LAB Radio Episode 5 – What is Horizen (formerly Zencash)? A Zcash fork with built-in secure messaging and privacy

Our guest today is Rob Viglione, the founder of Horizen (formerly ZenCash). Rob has blended his interests in academia, entrepreneurship and Blockchain development. As a PhD Candidate in Finance, Rob’s research interests span across crypto-finance, venture capital, asset pricing and blockchain development. Rob teaches a course: “Bitcoin & Blockchain Applications in Finance” one of only 3 in the world at the University of South Carolina.

Horizen (formerly ZenCash) is built on zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs), a new cryptographic breakthrough in privacy and the core math behind the blockchain. It was originally developed as Zerocash and eventually Zcash. Horizen (formerly ZenCash) then forked this original codebase into a new project and has since added many additional security and privacy features beyond Zcash.

As stated on Rob’s LinkedIn: “[Horizen (formerly ZenCash)] is building a globally distributed secure node network resilient to censorship by implementing network-level encryption on top of zk-SNARK blockchain obfuscation, embedding secure messaging, document publishing on IPFS, and a system of decentralized governance.”

After listening to this episode you will learn:

How Rob got into Cryptocurrency and Crypto Finance
How Rob created and thought of the ZenCash (now Horizen) idea
What exactly zero-knowledge proofs are and how they work
Why zero-knowledge proofs are such a breakthrough in cryptography and privacy
How transparency is built in as a default with Bitcoin and how zero-knowledge adds to that
Why we need privacy as people and organizations
How Horizen differs and compliments pre-existing Zcash and other forks
How Horizen innovates on economics and technology