Since its founding, Horizen has always been a project shaped by the same vision: empowering developers, institutions, and users to transact and build in ways that respect privacy while maintaining trust and regulatory compliance. When Horizen launched in 2017, it entered the world as one of the first ZK-powered privacy coins. Over the years, as the industry matured, so did we. We moved from building a private asset to building private-preserving infrastructure; from an isolated chain to interoperable systems; from anonymity to auditable confidentiality. Our journey has always been about more than cryptography; it’s about creating an ecosystem where privacy and practicality coexist, enabling broader adoption of decentralized networks.

Through each era of the project, one principle has remained constant: privacy only matters if people can actually use it. And that means integrating privacy into the places where users, developers, institutions, and liquidity already live.  

Today, we take the next step in that evolution. 

As Base has grown into Ethereum’s execution hub - an environment where millions of transactions flow daily across DeFi, consumer apps, and social platforms every single day. At this scale, the bottleneck is no longer liquidity or scalability. The bottleneck is that every action is public. 

Institutions can’t operate without confidentiality. Consumer apps can’t protect users without selective disclosure. Businesses can’t meet compliance requirements without auditable privacy. And developers can’t build meaningful applications when sensitive logic has nowhere safe to run.

This is the gap Horizen now fills.

Horizen now provides a framework that ensures sensitive transactions and computations can remain confidential, auditable, and regulation-ready, while fully integrated with Base’s ecosystem.

The Horizen Protocol unites two core components:

• The Horizen Confidential Compute Environment (HCCE) 

  • Leverages secure, attested execution within Trusted Execution Environments to enable confidential logic, protected data paths, and compliance-ready auditability. 

• The Horizen Chain 

  • Manages state and coordinates confidential, compliance-aware operations and keeps privacy fully composable with Base. 

Together, they create something Ethereum has long needed: a way for developers and institutions to build confidential and regulation-aligned applications without leaving the liquidity center of the ecosystem.

With this white paper, we share our vision for a blockchain where privacy is not an afterthought but a native feature. From confidential institutional settlements to privacy-preserving consumer applications, Horizen’s architecture lays the groundwork for a digital economy where privacy, interoperability, and liquidity coexist. 

The Horizen Protocol is built for the use cases emerging right now:

• Institutional settlement that requires confidentiality without sacrificing auditability

• Consumer apps that need private actions but public trust

• DeFi strategies that need protection from MEV without fragmenting liquidity

• AI and off-chain logic that must run privately but verifiably

This whitepaper serves as a blueprint for the next generation of privacy-first applications on Base.

Explore the white paper in full.