ZHOU — The Exchange Rate Board¶
One-line pitch: ZHOU is the system's exchange-rate infrastructure and the canonical global chat channel. Plumbing — you don't call it directly.
What this is¶
ZHOU is where market-rate relationships between tokens are established. When any two tokens need to be interconvertible (Purchase/Redeem flows), the pairing lives in ZHOU. It also hosts one of the primary global chat channels.
Its Alpha(name, symbol) function is one of the owner-gated primitives for spawning new SHA-like tokens used elsewhere in the system.
If you've played a web3 game before¶
- Closest analogy: a price oracle combined with a global chatroom.
- Or: Uniswap pair registry — tells everything else "here's how these two tokens relate."
- Or: a reference rate source that downstream contracts all read.
| Dysnomia term | What it maps to |
|---|---|
| ZHOU | Exchange-rate + global chat infrastructure |
| Alpha | Spawn a new SHA (owner-only) |
| Market rate | The conversion factor between two tokens |
| Upsilon | ZHOU's link to parent ZHENG |
What you actually do with it¶
- Nothing directly. Trades (Purchase/Redeem) read ZHOU's rates under the hood.
Rewards / costs¶
- Cost: none directly.
- Reward: none — infrastructure.
Requirements & gating¶
- None for players.
Where it connects¶
Depends on ZHENG. Feeds into YAU. Every GetMarketRate call anywhere in the system traces back to ZHOU's data.
Quick FAQ¶
Q: Do exchange rates change dynamically? A: Yes — the underlying formula factors in token relationships that evolve as the system processes actions.
Q: Is the ZHOU chat channel the same as a QING? A: No. ZHOU is a global chat log stream; QINGs are player-owned venue channels. They live at different layers.
Want the Solidity? The contract reference lives at
technical/docs/core/06_ZHOU.md.