ZooBC have few goals going forward with the project, but the first major one we attempt to address is a problem with 'Proof of Work' and 'Proof of Stake' consensus mechanisms. In both cases, people who own all the money ( In PoW, the fiat money to buy computers; in PoS, the on-chain crypto money) control the history of blockchain and earn all the network rewards (new coins). We address this by creating a federation of nodes, with permissionless rules to admit new nodes into the federation. Within the federation, network rewards are distributed equally between participants, and they take equal turns contributing to the blockchain history.
Nodes are admitted into the federation based on an amount of coins they stake, but their rewards and chance to create blocks are not proportional to their stake (as in PoS). Additionally, we use a novel algorithm to measure which nodes are actually participating in the peer-to-peer network, and gradually remove the nodes from the federation which are not participating. This is why we call our strategy "Proof of Participation". As an intentional byproduct, this strategy also adds a lot of other digital signatures from the network to each block, making it much more difficult for any one person to compromise enough private keys to commit a "nothing at stake"-style attack. So we first aim to make rewards more fair for network participants, and create a higher level of security by increasing the diversity of digital signatures in each block created, without resorting to Proof of Work. There are a few other cool things ZooBC doing in the protocol, but I think this is the most significant one at the moment.
