Some products cannot exist on public blockchains. The logic is too sensitive, the data too valuable, and the cost of putting either in the open is higher than anything full transparency returns. Those are exactly the products we want built.
Horizen and Crecimiento are running the Horizen Acceleration Season, a six week online program for startups building on Vela, Horizen's confidential coprocessor. We are selecting a small cohort from anywhere in the world to be among the first teams working with Vela while it is still in early access, alongside the people making it. Applications close August 24.
The program takes a team from a first Vela integration to a working product with a clear go to market strategy in six weeks. It opens with onboarding and a Vela deep dive, moves into a technical sprint and product work, then shifts to business model, distribution, and investor readiness before closing with Demo Day on October 8. Throughout, teams have direct access to Horizen DevRel and Horizen Labs engineering through office hours and pairing sessions, and to Crecimiento's mentor network through masterclasses and private sessions. Top performing teams will be flagged for follow on support within the Horizen ecosystem after the program ends.
Vela is a confidential coprocessor. You package your logic as a WASM job, run it inside a sealed trusted execution environment, and settle the result onchain, with smart contracts as both the entry point and the exit point. No operator, no host, and no cloud provider can see the data inside, and every run posts a cryptographic attestation your contracts and agents can verify against. Run logic in private, settle publicly onchain.
That is what privacy at the application layer looks like in practice. Horizen is privacy architecture neutral, so builders bring the approach that fits their use case, whether that is a trusted execution environment, zero knowledge proofs, or something else, using the Solidity tooling they already know. Vela is one of those options, built for the cases where sensitive data and public rails have to coexist, from tokenized asset issuers seeking liquidity on public chains to trading firms protecting proprietary strategies. Because it is in early access, the teams in this cohort help shape the roadmap rather than inherit a finished one. We want to know which use cases matter most, how builders want to use confidential execution, and which features are essential or missing.
The program suits early stage teams with a product or strong prototype whose use case genuinely needs confidential execution. The core skill set is an Ethereum development skill set, and while Vela runs WASM applications, you do not need deep privacy experience to be a good fit. Strong engineering fundamentals and a real use case are enough, and our team will bring you along on the privacy side. The program is fully online and open to teams anywhere. Whether you are crypto native or a web2 team entering web3, if your product needs to verify data without exposing it, we want to hear from you.
The timing matters. Institutional capital is preparing to come onchain in a period of increasing regulatory clarity, and those participants will expect the same confidentiality they take for granted everywhere else. A bank does not publish its positions to its competitors, and there is no reason a business operating onchain should have to. The foundational work happens before the demand arrives, not after. That is what this cohort is for.
Key dates
Applications close: August 24, 2026
Selected teams announced: August 26, 2026
Program starts: August 31, 2026
Demo Day, online: October 8, 2026
Apply to the Horizen Acceleration Season.
Check out Horizen's Ecosystem Lead Michael's most recent appearance on the Crecimiento Community Call: