Our guest today is Rob Viglione, the founder of Horizen (formerly ZenCash). Rob has blended his interests in academia, entrepreneurship and Blockchain development. As a PhD Candidate in Finance, Rob’s research interests span across crypto-finance, venture capital, asset pricing and blockchain development. Rob teaches a course: “Bitcoin & Blockchain Applications in Finance” one of only 3 in the world at the University of South Carolina.

Horizen (formerly ZenCash) is built on zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs), a new cryptographic breakthrough in privacy and the core math behind the blockchain. It was originally developed as Zerocash and eventually Zcash. Horizen (formerly ZenCash) then forked this original codebase into a new project and has since added many additional security and privacy features beyond Zcash.

As stated on Rob’s LinkedIn: “[Horizen (formerly ZenCash)] is building a globally distributed secure node network resilient to censorship by implementing network-level encryption on top of zk-SNARK blockchain obfuscation, embedding secure messaging, document publishing on IPFS, and a system of decentralized governance.”

After listening to this episode you will learn:

How Rob got into Cryptocurrency and Crypto Finance

How Rob created and thought of the ZenCash (now Horizen) idea

What exactly zero-knowledge proofs are and how they work

Why zero-knowledge proofs are such a breakthrough in cryptography and privacy

How transparency is built in as a default with Bitcoin and how zero-knowledge adds to that

Why we need privacy as people and organizations

How Horizen differs and compliments pre-existing Zcash and other forks

How Horizen innovates on economics and technology

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Further Reading and Resources

Rob’s Medium Site – https://medium.com/@robviglione

Rob Viglione’s LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-viglione-2780634/

Rob on Twitter – https://twitter.com/robviglione

Horizen main website – https://horizen.global/

Zerocash – http://zerocash-project.org/

What is Horizen (formerly ZenCash) – https://coincentral.com/zencash-beginners-guide/

Zcash – https://z.cash/ and https://coincentral.com/what-is-zcash/

Rob talks about the Horizen (formerly ZenCash) rebrand and what’s next: