Horizon (HZ) — A How-to Guide!

6 min readJun 18, 2020

HOW TO USE THE HORIZON PLATFORM.

Hello everyone! I decided to write a 4-steps guide to help people that find it difficult to understand and run Horizon. I wanted this to be a very visual guide, the type of guide I find easy to follow, so expect a lot of images!

If you have any doubt or need more help after reading the guide, join our discord or bitcointalk thread. (Links at the end)

Moving on…

What’s Horizon?

Originally known as “Next Horizon” or “NHZ”, Horizon was the first clone of NXT. It is a new generation, decentralized, digital currency/asset exchange which runs on a network of independent nodes, developing a trusted marketplace and major advantages over Bitcoin technology. A lot of unique assets have been issued through the HZ platform, which in my opinion, make the small work needed to install Horizon totally worth it!

For more about what HZ is, check these outdated but informative bitcointalk threads:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2197968.0

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1819971.0

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=823785.0

Yes, the fun part! NOTE: It needs JAVA 8 or later installed already.

Setting up Horizon!

First, go ahead and download HZ at https://github.com/ifinta/hz-source

Click on “Download ZIP” and wait for it to finish. You could also register and download it via the knotwork site if you encounter any problem with this GitHub.

Unzip the file once it is done downloading and go to the HZ folder. Please, read the README.txt for better understanding of what we’ll be doing!

2. Creating the nhz.properties

We’ll be adding some peers in this step in order to sync the platform later without issues. (This might not be needed since you can manually add peers in the UI later but just to make sure)

Locate the “conf” folder inside the hz-source-master one and click on it.

Evidently, I created it already – your turn now. Create a new file, name it “nhz.properties” and place it inside “conf”. The changes we will do in nhz.properties will override what’s on nhz-default.properties (you can read the default properties to understand more but don’t edit it!)

Alright, lets edit our nhz.properties!

Now, the commands inside the yellow boxes are only needed if you decide to run a node. The ones inside the white box will help you sync IF there aren’t a couple active peers (E.g. If you get stuck at a certain block height when syncing the blockchain). The red box is what we will be adding, nhz.defaulPeers and nhz.wellKnownPeers are the important commands in this case. Here, we’ll add any ACTIVE peers that we can find.

As of (04/06/2021) those are:

Lfm.knotwork.com

Ufbsh.no-ip.org

73.8.240.113

160.20.146.23

82.223.216.54

85.165.109.217

Add those, click SAVE and let’s run the program.

3. Running HZ!

Remember I said to check the README.txt inside hz-source-master? No? Ok.

Basically, to run Horizon what you need is Java 8 or later already installed. Yes, install Java if you haven’t.

Then execute run.bat if you use WINDOWS. If you use LINUX, like I am in this guide, you would need to run the script ./compile (only the first time) and then ./run.sh to get the Java process going. You should see something like this:

Quickly after, the blockchain should start downloading…

It should take some time to fully sync. Do not close the process! You’ll always need to have it open when using HZ!

Let’s go and try the actual site/UI while we wait for it to sync. Head over to http://localhost:7776/index.html in any web browser. This is where the Client UI is at.

Click the green box if you are new or when you return — believe me, if you take your time to get it all sorted out, you will — click the blue one. I will click on green just to show how easy it is to create an account.

As you can see, HZ generates you a passphrase to access your new Horizon account. Please, write it on paper and store it somewhere safe. It will then ask you to repeat your words to verify you saved them after clicking next.

Got it? Great! You are now ready to log in.

Type your passphrase to log in and start using Horizon. If your blockchain download is finished, you should see something similar to the image below. If not, wait for it to sync.

Load funds by clicking “more info” on “Account balance”. You only need your account ID (In this case it is NHZ-T8K3-TPYK-B5C5–6B3VZ) to receive HZ coins.

The Add peers option I talked about earlier can be located clicking on configuration>Peers> Add Peer.

4. Adding assets/currencies to buy or sell on HZ.

This could be new to you compared to the popular exchanges that exist at the moment but stay with me. It’s worth it.

Click on Asset Exchange>Add Asset

You will then be asked for an Asset or Account ID, find them at:

http://makemoney.knotwork.com/

You can check the API for all the assets issued here:

http://lfm.knotwork.com:7776/nhz?requestType=getAllAssets

I’ll guide you through this, don’t worry! This is the final step.

This guide is about Horizon so that’s where we need to click but if you are one of those curious folks and want to see what Stellar is about or how it works, satoshi0x wrote a great guide for it — https://hive.blog/devcoin/@satoshi0x/how-to-buy-sell-dvc-using-stellar

Anyway, click on Assets and a lot of options to choose from will appear. Up to you which one is worth buying, maybe all? Maybe a few? None? Take a look.

There is a bit of info on each. You can also search for them on Bitcointalk and Galactic Milieu to find more about these coins and assets.

I’m going to pick “HZIXC” the asset/token that represents ixcoin.

The asset ID that the UI asked you to input is selected (ID 41452906628483397). We are going to copy that and paste it on the Asset ID field and click add asset.