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Infinity

Infinity (III, ∞), Zero's native utility token, powers Zero and the Infinite Economy. The Infinite Economy represents all Tokens, protocols and associated transactions within Zero. The Infinity Token provides three token utility models:
  1. 1.
    Network Token Exchange: Infinity's primary utility model facilitates the exchange of Network Tokens in Zero. Each Network is required to utilize an Exchange Token, that is fractionally backed with Infinity as a Reserve. This enables automatic price discovery and the seamless exchange between any Token within the Zero Network, simultaneously removing the need for both centralized exchanges and decentralized liquidity pools (as are required with Uniswap).
  2. 2.
    ZNS Registries: Infinity's secondary utility model enables the purchase and sale of public namespaces, such as Member handles and domains via the Zero Name Service. Members can stake Infinity to purchase Zero Registries and Registry Entries. Registries represent 'root' namespaces within ZNS, such as '0://rootdomain', and enable Registry owners to sell associated domains, such as 0://rootdomain::domain. ZNS is further outlined in Section 4.3.1 Zero Name Service (ZNS) Protocol.
  3. 3.
    Infinity Mining: Infinity's tertiary token model is to incentivize Members to power the Zero Grid. In exchange for providing network compute, bandwidth, and web services (Dynos), Members receive hosting Credits (as outlined in Section 4.2.6 The Creditor) that are redeemable for Infinity. Redeemed Infinity can then be sold on the open market for traditional currencies, such as ETH, BTC or USD, creating a globally distributed and decentralized computing network. Example Dynos include additional storage, high availability video conferencing, and virtual world servers. The process of receiving Infinity in exchange for powering the grid is referred to as 'Infinity Mining'.
Infinity can be thought of as the ‘fractional reserve’ that backs the Infinity Economy. This structure creates three powerful mutual incentives for all Members of the Infinite Economy.
First, holding Infinity as the primary Reserve asset in an Exchange or Dynamic Token facilitates the seamless exchange and automatic pricing for tokens in the Infinite Economy. Technically, a common Reserve token is necessary in order to facilitate entirely on-chain exchange between two Exchange Tokens. This increases liquidity between all Exchange Tokens in the overall economy, something that is generally a primary issue with new tokens, communities, and projects. In this way, Infinity makes a ‘long-tail’ of tokens possible for new upstarts.
Second, a shared Reserve Token aligns incentives between all Zero Networks and the Zero system itself. As the Infinite economy grows and experiences network effects, individual (and especially early) Networks benefit proportional to the percentage they've chosen to back their token by the Infinity Token. This leads to the increase in value of a Network irrespective (and in addition to) the growth of their individual Networks economy.
Third, Infinity eventually plans to be pegged to a basket of underlying Tokens that have been selected for long-term growth potential (such as Gold, Bitcoin, and Ethereum). This enables Networks and their associated tokens to benefit from the overall macro-transition away from fiat-based currencies that are occurring and hedge volatility risk. Irrespective of an individual Network's success, or even the Zero platform's success, Infinity stands to benefit if precious metals and crypto assets perform generally well over the long-term.
The structure and issuance of Infinity is outlined in Governance & Token Issuance.