Zen Protocol (ZP) is a blockchain that allows users to develop financial products. It's a decentralized financial system, which contains a smart-contract platform capable of creating, issuing, and trading digital assets. According to its whitepaper, the protocol runs parallel to a Bitcoin blockchain but has functions like smart contracts based on the Ethereum platform. In other words, Zen Protocol aims to take the best features of Bitcoin and Ethereum to build a new financial platform.

Although Bitcoin is the gold standard for secure cryptocurrency, it has the capacity and scaling difficulties. Around the time Zen was launched, the programming language used by Bitcoin was purposefully limited, prohibiting contracts from consuming excessive resources and requiring them to be exceedingly efficient. In Ethereum, gas is similar to the transaction fee in Bitcoin. Each operation requires a fixed amount of Ether to complete. If there isn't enough gas to complete the contract, it fails, but the person who attempted to complete it still pays for the transaction. As a result, even when the contract fails, it consumes resources from both users and the network. So, with both Bitcoin and Ethereum, there is room for improvement.

Zen seeks to fill the technological gap through its smart contracts that are highly efficient, which means reduced application costs and higher throughput. Zen's databases are cost-effective, scalable, and efficient. Based on efficient smart contracts and databases, Zen Protocol aims to create a platform that enables consumers to identify and use financial goods while maintaining a high level of security. The network aspires to give a global community of developers and financial engineers the power to construct new assets. 

Some of the use cases for Zen are as follows:

As mentioned in its whitepaper, ZEN is the native mined token of the Zen Protocol used to create contracts but is not required while using them.  On Zen, each contract can generate various tokens that are attached to the contract that creates them. The contracts can use tokens issued by other platforms as well as the native ZEN token.