Horizen has recently released its first node, Mini-node, on the sidechain devnet. The release of the Mini-node is a significant milestone, because it puts us one step closer to the official release of our first sidechain!

The Horizen sidechain SDK will greatly enhance the scalability and decentralization of Horizen ecosystem and enable us to work with companies and enterprises in different business verticals to take blockchain technology to the mainstream.

Rob Viglione on the Importance of Horizen Sidechains

Sidechains are a huge step towards decentralization. This is decentralizing our architecture and enabling a much richer application environment that doesn’t have the cross-application cannibalization that can happen on a network. If you’re in a network with finite bandwidth, when you make a decision to build on that network you also have to consider the potential congestion on it. For us, we chose the architectural path of having a very robust secure mainchain, and we are constantly improving that security. The experimentation, the fun stuff, the exciting applications, the entire businesses that we are looking at migrating to blockchains, that’s what we want to happen on their own application-specific sidechains. So, it’s a really big step towards decentralization in terms of architecture and then also creating massive scalability that can actually mainstream this technology.

It’s Alive!

The new Mini-node is now actively being tested in our devnet environment. The node currently allows our developers to check the status of our node, check the node balance, create a transaction, and generate new blocks on the sidechain, and more.

Watch the latest video of Oleksandr from the Sidechain SDK Development Team as he demonstrates several of the functions of our Horizen Mini-node.

Horizen’s Sidechain SDK

Our SDK is truly novel because developers can write applications in their preferred language. Additionally, enterprises can take advantage of the mainchain’s functionality without having to build their own blockchain, all while utilizing Horizen’s large node network. Using our SDK, developers will be able to quickly and easily customize blockchain components such as consensus, token, block reward time, etc, which can be completely independent of Horizen’s mainchain.

Learn more about Horizen Sidechains

This blog is part of our Horizen Sidechains Series. To learn more about our sidechains read the first chapter of the series, or if you are caught up, read the next article in the series.

Read about Horizen’s transition to Sidechains HERE or check out our whitepaper.

Please keep following us, as more exciting news is coming soon!