A Quick Dive into Horizen – The Zero Knowledge Powerhouse
The world has witnessed a massive growth in the virtual currency industry in recent times as the radical new way of making payments drew investor attention significantly. In a public blockchain, transactions can be traced very easily and be linked to real-world identities. While it makes the public blockchains very transparent, it also raises concerns about the privacy of the users. Due to this reason, we have seen continuous research regarding privacy-enhancing technologies to ensure the anonymity of the users. Horizen is a privacy-focused blockchain founded by Rob Viglione and Rolf Versluis. The team behind the Horizen had a strong background in cryptography and blockchain technology. The project took birth as ZenCash in 2017 and it was a fork of ZClassic. ZenCash was rebranded as Horizen later on. The blockchain uses Zero- Knowledge-Proofs and bears the strong ethos of privacy being a natural right.
“In digital era, privacy must be a priority. Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?” – Al Gore
The Technology of Horizen
Horizen is a general-purpose blockchain that is composed of the main Horizen blockchain and sidechains. The mainchain is a blockchain like Bitcoin that follows Equihash Proof-of-Work. A delayed block penalty algorithm protects the blockchain against 51% attack. Zendoo Protocol, the novel Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) makes the sidechains decoupled and independent of consensus or any other design details. The core protocol acts as a ‘truth engine’ whereas heterogeneous consensus is maintained across the ecosystem due to the varied nature of sidechains. The mainchain maintains a parent-child relationship with the sidechains and Zendoo allows communication with the sidechains irrespective of their structure. This unique sidechain solution of Horizen allows the developers to build their own scalable blockchains with flexible design. Whereas the mainchain follows PoW, the sidechains can follow PoS, DAG or any other distributed consensus system.
Blockchain scalability and extensibility are difficult to achieve but Horizen provides massive scalability without compromising decentralization due to its networked structure. 10,000 sidechains can run in parallel with TPS (transactions per second) limit of 1000 and thus the total network can support up to 10,000,000 TPS. The high scalability of the network makes it extremely dependable for various purposes. Custom-built private or public blockchains can be created very easily using a wide variety of SDKs. The option to keep the sidechain entirely private or protect selective information using the zero knowledge cryptographic tools remains with the developers and Horizen comes with in-built zk-SNARKs. Zk-SNARKs allow confirmation of private blockchain transactions on the main chain while concealing details.
ZEN Cryptocurrency
Horizen is a no ICO project. ZEN, the native utility token of Horizen, was issued to all ZClassic holders on a 1:1 basis. ZEN has a maximum supply of 21 million just like Bitcoin and it is a mineable PoW coin being traded over many big exchanges like Binance, Coinbase etc. You can check the details of all ZEN mining pools here. ZEN has full end-to-end encryption at the node and internode level. It has an optional privacy feature that allows you to make transactions publicly or in a shielded manner (T-Addresses are regular public addresses and Z-Addresses are shielded addresses). The blockchain design of Horizen does not need separate tokens for application-specific sidechains. ZEN is the common token for the Horizen ecosystem, so the usecase is shared across all sidechains. All applications use CCTP to send and receive ZEN from mainchain to sidechain or vice versa. ZEN incentivizes the decentralization of the ecosystem and also attains tradeable value due to its usecase. The official wallet to store ZEN is Sphere by Horizen but a lot of third-party wallets support ZEN. Here you can see the complete list of supported wallets. You can also get ZEN without any investment from this daily faucet.
ZenNodes
Horizen has the largest node network with a multi-tiered node system in the industry and ZEN can be staked to participate in the 45K+ active node ecosystem of Horizen. The node network of Horizen is dispersed all across the world to provide great security, reliability and speed. There are three types of nodes – Regular Full Nodes, Secure Nodes and Super Nodes. The Regular Full Nodes are not incentivized but Secure and Super Nodes are incentivised. These earn 10% of the block reward. You need 42 ZEN to run a Secure Node and 500 ZEN to run a Super Node. The criteria and reward eligibility for running Secure and Super Nodes can be checked here. It is really easy to run ZenNodes and earn passive income. You don’t need to have the technical skills to run these nodes and node hosting can be done by third-party providers. Your staked ZEN always remains in your wallet and you get rewards weekly basis in your wallet.
Horizen is distinctly different from other privacy-focused blockchains due to its zk-SNARKs enabled ecosystem. The network of the blockchains makes it extendable and provides scalability to run different applications. The blockchain scalability trilemma says that it is impossible to achieve perfection for a blockchain in these three parameters altogether– scalability, decentralization and security but Horizen is gearing up to address it. To make blockchain technology adoptable by enterprises, data privacy issues must be solved and Horizen can provide customisable privacy solutions to them. The project has come a long way since its inception when it was called just another privacy coin project and the reverberant crypto community has supported it throughout the journey. Decentralization at the technical level is already achieved by Horizen. Governance level complete decentralization is supposed to be achieved by Zen Improvement Proposals (ZENIP) and the Horizen Community Council. EVM compatibility of the side chains is going to be a key success factor and that is already in their roadmap. Horizen seems to be absolutely ready to deliver surprises in the coming time with its Zero-Knowledge powerhouse!
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