Horizen is a project we have been keeping an eye on
It’s no secret that the Horizen blockchain has been going toe to toe with platforms like Ethereum, Cosmos, and Polkadot. What many don’t know is that they’ve announced design partnerships with major names in blockchain like Celsius, Dragonchain, and Sikoba, all within the last three months. With everyone flocking to Horizen, we had to find out what was drawing them in.
The Horizen Blockchain Ecosystem – Build Without Boundaries
When we began our search we expected to find one or two reasons that someone would choose Horizen over its competitors. What we found was much more than that. We’ve come to the conclusion that Horizen has many features that could draw in large-scale companies.
Their features include a 51% attack protection solution and one of the largest node networks in the industry with more than 40,000 active nodes distributed across the globe.
As a result, Horizen is able to offer unrivaled data integrity to those who choose to build on their ecosystem. This is great for companies that have to ensure their customer data is safe, such as Celsius and Sikoba.
Horizen also offers a low-cost entry point to blockchain technology, the option to fully customize your own interoperable blockchain, and more. Horizen has stayed true to their original project goals by offering companies a choice between public and private blockchains with optional privacy options backed by their TLS end-to-end encryption and zk-SNARKs proving system.
In essence, companies and developers are virtually unlimited to what they want to build.
Don’t just take our word for it. Community member Spencer Whetstone sits down to chat with Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano and co-founder of Ethereum and talks about Charles’ relationship with Horizen.
Sidechains and Dapps – Function Over Fashion
Although the data integrity aspect is also a massive draw for developers, we suspect that drawing in devs is crucial for remaining an open-source project and for the functionality of the SDK.
The Zendoo SDK was clearly built by developers for developers. Rather than choosing to spend their time creating a beautiful UX, they opted to prioritize functionality and since the SDK is still in beta, this choice was crucial. You can offer someone a beautiful UX, but if it doesn’t do much at all, what good is it?
We spent some time playing around with the SDK and building our own blockchain on Zendoo through their Horizen Early Adopter Program (HEAP), which has an amusing name, but this program enables developers to test the product.
The Horizen team is well known for its openness to outside feedback meaning that HEAPers, as they’re fondly known in the Horizen community, are actively helping design the final product.
We were excited to learn that Horizen supports their developer community throughout the entire process of building dapps to ensure developers are successful. The Horizen engineering team is available via Discord to developers who are building on Zendoo and experience issues. The team is also able to drive traffic to new dapps to quickly build a user-base.
Final Thoughts & Resources
Overall, Horizen is a project we will be keeping an eye on. We suspect they will continue releasing major partnership announcements and exciting new updates about Zendoo as it matures over the next year or so.