Horizen is a blockchain technology (side chain) web3.0 platform, users can safely conduct digital currency transactions and anonymous communication through Horizen's flagship application Sphere. Horizen's mainnet cryptocurrency, codenamed ZEN, employs advanced ("zero-knowledge") cryptography designed to bring privacy to life. Horizen has its own novel side chain technology and side chain (SDK). Based on Horizen's open source technology and powerful public infrastructure, developers and enterprises can develop their own, secure, and scalable public or private blockchain applications program. In August 2018, Zencash changed its name to Horizen.

1. Project introduction

Horizen is a blockchain platform with leading privacy protection technology, providing everyone with privacy security and complete control over the records of digital activities. We have a sustainable funding model and are equipped with protocol layer solutions.

The Horizen platform enables everyday uses beyond cryptocurrency, including the ability to privately chat with others. Horizen will allow you to post and browse any website with complete privacy. Moreover, anyone can build privacy-based applications on the Horizen platform and earn income from them. This will enable Horizen to accommodate a large number of real and useful services, giving people unprecedented freedom and everyday utility.

Project Features:
Autonomy
Horizen adopts a decentralized governance model. With no central authority and no single point of failure, Horizen is much more unhackable than traditional organizations. Everyone has an equal opportunity to participate in decision-making, which empowers token holders and makes ZenCash less susceptible to third-party influence.

Sustainable economic model:
60% for miners
20% for reserves
10% for security nodes
10% for super nodes

Focus on R&D:
Decentralized Autonomous Organization Reserve Research
Scalability Research
Network Stack Anonymization

When to use it:
Zen brings many different elements together to form a whole. Zen requires secure nodes rather than regular nodes, which ensures that node standards will be higher than basic security standards, keeping the entire system distributed, resilient, and secure. Zen prevents eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle intrusion by strengthening the encrypted communication capabilities between nodes and between nodes and wallets.

Zen also addresses the metadata shortcomings of other cryptocurrencies. For example, because participants in a bitcoin transaction communicate and transmit bitcoin in a potentially dangerous manner, they risk being identified by other parties involved in the transaction. Therefore, ZenCash - will incorporate a secure message mechanism in shielded transactions, users can confirm transactions, send, verify receipts. These functional elements will be embodied in the following systems:
ZenChat - a new type of secure communication network, capable of one-to-many communication and permanent storage of messages through the blockchain.
ZenPub - Anonymous document publishing platform using GNUnet or IPFS.
ZenHide - Breaking the blockade of encrypted e-commerce with Domain Fronting technology.

DAO: Infrastructure, Proposal and Voting
The Zen system will have at least one DAO funded by a fixed percentage of mining revenue, governed by a voting system where all stakeholders can vote. This management system helps reduce disputes over the implementation of project changes, improvements, and integrations to reduce the chance of forks caused by disagreements. We will implement a more comprehensive governance plan that we have learned through hard development and testing. The goal of this plan is to open up full competition in governance so that everyone can participate. This means that we will see a large number of competing DAOs composed of different work teams to solve different problems. Each DAO will have its own structure, processes, and goals to ensure that their respective attributes evolve through competition and that organizational decisions that start with mistakes do not perpetuate.

DAOs will be responsible for building, maintaining, improving and maintaining the infrastructure to keep the system running. It also takes care of running Zen software application changes and is flexible enough to support other community important things like community outreach, marketing, training, etc.

As the Zen system gains popularity, users, miners, secure node operators, and ecosystem partners will also need to scale. A structure such as a DAO can allocate funds to individual projects and proposals to support their development.

Technical Overview

Privacy:
Zen is a privacy-preserving platform built on Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Parameters of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs) technology with a decentralized secure node architecture .

Security:
ZenCash is the first digital currency to be fully end-to-end encrypted at the node and relay node levels. In addition to zk-SNARKs, Zen's architecture also includes node-level encryption. The operation of digital currency depends on nodes, and we require secure node operators to have the latest information technology and network security, otherwise they will not be paid.

Anti-Tracking:
The protected transaction is fully encrypted, but can be verified as true under the consensus of the whole network. The sender, receiver, and transaction amount are hidden on the blockchain, making Zen completely untraceable.

Domain fronting is a versatile censorship circumvention technique that hides the remote endpoint of a communication. The technique works at the application layer, using HTTPS to communicate with banned hosts, but appearing to communicate with those normal hosts that are allowed by the censor, thus avoiding censorship.

The core idea is to use different domain names in different communication layers. One of the domains appears “outside” in HTTPS requests – in 9 DNS requests and TLS server name indications; and the other appears “inside” – in the HTTP Host header field, which is encrypted by HTTPS to hide it from censors . A censor cannot distinguish between fronted and non-fronted domain traffic, and must either allow censorship-evading traffic, or block all domains, which can cause huge collateral damage.

Domain fronting requires no special cooperation from network intermediaries. We identified some difficult-to-block web services, such as content distribution networks, which support domain forwarding to avoid censorship.

Vandal Resistant:
Zen has an extremely decentralized network of nodes. Learn more about Secure Node!

Secure Node Network

Many Zen security nodes have built a reliable distributed digital currency network, and communication between nodes is encrypted. Zen node communication looks indistinguishable from other encrypted internet traffic, not as conspicuously as Bitcoin traffic. This feature effectively masks the type of activity that is actually taking place, making Zen users and nodes difficult to mask.

The basic requirements for building a secure node are as follows:
Each node needs to keep at least 42 ZenCash on the public address. This fully demonstrates that the operator cares enough about ZenCash and deters malicious users from running secure nodes.
Create and save a valid TLS certificate from a well-known certificate authority, which makes it possible to encrypt data transmission.
Run nodes on servers with sufficient processor resources and memory to solve high-computing tasks. This can effectively defend against DDoS attacks.
Keep a complete ledger of the Zen blockchain to ensure that UTXOs and eigenvalues ​​are not lost.
Keep the node online and running at least 92% of the time.

Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) Reserve:
The Horizen Reserve model is an inclusive, provably fair, transparent economic mechanism that incentivizes participation.

Mineable:
All you need is a modern graphics card and you can mine ZenCash. ZenCash adopts the proof-of-work mechanism (PoW) and performs GPU mining based on the Equihash algorithm.

Two. Comments

Horizen, the token is called ZEN for short, Horizen is an anonymous blockchain project with leading privacy protection technology, which can provide everyone with privacy security and give people complete control over digital activity records. The Horizen platform enables everyday uses beyond cryptocurrency, including the ability to privately chat with others. The blockchain network built by Horizen will also allow users to publish information and browse any website with complete privacy.

Related links:
https://www.horizen.global/
https://info.binance.com/cn/currencies/horizen
http://www.qukuaiwang.com. cn/szhb/3154.html#jj
http://www.genesisfor.com/life1/show/473.html