A Quick Intro To Horizen Sidechains!

If you missed it, Horizen is designing Sidechains and a Sidechain SDK to allow developers and enterprises to quickly and affordably spin up their own blockchains. Our Sidechain is designed for conducting secure and decentralized cross-chain transfers without requiring the mainchain nodes to verify the Sidechain, thus allowing scalability. 

Read the first article of the Horizen Sidechains Series here. 

Why Sidechains?

We originally decided to pursue Sidechain technology when several large enterprises from a variety of industry verticals approached us to create customized blockchain applications. Each enterprise required their own set of data and rules but wanted to utilize Horizen’s robust public blockchain infrastructure. Realistically we could not create a new blockchain for each new application, which got us thinking about Sidechains. 

Our approach is to allow the developer, or the company, to actually create applications implemented as parallel blockchains (Sidechains) to our mainchain (the Horizen blockchain) with their own logic and data, and use a single protocol to receive and send back coins from / to the mainchain, that can be used by different types of applications.

THE MAJOR BENEFITS OF OUR SIDECHAIN MODEL:

• Scalability: The ability for the Sidechain to be completely decoupled (independent) from the mainchain, so no modifications of the core client is required (except the initial implementation of the Sidechains support that is done only once).
• Safety: Possible security impacts in the case of a faulty implementation of the Sidechain functionalities are bounded inside the Sidechain and are limited only to the Sidechain balance in the mainchain.
• Decentralization: Sidechains can be run by untrusted nodes without the need of a central authority or trusted parties to validate cross chain transfer.
• SDK: Unlimited software languages and protocols, and the ability of customizing the Sidechain logic and data with no limitations.

You can read about Horizen’s transition to Sidechains HERE or check out our whitepaper.

Horizen’s Sidechain SDK

Our SDK is truly novel because developers can write applications in their preferred language. Additionally, enterprises can take advantage of the mainchain’s functionality without having to build their own blockchain, all while utilizing Horizen’s large node network. Using our SDK, developers will be able to quickly and easily customize blockchain components such as consensus, token, block reward time, etc…which can be completely independent from Horizen’s mainchain. 

Learn about Horizen Sidechain use cases by watching this video presented by Rolf Versluis, Horizen Co-founder and Executive Adviser: 

Please keep following us, as more exciting news iscoming soon!