Horizonen is a privacy-oriented cryptocurrency with side chains that allow anyone to build privacy-based applications.

The mission of Horizen is to empower and bring people closer together through the process of building an inclusive ecosystem, where everyone's contributions are rewarded. Zendoo is a decentralized and customizable side chain solution designed to overcome current limitations in blockchain scalability and extensibility. It is a parallel platform with enhanced capabilities for large-scale deployment of public or private blockchains, and the SDK provides the components needed to build a decentralized blockchain.

A privacy-protected public chain architecture implements a special scenario application.

At the heart of the ZEN system is a blockchain similar to Bitcoin, and ZEN's Equihash workloads prove to have a delayed block penalty algorithm that improves security. The side-chain platform includes a proof-of-interest consensus mechanism, as well as a software development toolkit and user interface that can be used for side-chain software development to abstract away the complexity of blockchain construction, deployment, and maintenance. The Cross-chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) makes the decouple side-chain network independent of consensus, programming language, or any other design detail in the side-chain.

Zen integrates many different elements into a whole. Zen requires secure nodes, not unconventional ones, to ensure that the node standards are higher than the basic security standards, keeping the entire system distributed, fast recovery, and secure. Zen protects against eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle intruders by enhancing the ability to encrypt communication 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 transaction stakeholders. As a result, ZenCash - will incorporate secure messaging into blocked transactions, allowing users to confirm transactions, send and verify receipts. These features will be embodied in ZenChat, a new secure communication network that enables one-to-many communication via blockchain and permanently stores messages. ZenPub - Anonymous document publishing platform using GNUnet or IPFS. ZenHide - Breaking the blockade of encrypted e-commerce with Domain Fronting technology. The Zen system will have at least one DAO funded by a fixed percentage of mining revenue, managed by a voting system that all stakeholders can vote on. This management system helps reduce disputes over the implementation of project changes, improvements, and integrations to reduce the chance that disagreements lead to forks. We will implement a more comprehensive governance plan, learned through hard research and development and testing, that aims to open governance to competition across the board so that everyone can participate. This means we're going to see a lot of competing DAOs with different teams working on different problems. Each DAO will have its own structure, process, and goals to ensure that their respective attributes evolve through competition, and that organizational decisions that are initially accompanied by bad decisions are not permanent. DAOs will be responsible for building, maintaining, improving and maintaining the infrastructure to keep the system running. It is also responsible for running changes to Zen software applications and is flexible enough to support other community priorities such as community outreach services, marketing, training, etc. As Zen systems become more widespread, users, miners, security node operators, and ecosystem partners need to scale up as well. A structure like the DAO allocates funds to projects and proposals to support their development.

ZEN is used for payment, store of value, network transaction fees and will be a gas fee for the side chain.

Horizonen uses a revision of the Nakamoto Consensus, where valid chains are the longest and have the most proofs of work. The consensus between Horizen and other systems that use Nakamoto Conensus is probabilistic, because it is always possible to have a new, longer competing chain with more accumulated proofs of work that would invalidate the current chain. Horizonen attempts to enhance the original Nakamoto consensus by incorporating the punishment system for delaying block submissions, thus making it more expensive to perform a successful 51% attack.

Horizonen uses the side-chain architecture to open countless potential real-world use cases. This cross-chain transport protocol allows for decentralized side chains. These are standalone blockchains that hook up to parent blockchains that can run simultaneously.

ZEN is one of the zzero forked coins, so it also has anonymous properties such as zero-knowledge proof technology. The project was called Zencash in the early stage, and later renamed ZEN in 2018. There was no private placement or pre-excavation of the project, and the foundation would not pump water out of the blocks produced by miners, so the distribution of tokens was fairly good. Project on the basis of trading anonymity at the same time, and the innovative joined end to end anonymous communication function and function of anonymous data, allows the user to ZEN through the network to realize anonymity strong communication and anonymous data release, function more comprehensive, and joined the hacking and protective agent, making security is good.

Anonymous coin comes from the uncertainty of policy supervision. In the future, under the background of increasingly strict supervision, it may face certain risk of removal. At the same time, there are many competing products in the industry, all of which have their own unique characteristics, so whether Zen can stand out in the future needs a certain time test.

ZEN is a governance token currently used for equity pledges and miners' fees. The reward for mining will be halved in the near future. In the short term, this governance plan will allow ZEN to reduce supply, thereby supporting its price. In the long term, ZEN's growth depends on the development of platform technologies and may be constrained by regulatory uncertainties.