Privacy Q&A Series: Rob from Horizen
This is the first of what will hopefully be many articles in the Privacy Q&A Series. We’ve watched the teams in the Battle of the Privacy Coins perform for around 9 months now, I thought it was about time that we heard from the projects themselves.
With the dawn of a new article series upon us, it’s only fitting that it begins with Horizen.
We spoke with Rob from Horizen about all things $ZEN, what’s to come for the team, and some of the hurdles the team encountered along the way to becoming cryptocurrency’s largest node network.
What is Horizen?
Horizen is a community-based blockchain project that aims to build a fair and inclusive ecosystem with strong privacy tools and an architecture that scales to real-world problems. Our platform enables businesses and developers to quickly and affordably create their own public or private blockchains on the largest node network in the industry. Horizen’s Sidechain SDK provides all the necessary components for fast and easy deployment of a fully customizable blockchain with best-in-class privacy tools.
What was the catalyst for the creation of Horizen?
We launched Horizen to tackle some big issues in blockchain we didn’t see popular projects at the time doing much about: Scalability, sustainable economics, and application privacy. Our take on scalability focuses on system architecture, not parameter optimization (e.g. like larger blocks); sustainable economics means that we pair reward with contribution for all stakeholders on the margin (not only miners get paid), and we do application privacy by extending zero knowledge cryptographic tools in our SDK and ginger-lib to people who want to build apps that preserve user privacy.
Was there a point when you felt like the idea of Horizen had been validated?
We’ve had some big milestones, like building out the largest node network in the industry (larger than both Bitcoin and Ethereum combined), and inventing an augmentation to Nakamoto consensus for an on-chain solution to 51% attacks; but the real validation will come in some weeks when we launch our brand new sidechain system, called Zendoo. Zendoo represents one of the most significant innovations in the industry since perhaps Zcash brought SNARKs to coin transfers.
Were there any moments where you thought Horizen might not make it?
Every entrepreneur has the same recurring nightmare of failure, it’s a nagging doubt that can either rally your fighting spirit or crush your soul! We launched just before the two-year bear market starting in early 2018, and we’ve been fighting an uphill battle ever since. The good news is that we don’t know how to give up, and so we’ve powered through the toughest times and are getting ready to deliver our core breakthrough, our Zendoo sidechain protocol. We expect this to explode our network usage.
Advertising to crypto-aware people is much simpler than advertising to mainstream audiences because there is assumed knowledge, how would you explain Horizen to someone who doesn’t know anything about blockchains or cryptocurrency?
That can be difficult. You’re right, it is much easier to advertise to audiences that already understand the value of the technology, but education is extremely important to me and to the other members of the team. If I were to explain Horizen to someone I would say that we are a community-based technology project that aims to build a fair and inclusive blockchain ecosystem with optional privacy features to control your digital footprint.
What makes Horizen stand out above the competition?
There are many things that make us stand out from the competition. The team, what we are building, our community. So many things. Horizen is a unique project that attracts passionate people interested in meaningful innovation. It’s not just about our team or our ecosystem. It’s everyone that comes to our Weekly Insiders, interacts with us, gives us feedback on how we’re doing and what we could be doing better, etc. That’s what truly makes us stand out above the competition. And then there’s our unique technology that tackles scalability in a novel way, combined with strong zero knowledge privacy tools that make building on our blockchain practical and secure.
Are there any privacy projects outside of Horizen that you find interesting?
The team behind Zcash is one of the most committed and innovative in bringing sophisticated privacy tools to blockchain. We launched using their original tech stack, collaborate with them on security vulnerabilities, and have enormous respect for both their professionalism and ethical integrity.
What are the regulatory challenges facing Horizen? How will these be dealt with?
Horizen is a global project with increasingly decentralized governance, so I have no doubt we’ll have a variety of regulatory challenges in different markets, but the Foundation that employs the core team is a US nonprofit. This means we’re largely focused on complying with US regulations, and thus far we haven’t encountered any issues. In fact, we’ve been rated a 1 out of 5 score by the Crypto Rating Council (CRC), which places Horizen in the same category of regulatory risk as Bitcoin (1 is the best score, 5 is the worst). Early on we were more concerned about how US regulators would see privacy projects, but it seems that they have, rightfully, focused on preventing crime by going after criminals than by stifling innovation by prohibiting cryptographic applications. This is encouraging and hopefully more of the world realizes the immense benefits of protecting privacy grossly outweigh the harms of a minority of bad actors.
What can we expect from Horizen over the next 12 months?
We have some really big plans for the next 12 months. We have an incredible roadmap for 2020 and we are always rolling out updates for our existing products like Sphere by Horizen and our nodes. We are releasing quite a few major releases coming in the next twelve months including Horizen Developer Environment (HDE) and our Community Hub, but what I’m most excited about are the beta release of our Horizen Sidechains and its developer SDK in the next few weeks. Horizen sidechains are the culmination of a two-year-long investment that marks a significant innovation to the space.
Finally, why is privacy important and why should people take it seriously?
We live in a world where privacy becomes more and more infringed upon through technology. People make trade-offs to technology companies and the government in exchange for convenience. What they might not know is that their personal data has value, a lot of value, and they aren’t being paid for it. I believe that privacy should be a human right and that people should be provided the tools to maintain their privacy or benefit from the use of their data. Ultimately, it should be their choice.
A big thanks to Rob for taking the time to answer these questions. If you’d like to learn more about Horizen you can do so here.
