Horizen presents the world with another evolutionary proposal in its latest whitepaper: Zendoo, a universal construction for Bitcoin-like blockchain systems that allows the creation and communication with sidechains of different types without knowing their internal structure.

Projects based on Bitcoin’s source code inherit some of the Bitcoin protocol’s constraints. Most notably, the Bitcoin protocol has limited throughput, increased latency, and a reduced ability to scale and to introduce new functionalities. This is why Horizen’s vision is different, it consists of having a massively scalable general-purpose blockchain system with a novel Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol that enables an unbounded and fully decentralized sidechain ecosystem.

Sidechains are essentially a parallel chain with desired features that provide a way to transfer coins between the mainchain and the sidechain. Sidechains are an appealing innovation for enhancing existing blockchain systems. They enable blockchain scalability and extensibility by creating platform and application layers that are bound to the mainchain without imposing a significant burden. For example, the Horizen Sidechain solution allows developers to build their blockchain system that benefits from our mainchain’s infrastructure (e.g. the security of the largest node network ) without inheriting the mainchain’s limitations (e.g speed or consensus mechanism).

We believe the value of sidechains as a scalability solution is still undiscovered, and we seek to develop this area. Our latest whitepaper introduces Zendoo, a universal construction for Bitcoin-like blockchain systems that enable the creation and communication with different sidechains without knowing their internal structure. Moreover, with Zendoo, the sidechain may not even be a blockchain but can be any system that uses the standardized method to communicate with the mainchain. The paper also provides a specific sidechain construction, Latus, that leverages zk-SNARK techniques to establish decentralized and verifiable cross-chain transfers.

Zendoo allows the creation of fully decentralized blockchain applications with the possibility to introduce the specific logic and data to address any kind of need.

One of the main features of the construction presented in this paper is the usage of zk-SNARKs for enabling verifiable cross-chain communication. For instance, a sidechain using the recursive composition of zk-SNARKs, can construct a succinct proof of state transition virtually for any number of transactions. With the usage of SNARKs in sidechains, it will also be able to create auditable and data privacy-preserving applications to address real-world use cases.

Read our latest whitepaper to learn about Zendoo and how Horizen truly enables the blockchain scalability.