Horizen, a distributed blockchain platform enabling decentralized applications (formerly known as ZenCash), today announced a milestone breakthrough in its technological roadmap – Horizen Sidechain Alpha, and a re-introduction of Horizen with a new whitepaper release.

The Horizen system is composed of the main Horizen blockchain and tradable ZEN token, a core protocol that behaves as a simple ”truth engine” and decoupled sidechains that are fully generalizable in consensus and any other design characteristics.

Sidechain

The Horizen engineering team has been designing a unique sidechain solution that allows developers and enterprises to quickly and affordably create their own blockchains. Today’s milestone provides a sneak-peek into Horizen’s decentralized, programing language consensus agnostic, and sidechain architecture.

“Horizen Sidechain Alpha is the first milestone in achieving our vision of creating an application rich environment that will bring blockchain benefits to life, including privacy and decentralization. Horizen is built from a community with a strong ethos of privacy being a natural right. This new research and development direction is going to allow Horizen to have unbounded design opportunities while paving a more resistant path to achieve data privacy and freedom.”

– The Horizen Team

The Horizen Sidechain system architecture allows a modular protocol that stresses functionality over design choice. This framework allows any type of rules to be deployed as a sidechain – whether it is a blockchain or other types of computing systems. The Horizen mainchain function is purely to check whether such rules have been followed and to provide a common token of value.

This modularization permits massive scalability, application design freedom, and flexibility such that any component can be changed over time so long as the interfaces conform to standards.

Developers

Horizen is also launching the Horizen Developer Environment (HDE), a project to foster open-source software development as well as non-code-related contributions to the Horizen blockchain ecosystem. The goal of the HDE is to amplify the benefits of contributing to open source software and improve the Horizen ecosystem at the same time.

Horizen Whitepaper 2.0

Horizen has developed significantly from its birth as ZenCash in May, 2017. Therefore, along with the release of this milestone of the sidechain solution, the Horizen team has also re-introduced Horizen with a new whitepaper – A Blockchain Platform for Fully Customizable Decentralized Applications.

The whitepaper details information on the Horizen general-purpose blockchain system with Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) that enables an unbounded and fully decentralized sidechain ecosystem.