Horizen Weekly Insider Recap – Weekly Insider #137
Each Monday, the Horizen team has a public team call to ensure that our community stays up to date on the latest project insights and updates.
Engineering and Product
zkAudit is a privacy-preserving verifiable proof of community assets for Celsius. With a target completion date of Q2, the current status of the project is that it has been rebased on the newest SDK, Blaze v0.3.3. It is currently deploying in testnet and introducing a new interface required by 0.3.3 on the sidechain app.
Horizen’s TokenMint platform V1 (MVP) is our multi-token sidechain, a web 3.0 wallet, a block explorer, and a web3 token generator to support the economy of your projects, without the need for setup or coding, own your token! This project is currently live on public testnet! Download the Cobalt Wallet and view the Block Explorer to help test. We welcome feedback. The token generator has also been released and Cobalt is officially in the chrome web store.
V2 of the TokenMint Platform (NFT) adds D-POS and the possibility of minting NFTs. The target completion of this is Q2 and it is currently on track. The burnable, mintable options, upgradable metadata for NFT, and token events management development have all started. Internal testing of the sidechain will start soon in testnet.
The EVM Sidechain (EVM MVP) is the Ethereum Virtual Machine sidechain to bootstrap DeFi projects. The target completion for this project is Q3 and we are currently on track. Ethereum compatible state database and cryptography have been merged. We are currently working to support Ethereum blocks and transactions structure. Scripts and environment are ready for performance measurement, which will start today.
The Horizen team is also working on our sidechain monitoring system, which is a simple reference design to check the status of a list of sidechains and nodes. The project is currently being deployed on testnet. The next steps for this project are to deploy and use it to monitor our tokenization platform in testnet.
BD/Operations Updates
Vano: HDE – 2 tasks went out to test our TokenMint platform. The first task is to test the TokenMint platform and Cobalt web wallet on testnet, we had 10 slots on there and we had both great feedback and activity. The 2nd task we added 10 more slots, for a total of 20, which was for creating your own token on our TokenMint platform, because of great activity, we added 5 more slots. Both tasks are now complete, thank you to everyone for participating and providing useful feedback. This feedback will be used to develop the platform further. In the future we will have more tasks regarding our TokenMint platform and other products, so stay tuned.
Marketing Updates
Lucy – I hope you all have created your own tokens on TokenMint, also owning other tokens created by other uses. If you have not, I would encourage you to give this a try. You can redeem TestZenny to get free swag and other perks on our online store, or a higher Discord role. (Inset link to store). You still have time to acquire TestZenny, we have a giveaway where you can earn more, or if you provide us useful feedback, you will earn some TestZenny.
Really happy to hear we have received a lot of participation from HDE tasks. Next week is an important day, Horizen will have our 5th anniversary, so stay tuned for activities around that holiday. The week after next we will be at Consensus, we are giving away some passes, so be on the lookout for that as well.
Leadership Updates
Rob: TokenMint with the token generator is awesome, I really enjoy using this myself. I am really proud of the team for this one, handling the launch professionally. This is such a big deal because Zendoo and the cross-chain protocol is our differentiator. We are going to be releasing a lot of products that are similar to competitors’ products, but the point here is to make it a consistent experience across the industry. Zendoo and the fact that we can have a zero-knowledge way to operate these functions is crucial. That is the core of what makes us special in the industry.
TokenMint & AuditChain are live and using this technology. TokenMint is simple, but it is the first demonstration of running something live on Zendoo, which is a big deal. This is one big step for Horizen and is a big deal for the community. We are looking forward to our first NFT launch down the line.
EVM is our next big project and we have been going deep behind the scenes to make this a success. We will need to carve out specific metrics to define success for this launch. We will want to lay some basic infrastructure to make this successful. Etherscan and other tools that developers are already familiar with. Until we have a decentralized exchange for TokenMint tokens, it is not all that useful. We are going to focus a lot of our efforts on EVM moving forward. We will have to think deeply from the BD perspective – which partners to reach out to and convince them to build on our EVM. Horizen Labs will also have to decide which products to focus on, these are all important details that will help to make the launch successful.
As important as EVM is, it is not our end goal. Our work doesn’t stop at EVM. In the long run, we want provability – proving sidechain execution in a more dev-friendly way. We are looking into improvements on the lattice project that we worked on last year. On the other side, we are going to race towards zkEVM – we have some big players racing in this direction and we are going to be racing there as well. All of these things are stepping stones to the final end goal of a zkEVM – which is best for security and full decentralization. A lot is ongoing, but we have some short-term wins which are great to see. More details are forthcoming on ZenCon0.
Q & A Section
Q: Do you have programs planned such as hackathons to expand the ecosystem for developers?
Rob: We don’t have anything planned yet, but that’s a great idea. Once we have EVM, we will be ready for external usage and that event would be a great idea.
Q: For the new sidechain type, what does the sidechain not being fully decentralized mean entirely?
Rob: Declare a certifier set upfront, this declared set has the right to pass certificates back to the main chain. It’s the way that all the other sidechains on the market work. Rather than wait for that, we decided to launch some products with what we have such as lattice and EVM. Zendoo supports full decentralization, which is our differentiator, but some of the first products we are launching come with their first declared certifier sets.
Alberto: In the current version, Zendoo is able to support a fully decentralized sidechain because it verifies the snark proof that is submitted with the certificate and this can be done in different ways. To have the full decentralization on the sidechain side you need to prove the whole history. We are moving on with the full provability on the sidechain side.
Q: What has surprised the team the most about the Alpha TestNet feedback?
Rob: Everything is working so smoothly, which is amazing. On the community side, I was shocked with the explosive growth and engagement with the recent TestNet launch. It’s amazing to see how excited people are to get their hands on the tokens and play around with them.
Rosario: Proof of delivery for the team. All of the teams internally working together was great to see, we are just getting started, we onboarded a new product team less than a year ago. All of these team members putting together and designing the different parts of the product together is amazing to see. The marketing team is doing a great job with the campaigns and getting the word out.
Victor: Enjoying seeing all the good feelings and energy throughout the team, we are happy with all of the glory and a big thanks to the team because they are doing a great job.
Andrew: Excited to see the response from the community, being involved with it, love seeing the way the community has created their own tokens and is spreading them around. Excited to see all of the different tokens in my wallet and I want to collect as many as possible. It’s been great collecting feedback for the product and engineering teams and seeing the community come together for us.
Be sure to join us next week, for additional updates from our team.
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