Horizen

Horizen used to go by the name of ZenCash. It’s a blockchain platform created by a fork from Zclassic, which itself was actually a fork of Zcash. Horizen’s network features a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), ZenChat (a private messenger), ZenPub (an anonymous publishing platform), and ZenHide (which masks endpoints like TOR). ZEN is the native crypto token used in the Horizen network.

With an estimated 60 million Americans having been the victims of identity theft already, and that figure looking set to rise, the need for privacy-focused blockchain innovations like the Horizen Network is growing, and not just because hackers are trying to get into our personal computers and devices at home. These days we entrust a lot of our information to large corporations, from Amazon to Visa, keep our information far away from us in vast data warehouses. We don’t know that it’s safe, but we trust them to make sure it’s so.

Those corporations and governments need to abide by stringent data security and privacy laws, such as GDPR in Europe. They know that they will receive substantial fines and a considerable loss of trust if data breaches occur, so to service these companies Horizen shifted its priority to developing enterprise applications that would help the big players to maintain watertight data security.

Horizen Summary

Horizen is not quite the same as other privacy coins. It also offers a comprehensive suite of secure and private tools for large organizations. These include – ZenPub, ZenChat, ZenHide, and ZEN (ZenCash). Each one uses secure nodes for encryption and is focused on privacy.

Horizen’s native crypto is called ZEN. It rewards miners and secure nodes and is tradable in the open market.

All that said, it uses the Zerocash protocol found in many other privacy coins, which means that unfortunately it’s still susceptible to the same glitches and backdoors. However, it looks set to become an important privacy blockchain for enterprise-class users.