Aliens TLDR

As the adoption of emerging technologies like blockchain continues at a rapid rate, so do enterprise investments.

As data privacy and data ownership concerns grow across the enterprise, blockchain technology is offering a way for companies to build systems that enable privacy, transparency and identity protection.

Horizen claims it leverages “zero-knowledge proofs” to not only protect user data, but to also increase blockchain scalability and make it more useful, particularly for enterprise users.

Rob Viglione, cofounder and team lead at Horizen, told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview that the focus on zero-knowledge technology is what will enable true business use cases to be built on blockchain.

Viglione believes privacy technology is the missing link to achieving blockchain scalability and enterprise adoption of blockchain.

Horizen wants to solve this issue through the use of zero knowledge, which Viglione described as “a breakthrough technology that allows for the verification of information without revealing any of the underlying data.” As technology advances and more enterprises become data-driven , issues around governance, privacy, sovereignty and ownership will rise.

For Viglione, the desire to enable industries to cut through the anxiety around data breaches is what drives Horizen’s zero-knowledge proof.

Horizen strongly believes the use cases of zero-knowledge proofs can reach major industries like healthcare, education and DeFi. A combination of provability and interoperability is what will lead to blockchain scalability, according to Viglione.

Horizen helps its clients build their public or private blockchain or applications using its existing infrastructure, one it asserts is highly secure.

The company claims this insulates its clients from the burden of building from scratch and encountering challenges with enterprise-level blockchain adoption like scalability, decentralization and privacy.

Viglione said TokenMint will allow anyone to create a crypto token with minimal effort regardless of knowledge, adding that the platform’s user interface (UI) is “simple and intuitive, making for a seamless experience.” The platform originates from a subsisting blockchain network and a scalable cross-chain.

Viglione also said Horizen’s go-to-market strategy will be a “product and user-experience led phased approach,” which will begin with the “alpha public testnet phases with rapid improvement releases,” where real user feedback will be implemented to make the platform market-proof and secure.

The Horizen sidechain network runs on the zkSNARK technology, a novel form of zero-knowledge cryptography (privacy technology) that allows the company’s mainchain to confirm sidechain transactions without any interaction between the prover and verifier.

He added that Horizen is contributing and adding unique value and capability to the broader blockchain ecosystem by bringing in its expertise in zero knowledge proof (zkp) technology, with its robust blockchain infrastructure and a powerful cross-chain deployment protocol.

Horizen has been providing developers with top-level tools to custom-build public or private blockchain networks since it was founded by Rob Viglione and Rof Versluis in 2017.