We are witnessing the blatant breaking of our rights on every corner of the Internet. Privacy has become nearly nonexistent. The majority of users don’t realize how large this problem is. You are monitored constantly and your personal information is gathered, filtered, and even sold to third parties. In this dangerous environment, you need to know how to protect yourself!
Economic Freedom
Many define Bitcoin as an asset, money, or investment, but actually, it is a revolution of thinking. Bitcoin is a pioneer in this newly discovered land of economic freedom. Many developers and economists now invest time in finding the best solutions for real-life problems: smart contracts, introducing lightning fast networks, internet of things (IoT), and many others. But everything started with the users’ desire for privacy.
The lack of privacy on the internet is an enormous problem. Bitcoin doesn’t protect your privacy. Knowing this, many projects emerged with various solutions to this problem, but don’t satisfy all of their users’ needs. Economic freedom isn’t enough, it’s only one of the problems. What about free speech, private communication, and privately storing important information?
The Horizen Platform Offers a Solution
“Horizen is a blockchain platform with a leading-edge privacy technology that provides everyone with privacy and complete control of their digital footprint. Cutting-edge cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs enable fully anonymous peer-to-peer communications within the Horizen ecosystem. Horizen’s distributed and encrypted networking design is resistant to traffic correlation and metadata analysis.”
Horizen is a collection of open source, cutting-edge technologies focused on usability and privacy. Horizen doesn’t reinvent the wheel, it uses available resources combined with their vision and new privacy-focused core technologies to design this remarkable platform.
ZEN the Currency of Choice
ZEN is Horizen’s privacy coin based on zk-SNARKS (a zero-knowledge encryption technology) that allows undecipherable encrypted communications to propagate throughout the network while providing protection against denial of service (DoS) attacks and spamming. Zero-knowledge encryption allows for private economic activity where the recipient, sender, and amount of each transaction is confidential.
The Horizen platform allows both T-transactions and Z-Transaction on their network.
T-transactions are the traditional blockchain-recorded transactions controlled by a private key in a wallet. These are derived from Bitcoin, and enable rapid compatibility with exchanges, wallets, and other Bitcoin-derived ecosystem applications.
Z-transactions are transactions sent to shielded addresses, inherited from Zcash and Zclassic. Balances in shielded addresses are private. If sending to one or more shielded addresses, the value stays private, but any transparent addresses on the receiving end will deshield the transaction and reveal the value received on the blockchain. The shielded addresses the value was sent remains confidential when deshielded.
Chat Anonymously with Sphere by Horizen
Sphere by Horizen is a multifunctional app that allows people to take control of their privacy and finances. It is the launching point for most Horizen services and enables you to chat completely protected with zero-knowledge encryption (zk-SNARKs). You can send messages to people you know, or you can chat with complete strangers and your privacy won’t be compromised. In the near future we can expect mobile and IOS release, so you chat privately on the go! This is very convenient if you are coming from countries where freedom of speech is in danger and where oppressive governments try to censor every possible critique.
The Horizen Network
Horizen has one of the largest node networks with a multi-tiered node system, establishing one of the most secure, distributed, and resilient networks in the industry. Horizen’s ecosystem offers enhanced privacy as the first end-to-end encrypted blockchain network to market.
Horizen is the first blockchain to implement node-to-node TLS encryption. All wallets and nodes are encrypted, which is not the case with classic masternodes. There are already 25k Secure Nodes and over 3k Super Nodes on the Horizen network, and this number increases every day. Node owners are incentivised for running a node, increasing the value of the project itself through the increased decentralization and security each new node brings.
Super Nodes introduced the ability to create sidechains. Horizen Sidechains will enable many different use cases on the Horizen network. Sidechains are reserved for deploying dApps by harnessing a large amount of available computational power and bandwidth without disrupting functionality of the mainchain.
The ZenDAO will be one of the first applications enabled on Horizen Sidechains. The ZenDAO (decentralized autonomous organization) is a voting mechanism that gives the community the power to allocate treasury funds to the continued development of the Horizen platform.
This completely decentralized system with community-based governance, uses economic theory, game theory, liquid democracy, and the latest privacy technology to allocated treasury fund resources. Creating incentive compatible foundations for all stakeholder groups driving the evolution of the platform, creating preconditions for this decentralized ecosystem to be indefinitely sustainable.
The Horizen roadmap targets the end Q3, early Q4 2019 for their SDK (sidechain development kit) alpha. The SDK will allow developers to choose from a number of functionalities for their sidechain, simplifying the development process. This implementation enables a number of different consensus mechanisms to be used for sidechains, with a unified protocol to send assets, in this case, ZEN from the mainchain to a sidechain and vice versa.
Horizen Sidechains: Decoupled Consensus Between Chains: https://youtu.be/HzuJ48zyhKUlist=PLhZisbhyYIXJcqMIZKhTpn2peGAABUYK-
Horizen has signed with their first sidechain partner, Horizen Labs, an independent blockchain technology company. Horizen Labs will enable small businesses and enterprises alike to build their own blockchain-based systems on top of the ultra secure, decentralized network.
Education and Support
The Horizen Academy is free and open to everyone who has the desire to learn more about these fascinating technologies. Horizen believes education is important to raise the awareness about blockchain, privacy, and many other topics and offers education for users of all skill levels.
ZenHelp is global helpdesk for all Horizen users. It is the first 24/7 user support desk of its kind in the cryptocurrency industry, with real people available to help.
Conclusion
The Horizen project just entered their second year of life, surviving a bear market and evolving into a strong project with clear visions empowered by their vibrant community and excellent team. Making privacy and decentralization the basis for their business model, this project ensured its position once the “Race for Privacy” begins.
