Horizon held a DAO vote on Horizen 2.0 in the second quarter of this year. It recently published the latest whitepaper for Horizen 2.0. This whitepaper provides important information about the current ZK issues that are causing limited adoption and future expansion. It also offers ways to make ZK cheaper, faster, and more easily available to developers.
The Horizen 2.0 whitepaper reveals significant technological advances and strategic approaches designed to address some of the biggest challenges in ZK.
This summary highlights the key insights from the whitepaper and provides a clear understanding of the changes and their…
— Horizen (@horizenglobal) August 12, 2024
Focused on scalability and privacy, Horizen is a popular blockchain ecosystem. It uses Zendoo, the sidechain technology, which enables distributed apps and the building of public and private blockchains. For secure communication, Zendoo uses the zero-knowledge proof system (zk-SNARK).
Horizen 2.0 is a next-generation EVM platform for running ZK applications designed with increased scalability and efficiency. The team combined the best elements of their mainchain and EON sidechain to develop rich ZK dApps to create a more powerful, one-unified network. This update supports fast and low-cost transactions with the latest testing techniques and unparalleled user and partner performance. Instead of Proof-of-Work, which Horizen used, Horizen 2.0 uses delegated proof-of-stake.
Challenges Horizen faces
EVM-compatible applications in Web3 offer seamless communication, interoperability, and a single set of tools and protocols. However, the EVM standard was not developed for ZK capabilities, so other tools and protocols are needed to build ZK applications. Unfortunately, these developments require different programming languages, interfaces and tools.
How Horizen 2.0 solves these problems
Horizen 2.0 aims to provide an environment with advanced tools for effectively building ZK apps with cost and energy efficiency. Horizen 2.0 lowers costs and increases productivity for ZK app development.
Horizen 2.0 allows developers to use current Ethereum tools and protocols as it is an EVM compatible chain. This compatibility guarantees developers seamless porting and integration, reducing the learning curve.
Finally, it offers powerful selective disclosure and security tools. These improvements ensure that information remains private. Ultimately, Horizen develops the latest ZK developments and EVM capabilities to provide a frictionless ZK testing mechanism.