified services.

These roots define the private state of the network — compact, verifiable, and impossible to forge.

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