On September 3, 10:00 UTC Swapzone was honored to have Vano Narimanidze, BD at Horizen, answering our questions about this well-known and respected crypto project. Was such a pleasure! Thanks Vano for the insights and so thorough explanations. Here’s the AMA Recap for those who missed it. YouTube Live stream for those who like listening and some textual material if you’re more of a visual person. Enjoy!
Table of contents
- The Bigger Crypture w/Swapzone: Horizen’s BD Vano Narimanidze on YouTube
- AMA with Vano from Horizen: textual recap
- Question for Vano: tell a bit about yourself, your experience with Horizen, your job and your background in general
- To start with: how would you describe Horizen, its mission, vision, probably values. What do you do in general?
- Decentralization and transparency talk: what’s in it for Horizen, how you make use of it. What benefits can these aspects bring for businesses and generally?
- In simplest terms: zero-knowledge cryptography. How is zero-knowledge cryptography implemented at Horizen? How does it influence the ecosystem and what’s in it for the users?
- In simplest terms: Zendoo. How did the idea appear? How did it develop? At which stage is it now? How is it used (probably some use cases)?
- Expanding the ecosystem: highlight the latest partnerships and briefly tell what is their mission/use case/implementation? How do they enhance Horizen?
The Bigger Crypture w/Swapzone: Horizen’s BD Vano Narimanidze on YouTube
AMA with Vano from Horizen: textual recap
Here are the answers by Vano in a concise manner.
Question for Vano: tell a bit about yourself, your experience with Horizen, your job and your background in general
I am a Business Development Manager of Horizen. My main job is to cultivate and build a thriving ecosystem within the Horizen network by getting new partnerships and unlocking new use cases for ZEN. I joined the team back in August 2018 as a Country Lead of Georgia, regional representative but since then I increased my commitment with Horizen and my role expanded to BD.
The experience so far has been amazing. Horizen has one of the best teams out there – everyone is super competitive, knowledgeable, and friendly. I always say – possibly the best level of satisfaction you can get from the job is when you are working for your own company. Working for Horizen is giving you such a level of satisfaction. It is a joy to work with us.
I also have a strong background in IT and I guess it helps with integrations during my work with project teams.
To start with: how would you describe Horizen, its mission, vision, probably values. What do you do in general?
Horizen is one of the most secure interoperable blockchain ecosystems supported by one of the largest and most decentralized multi-tiered node infrastructure in the industry.
Horizen’s mission is to ensure data integrity and privacy freedom by enabling real-world use cases with the most secure interoperable blockchain ecosystem.
Our sidechain platform focuses on scalable data privacy and enables businesses and developers to custom build their own public or private blockchains using its unique sidechain technology, Zendoo, in a fully decentralized and unfederated way, the first time in the industry as well.
We are also striving to make things easy for developers. Our Sidechain SDK will include template sidechains and tools needed to launch your first sidechain. Obviously, over time, more tooling and documentation will be available and things will get easier and easier.
Decentralization and transparency talk: what’s in it for Horizen, how you make use of it. What benefits can these aspects bring for businesses and generally?
Decentralization and transparency are very important for Horizen. We are having our Weekly Insider livestreams every Monday which is happening in our Discord and is being livestreamed on our YouTube and posted on our podcast as well. This is our weekly public updates from different departments. We are also publishing quarterly reports and Horizen is also a member of Messari’s Disclosure Registry.
Our team is also spanned across the globe and as part of our decentralization initiative we are building ZenDAO, a voting mechanism to allocate treasury funds to continue the development of the Horizen platform. Nowadays, the project is getting 20% of block rewards in the treasury and in the future, the governance will shift from team to ZenDAO. It will also live as one of our sidechains.
In simplest terms: zero-knowledge cryptography. How is zero-knowledge cryptography implemented at Horizen? How does it influence the ecosystem and what’s in it for the users?
In the early days of the project, we borrowed the zero-knowledge technology from Zcash and in its current form, it is used for doing private transactions and messaging on the mainchain.
With Zendoo though, we greatly expanded our zero-knowledge technology use cases and research and we are using it for doing sidechain to mainchain funds transfers, so-called backward transfers in a fully decentralized way. Although everyone can read our whitepapers on our webpage, they are highly technical so I would recommend reading our Academy. It has similar information in much more easily digestible language.
Also, zero-knowledge technology is becoming super popular these days and it is considered one of the leading technologies for blockchain scaling.
In simplest terms: Zendoo. How did the idea appear? How did it develop? At which stage is it now? How is it used (probably some use cases)?
Zendoo, the idea of creating a blockchain scaling solution appeared in 2018. Scaling was an issue already back then and the solution is much needed today. R&D was led by our Engineering Director, Alberto Garoffolo and after 3 years of work, the product is ready to be shipped. We will be having a testnet release during September now and mainnet release is planned until the end of October.
As for use cases, our flagship product on Zendoo will be zkAudit, a Proof of Reserves sidechain product that we are building for Celsius. zkAudit is built for anyone who wants to increase their transparency and credibility while preserving the privacy of their users. zkAudit is equipped with zk-SNARKs, a privacy technology that allows verification without revealing identifiable information. This means all transactions can remain confidential – all of the information is encrypted, enabling privacy while upholding validity in near-real-time. You can find the PoC on Celsius website.
Expanding the ecosystem: highlight the latest partnerships and briefly tell what is their mission/use case/implementation? How do they enhance Horizen?
Some of the recent partnerships around Zendoo include:
- Dash
Rewarding marketing activity with DASH cryptocurrency will be both transparent and include data protection thanks to Horizen’s scalability protocol Zendoo with zero-knowledge proofs.
- Morpheus.Network
Partnership enables the Integration of blockchain technologies and provides ZK-based privacy for the supply chain. It will enable businesses to record each step in the supply chain process on a public, permissionless, and decentralized blockchain.
- Partnerships with IOTA and DIA
Enhancing Zendoo and bring Oracles to our ecosystem
- Dragonchain
Providing identity protection capabilities to our Sidechain SDK
- Partnership with Sikoba
Bringing transparency to the decentralized credit market
- Companies like LTO Network and APIS
Utilizing Zendoo technology and build in our ecosystem
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