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What is Horizen Chain?

Horizen is an EVM-compatible Layer-3 blockchain built on top of Base, an Ethereum Layer-2 powered by the OP (Optimism) Stack. Built for private onchain finance and compliance-forward blockchain app development, Horizen aims to bring regulatory-compliant, auditable confidentiality to where Ethereum's liquidity and activity already live.

Unlike chains that require learning a new language or committing to a fixed privacy model, Horizen lets you ship standard Solidity and choose your confidentiality primitive per use case, or skip it entirely. There is no mandated privacy stack and nothing new to adopt before your first deployment.

Horizen Chain is built on top of the Ethereum stack, inheriting Base's security, composability, and liquidity, while making confidential execution possible through a variety of privacy primitives and tools including Vela, the trusted execution environment (TEE) product from Horizen Labs, and zkVerify, the zero-knowledge proof verification and attestation protocol also by Horizen Labs.

The result is a chain where:​

  • Contracts can execute with confidentiality as outputs are cryptographically sealed and attested by app-level privacy integrations
  • Compliance and auditability are programmable at the application level (developers implement approaches such as viewing keys or verifiable audit logs)
  • Developers build with familiar EVM tooling (Hardhat, Foundry, ethers.js, wagmi, etc)
  • Liquidity moves freely between Horizen and Base via native and LayerZero bridging

Horizen is the capital coordination and execution layer for a new class of privacy-first onchain applications spanning DeFi, payments, AI agents, and compliance-aware institutional finance - all composable with Base and the broader Ethereum ecosystem.

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