What is Horizen?
The Horizen Coin or ZEN is the native token powering the Horizen platform. Initially, the Horizen Coin was named ZenCash.
There is a total supply of 21,000,000 ZEN coins which makes it deflationary. As such, it's possible for the ZEN price to increase as the coins become more scarce.
It’s mined using the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism and the Equihash algorithm. The latter can hide the sender, recipient, and value of a transaction. The block rewards have been allocated as follows:
- 60% - Miners;
- 20% - DAO;
- 10% - Secure Node Operators;
- 10% - Super Node Operators.
Since ZEN is a cryptocurrency, its price tends to fluctuate. The graph above provides a more in-depth look at the Horizen price history and the current ZEN price which can help you to make a more informed decision.
What are the Main Features of Horizen?
ZEN is the official currency of the Horizen ecosystem. The latter is an interoperable blockchain ecosystem with a massive multi-tiered node infrastructure. This infrastructure facilitates over 10,000,000 transactions throughout more than 10,000 supported sidechains. To put it simply, its large multi-tiered node system is the reason why Horizen is capable of maintaining high throughput for all transactions on the network.
In addition, it provides unique privacy features that are completely optional.
One of its main features is a scalable sidechain solution where developers can design and build their own projects.
As mentioned in the What is Horizen section, the project utilizes the PoW consensus mechanism in its mainchain. When it comes to Horizen’s sidechains, they’re all pegged to the mainchain and operate using a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism.
Its privacy is ensured via zk-SNARKs that hide the sidechain’s logic and structure from the mainchain when the chains are communicating. In other words, the mainchain is decoupled from the sidechain.
Moreover, zk-SNARKs help developers to build on the Horizen network without sacrificing privacy.
The Equihash consensus mechanism that’s used for mining ZEN coins supports ASIC mining.
The Horizen ecosystem consists of unique products and services including:
- Zendoo - a sidechain protocol with an integrated SDK that allows developers to build and launch independent sidechains;
- Zennodes - multi-tiered node system of a massive scale;
- Sphere - digital crypto wallet app;
- Horizen Developer Environment (HDE) - a decentralized platform for developers;
- Academy - an educational platform centered around the world of crypto;
- Horizen Community Council (HCC) - is a Horizen organization responsible for the governance of the ecosystem.
Besides the HCC, Horizen implements Zen Improvement Proposals (ZenIP) for governing the project. ZenIP provides all of the necessary information on how to structure, write, and submit a proposal. Once the proposal has been submitted, it will be publicly available on GitHub.
Users who are having trouble making their first proposal draft can consult with ZenIP editors. As of July 2022, there are 3 editors.
The Horizen crypto project aims to become fully decentralized when it comes to governance.
Before making any purchase decisions, make sure to do proper research. In this case, you can start by checking out the Horizen price history and other statistics in the section above.
Who Developed Horizen?
The Horizen crypto project was co-founded by Rob Viglione and Rolf Versluis in 2017.
Rob Viglione holds a Ph.D. in Finance from the University of South Carolina. Prior to co-founding Horizen Labs and the Zen Blockchain Foundation, he worked as an operations research analyst at Lanmark Technology. He’s been the CEO at Horizen since January of 2019.
Before Horizen, Rolf Versluis worked at Cisco Systems. He owns businesses in the IT industry as well as a mid-size mining operation. Rolf Versluis currently works as an executive advisor at the Zen Blockchain Foundation.
The duo has received some help from Jane Lippencott, the co-author of the project’s whitepaper. She has been an advisor to Slingshot Finance, Teller Finance, and Unbounded Capital® as well as a mentor at Gitcoin, Celo, Open Web Collective, Katapult Accelerator, BSIC, dLab, Ethereum Classic Labs, and Techstars.
Zen Blockchain Foundation’s core team consists of 5 members:
- the engineering director - Alberto Garoffolo,
- the director of product and engineering - Rosario Pabst,
- the VP of marketing - Lucy Wang,
- the growth director - Jonathan Teplitsky,
- the BD manager - Kaspars Rekis.
It has partnered up with IOHK Contract, Infopulse, NTT Data, Fenwick & West LLP, Politecnico Milan, Tech de Monterrey, and the University of Salerno.
