Horizen’s mission is to empower people and bring the world together by building a fair and inclusive ecosystem where everyone is rewarded for their contributions. Horizen’s sidechain and scaling solution is the first completely decentralized and fully customizable sidechain protocol on the market. The Horizen sidechain platform enables businesses and developers to affordably and quickly create real-world blockchain applications on Horizen’s fully distributed, secure, and privacy-preserving architecture. Launched in May 2017, the platform enables real-life uses beyond its native cryptocurrency, ZEN, which is a mineable PoW coin available on major crypto exchanges. Users can securely store and transact ZEN using Horizen's flagship app, Sphere by Horizen, a multifunctional wallet that interfaces with Horizen products and services. Horizen has a passionate worldwide community, a team of over 50 professionals, and an ambitious roadmap driven by continuous investments in cutting-edge research and development.

Horizen is developing Zendoo - a decentralized and fully customizable sidechain solution. Sidechains are an innovation devised to overcome current limitations regarding scalability and extensibility in blockchain. Sidechains are a parallel platform with desired features that supplement the capabilities of the mainchain without imposing a significant burden. Horizen’s sidechain platform, Zendoo, enables the deployment of public or private blockchains at scale. Horizen’s Sidechain SDK provides all necessary components to build a completely decentralized and fully customizable blockchain. Zendoo extends the Horizen network from a cryptocurrency to a privacy-preserving platform that scales for commercial applications.

ZEN is a proof-of-work ASIC-mineable cryptocurrency employing the Equihash (200-9) algorithm. Emission:

• Block rewards: 60% miners, 20% treasury, 20% nodes.
• Block interval: 2.5 minutes
• Halving period: every ~4 years, as per Bitcoin

Horizen has the largest incentivized node network in the industry with a multi-tiered node system. Node operators receive 20% of the total block subsidy. Horizen’s geographically dispersed node network provides the required infrastructure to reliably operate a robust ecosystem of sidechains and applications. Both types of nodes facilitate encrypted node-to-node communication and Super Nodes will also be running core sidechains in the future, like Treasury sidechain.

Users can get free ZEN from Horizen Faucet every 20 hours. The Horizen faucet is a risk-free way to explore the Horizen ecosystem.