The use cases intended for ZEN include but are not limited to: protocol governance, exchange fee value capture, derivative collateralization, liquidity mining, and staking. Further details regarding each of these use cases can be found below.
Protocol Governance: The ZEN token can be used to govern various components of Injective's side chain including the futures protocol, exchange parameters, and protocol upgrades via a DAO structure.
Exchange Fee Value Capture: After the relayer reward distribution, the exchange fee will undergo an on-chain buy-back-and-burn event to accrue value for ZEN.
Mint, Auction, Rent NFTs: To mint NFTs, or bid in the marketplace, users will use ZEN to bid and pay a fee.
Collateral Backing for Derivatives: ZEN will be utilized as an alternative to stable coin as margin and collateral for markets. In some futures markets, ZEN can also be used for collateral backing or insurance pool staking where stakers can earn interest on their locked tokens.
Exchange Participation Incentives: The foundation plans to incorporate a liquidity mining scheme and distribute a fixed number of ZEN tokens daily weighted by the liquidity each network participant provides.
Tendermint-based Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Security: To ensure the security of ZenChain, ZenChain will incentivize nodes to stake ZEN and participate in the ZenChain network consensus with block rewards.