Horizen ZEN is DASH-ified ZCash ZECHorizen ZenCash was launched in May 2017 as a privacy-oriented digital currency ecosystem built on zk-SNARKs (“Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge”), an innovative cryptographic technique first introduced by the ZCash ZEC team.
Building upon the ZCash team’s core focus Horizen aims to create a high-performing platform for money, messages and media by directly integrating ZEN (the native currency of the Horzen ecosystem) into a suite of privacy-focused applications.
In an effort to “Dashify Zcash” by adding governance and self-funding elements to zero-knowledge proof-based cryptographic transactions, replacing Zcash’s “founder’s reward” system of paying a single company from a percentage of the block reward to introducing voting for a treasury, and therefore a greater degree of decentralization and budget flexibility by becoming a DAO, or decentralized autonomous organization. This also introduces an incentivized infrastructure of paid nodes, like Dash’s masternodes, improving the robustness of the network by ensuring proper hardware and bandwidth for nodes. This follows the DAO infrastructure pioneered by Dash, which has become more common in newer cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin metamorphosised
Bitcoin introduced the concept of scarcity and solved the “double-spend” problem by incentivizing miners to participate honestly in block creation. However, the system was not programmed with explicit incentives for other key stakeholders, such as investors, network users, or node operators.
The Horizen team embedded modified incentives targetted to these groups. The new policy allows holders of ZEN to operate secure and supernodes in which they can “stake” (i.e., lock-up) ZEN to earn a portion of the block reward.
You can think of staking like earning cash interest payments on bonds or other credit instruments, except in this case, the interest is earned directly in the form of ZEN.
medium.com
