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09 / 09 All mechanics

Liquidity

Where ZINC trades, and how fees turn into continuous buy-and-burn.

Beginner

If you want to buy or sell ZINC, there’s one main place it trades, and the protocol itself is a steady buyer in the background.

Step by step:

  1. ZINC lives in a single main trading pool. When you buy or sell, your trade flows through that pool.
  2. Every time someone mines a round, a small slice of their SOL is set aside.
  3. The protocol uses that set-aside SOL to buy ZINC from the pool.
  4. The ZINC it buys is then melted, permanently removed from circulation.

So two things happen continuously: the protocol keeps buying ZINC, which adds demand, and it keeps melting what it buys, which slowly shrinks the supply. That mix of steady buying and shrinking supply is a supportive backdrop, though not a promise about price (markets still move).

Intermediate

The interesting part is the loop, and how it feeds itself.

Step by step:

  1. A portion of each deploy’s SOL is routed into a dedicated buyback vault.
  2. That SOL accumulates over many rounds until there’s enough to act on.
  3. The protocol spends it to buy ZINC in a Meteora pool, the same pool where everyone else trades.
  4. The ZINC it buys is melted continuously, so it never re-enters supply.

Why this is a flywheel: the buying creates real buy pressure in the market, while the melting creates scarcity by removing tokens for good. More mining means more fees, so more buying and more burning: the busier the game gets, the stronger both effects become. The melt sink also helps fund staking yield, so holders feel the effect from two directions.

Advanced

Mechanically, this runs through Meteora and an admin/crank instruction.

Step by step:

  1. ZINC trades in a Meteora DAMM v2 pool (a concentrated-liquidity AMM on Solana). This is the venue both users and the protocol transact against.
  2. A buyback_fee_lamports portion of each deploy_round accrues to the buyback SOL vault, separate from the regular deploy fees.
  3. An admin/crank calls run_buyback / buyback, which swaps the accumulated buyback-fee SOL into ZINC through the Meteora pool, then melts that ZINC into the shared melt sink.
  4. Regular users don’t touch that instruction. To trade, they swap via aggregators like Jupiter or Meteora, which route orders into the same pool with slippage and price-impact handling.

Because the melt sink feeds staking_rewards_factor, every buyback both tightens supply and lifts staking yield. The buyback is a protocol-driven tailwind, not an action any single user takes, and every leg of it is verifiable on-chain.