White Papers

Sidechains are an appealing innovation for enhancing existing blockchain systems. It enables blockchain scalability and extensibility. We believe that the such value of sidechains is underestimated, and we seek to develop this area. This paper introduces Zendoo, a universal construction for Bitcoin-like blockchain systems. The paper also provides a specific sidechain construction, Latus, that leverages zk-SNARK techniques to establish decentralized and verifiable cross-chain transfers. Both constructions enable the creation and communication with different sidechains without knowing their internal structure.

Horizen is a distributed blockchain platform enabling truly decentralized applications. The system is composed of the main Horizen blockchain and its well established tradable ZEN token, a core protocol that behaves as a simple ”truth engine”, and decoupled sidechains that are fully generalizable in consensus and any other design characteristics.

The Horizen Secure Node system is a unique compensated blockchain network with enhanced client-to-node and node-to-node encryption. The system was designed to rapidly and massively decentralize the blockchain network to provide unparalleled censorship resistance, net capacity and to lay the infrastructure for a high-performing privacy-oriented platform.

The longest chain rule, or Satoshi Consensus, worked well in the relatively decentralized environment in which it was introduced in 2009. Mining technology has evolved over the years, thus making it financially feasible to launch 51% attacks on operational public blockchains networks. Horizen proposes a solution to modify the longest chain rule to make it financially infeasible to conduct such attacks while also allowing the network to dynamically adjust parameters.

We propose a novel sidechain construction tailored to be compatible with the Horizen blockchain and designed for conducting secure and decentralized cross-chain transfers without requiring the mainchain nodes to track sidechains to verify them. The proposed scheme can also be adopted for other similar blockchain systems. We show that our cross-ledger transfer mechanism is secure under certain plausible assumptions.