The Year of Delivery at Full Charge – Horizen Q3 2019 Review

We’ve reached the end of 3Q 2019, and we’ve delivered several key updates including major milestone progress on our sidechain development, major upgrades to the Horizen faucet and our flagship app – Sphere by Horizen, and opening our new Weekly Insider team call. The summer may be over, but the “Year of Delivery” is not. We are heading into Q4 at full steam. 

Highlights

The hard work the team put in this quarter boosted our rating on CoinMarketCap to an A (attractive). The rating puts us among the top projects rated by Flipside Crypto. Other A-rated projects include Bitcoin, Ripple, Monero, and Dash. 

The score is a metric used to assess the overall health of a project and is derived from three major lifecycle fundamentals. 

• User activity
• Developer behavior 
• Market maturity 

It truly was a team and community effort to reach this grade. So thank you to everyone for giving us your feedback, joining our Weekly Insider, and helping us continue to improve our project! 

HORIZEN COMMUNITY

On the community side, we welcomed many new members to our social channels, especially to Telegram 

and Discord, this quarter. The trend has led to many great technical conversations. We love that our new members are as excited by our technology as we are! We want to give a big welcome to all of our new members and a huge shout out to everyone that has helped welcome them!

To help everyone get to know other members of our community, we started a great new blog series featuring our Monthly Community Stars. Be sure to check them out on our blog. 

ENGINEERING

This quarter, the Engineering Team’s focus has been on laying the foundation of our Sidechains. They successfully stood up the first sidechain nodes on testnet and node synchronization between mainchain and sidechain has been stable. We’re looking forward to what the team has in store for Q4!

In addition, the team also released several major improvements to Sphere by Horizen for our node operators. Sphere by Horizen 1.2.0b added the long-awaited batch withdraw and batch split features for easy management of stake addresses. Not to mention, we are getting close to the mobile release for Sphere by Horizen. So, stay tuned. 

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

Our Business Development Team drove the adoption of ZEN with major integrations with partners like Xpay.Cash, a Latin American POS system that can be found in several large brick and mortar store chains in Colombia. They also integrated ZEN with Accointing, a major cryptocurrency tax management platform. These partnerships make ZEN even more usable for our community and further expands the ZEN network. 

MARKETING

The Marketing Team announced a few major changes. Jonathan (Sr. Marketing Manager) and Gustavo (UX Director) worked hard over the last few months to roll out several awesome new features to the Horizen faucet. One of the main features rewards frequent users which means you will be rewarded with even more ZEN by getting free ZEN every day. Crazy right?   

The team took a step further on exercising our core value – transparency, by opening up our team sync call to the public. The new Weekly Insider was officially launched in September. Every Thursday our team gathers on our Discord channel to share the latest project updates with our community. The thirty-minute call includes a Q&A session where the project leadership answers any questions listeners may have. Recordings from each Weekly Insider are also published on Horizen Podcast and Youtube channel after the live call. The increased transparency and frequency have been incredibly well received by our community. We want to give a huge shout out to everyone that joins us for these updates!

We recently expanded our presence on social media by launching our account on Instagram. Our Instagram focuses on sharing more personal and candid side of the Horizen family. You’ll find many pictures of our team on their many adventures, images from our community members, and more. 

Horizen Progress Report

Our project continued to drive improvements to the Horizen ecosystem this quarter. Our technical releases improved the functionality and usability of our products. These updates include:

• Sphere by Horizen 1.2.0b which added batch split, batch withdraw, private key balance sweep, and backup phrase view functionalities
• Enhancements to the node tracking system 
• Horizen is now an A-rated project by Flipside Crypto

Want to see more of our Q3 accomplishments? Check out the full list below 

2019 3Q Accomplishments

Technology

• Core development moved to public repo
• Horizen Developer Environment (HDE) announced
• Guatemalan elections on the Horizen blockchain
• First sidechain node live on testnet
• Second sidechain node live on testnet
• Synchronization stable between sidechains and mainchain

New Team Members

• Oleg Alesandrov
• Aldo Antinori

New Exchange Listings

• ZEN listed on BW.com
• ZEN listed on TOKOK
• ZEN listed on Fox.one

Marketing

• Horizen now on Instagram
• Horizen now on Medium
• Launched Weekly Insider
• Website optimization for improved user experience. Updated pages include: 
  • Exchanges
  • What is Horizen
  • ZEN
  • Wallets
• Held Horizen naming convention competition
• Introduced new Horizen Community Star Interview blog series

Other Accomplishments

• New Horizen faucet upgrades!
• Horizen whitepapers now in French
• Horizen’s ambassador network grew in China and Mongolia
• Horizen Chinese Wiki

Media Coverage

• Rob on Crypto 101
• Angie V. Webinar with Formación en Criptomonedas
• Rowan on Minting Coins
• Coinbase Custody exploring ZEN support
• Rob on Crypto Rich
• Rob on Learn Crypto

Horizen Around the Globe

The Horizen team around the world attended over 18 events in 7 different countries.

• Smart China Expo: Chongqing, China
• Horizen Meetup: Alsace, France 
• Blockchain UA: Kyiv, Ukraine 
• Horizen Meetup: Kyiv, Ukraine 
• Horizen Meetup: La Calmette, France
• Horizen Meetup: Strasbourg, France
• Blockchain UA Hackathon: Kyiv, Ukraine
• Industry 4.0 and Blockchain: Tbilisi, Georgia
• Horizen and Binance Meetup: Monterrey, Mexico
• Startup Grind International Launch Party: Tbilisi, Georgia
• OKEx Talks 2019: Tbilisi, Georgia
• The Libra Effect: Tbilisi, Georgia
• BIP001 Conference: Odesa, Ukraine
• Blockchain Meetup: Odesa, Ukraine
• Horizen Meetup: Los Angeles, United States
• Soiree Crypto a la Calmette: Chemin de Saint-Chaptes, France
• Blockchain Summit LatAm: Mexico City, Mexico
• Horizen/Paytomat Meetup: Bamahu-Wa, Ghana

Don’t see your country or city on the map/list? Help bring ZEN into your city and organize a local event! Contact us and find out how we can work together to make this happen!

Check Out These Pics From Our Events!