It’s no secret that Ethereum has long been the go-to platform for developers who want to build dapps without creating their own blockchain. With hundreds of thousands of applications built on the Ethereum platform, it’s hard to imagine why anybody would choose to create their own ecosystem, but for projects who focus on scalability and privacy, like Horizen, it only made sense to go toe to toe with these giants.
On the Horizen
Horizen is an open-sourced project that offers a unique dapp platform and a wide range of products and is looking to go from underdog to top dog.
In 2017, Horizen was founded as a privacy-focused cryptocurrency project. As the project matures and evolves, the team decided it wasn’t enough to follow in the footsteps of larger projects. Their chosen path wasn’t easy. The easy path would have been to build on top of existing projects like Ethereum, but what was available didn’t provide privacy features, true decentralization, ability to scale, or freedom of choice. They saw the limitations in the blockchain that hinder the development of dapps for real-world use cases.
Horizen decided to take a road less traveled and created Zendoo, the first completely decentralized and fully customizable sidechain protocol on the market. Zendoo significantly lowers the barriers developers face when building dapps and addresses the biggest problems in the industry at a fundamental level.
The Answer to Long Term Scalability
Sidechains are an elegant innovation devised to overcome current limitations regarding scalability and extensibility in the blockchain. As many know, there are several blockchain projects that also offer sidechains solutions, but none solve all these major issues: scalability and flexibility, decentralization, privacy, and auditability.
The Zendoo platform and SDK allows developers and businesses alike to efficiently create their own blockchain or dapps on top of the Horizen’s fully distributed and privacy-preserving network with the possibility to introduce the specific logic and data to address any kind of need. Their general- purpose blockchain system has a novel Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol that enables the creation of a secure and decentralized sidechain ecosystem that is indefinitely scalable and fully configurable to meet heterogeneous needs.
Their sidechain SDK offers developers a suite of tools to build dapps that leverage Horizen’s multi-tiered node network – the largest in the industry, and a suite of zero-knowledge privacy tools. Developers are able to write their own applications using their preferred language. Developers are able to customize the blockchain components like consensus mechanism, block reward time, etc. to their preferences in a way that is completely independent of the mainchain.
With such a powerful and unique design. It’s easy to see why this was the beginning of the further evolution of the Horizen project.
Privacy for the Modern Age
Horizen’s Ginger-lib privacy tool is an expansion of the original zk-SNARK privacy technology. This general-purpose toolkit enables developers to implement zk-SNARKs supporting full recursive proof composition. This means developers can build scalable privacy solutions into their applications while maintaining the speed and security of the network.
Creating An Environment for Inclusion and Collaboration
It took years to cultivate a high performing, full-stack team combining expertise from around the world. The Horizen team consists of 30+ members, and together they have built an entire scalable ecosystem, supportive community, and provided useability for all Horizen stakeholders including anybody that wishes to leverage the Horizen decentralized application platform.
Horizen is dedicated to building a platform where everyone is empowered and rewarded for their contributions. Horizen has quickly moved to a leader in this space. Their dedication to supporting and educating developers has resulted in the creation of several exciting initiatives. The team has created ways for anybody to come into the ecosystem regardless of their level of knowledge and expertise and grow from there with initiatives like the Horizen Developer Environment (HDE) and Horizen Early Adopter Program (HEAP).
The Horizen Developer Environment (HDE) is a space where developers can contribute to the Horizen ecosystem and be paid in ZEN for the successful completion of tasks. The community can also work with other community members on tasks as well as receive help from the team, enabling developers to enhance their skills while contributing to the open-source project.
If you are interested in getting early insights and access to Horizen’s newest releases, you can join their Early Adopter Program (HEAP) to test Horizen’s latest products and releases before they are released. The feedback provided by the HEAPers, as Horizen calls them, shapes the releases before they come out. Now that’s what we call empowering the community!
Resources
If you would like to learn more or check out the topics we discussed in this article, view the links below.
Website: https://www.horizen.io/
HDE: https://hde.horizen.io/
HEAP: https://heap.horizen.io/
Horizen Academy: https://academy.horizen.io/
Discord: https://horizen.global/invite/discord
Telegram: t.me/horizencommunity
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