Trust infrastructure for the African informal economy.
Hundreds of millions of people across Africa participate in informal economic activity — producing real value, serving real customers, building real reputations — yet remain invisible to formal capital markets. The barrier is not productivity. It is legibility.
Zivana is an open Layer 2 protocol built on Cardano and Midnight that makes economic capability visible, verifiable, and financeable without requiring informal actors to become formal first. Trust built in a Lagos market, a Nairobi cooperative, or an Accra trade network belongs to the people who earned it — and should travel with them.
Zivana Protocol is open infrastructure. Four primitives — Identity, Trust, Covenant, and Distribution — that any developer can build on to create trust-enabled financial applications for the informal economy.
Catalyst is the genesis application. A regenerative capital platform connecting Nigerian SMEs with investors through profit-sharing covenants that replace extractive lending with aligned, community-owned growth.
| Layer | Technology | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Settlement | Cardano | eUTxO distribution, $ZVN token, finality |
| Privacy | Midnight Network | Shielded covenants, ZK proofs, selective disclosure |
| Identity | Hyperledger Identus | DID credentials, verifiable attestations |
| Repository | Purpose |
|---|---|
| zivana-core | Aiken smart contracts on Cardano |
| zivana-midnight | Compact contracts on Midnight |
| zivana-identity | Identity and credential infrastructure |
| zivana-oracle | Revenue attestation oracle |
| zivana-sdk | TypeScript Protocol SDK |
| zivana-governance | Governance contracts and Schema Registry |
| zivana-token | $ZVN token contracts |
| zivana-docs | Full protocol documentation |
| catalyst | Catalyst — genesis application |
- Documentation — coming in Phase 2
- Community — coming in Phase 2
- Contributing — read our contributing guidelines
Built for Africans. Open to the world.