Zen is a decentralized financial platform, built from scratch with the goal of providing people with a secure, scalable and useful infrastructure for creating their own financial instruments, and trading them directly without intermediaries. The Zen blockchain is secured by multiple proof-of-work algorithms, with token-holder voting on the balance between them. Multi-hash mining creates robust incentives for miners to deliver efficient, reliable security. Zen smart contracts are written and secured by a subset of the F* functional programming language, allowing users to: A) Prove the amount of resources a contract will consume and provide the necessary fees for running the contract to miners, removing the need for a “gas” based system. B) Prove their contracts meet a given specification, meaning they can prove the contract will definitely do (or not do) something given a specific set of parameters. The Zen platform comes with a built-in solution for oracles, which provide contracts with useful real world data. Finally, Zen is integrated with the Bitcoin blockchain, allowing contracts to observe and respond to native bitcoin transactions