Horizen is the ecosystem for private DeFi. EVM-native, built on Base.

On a fully public chain, every balance, position, and trade is broadcast to anyone who cares to look — competitors, copy-traders, front-runners, extractors. No serious market operates that way, and onchain finance shouldn’t either.

Most privacy chains make you learn their language and adopt their privacy model. Horizen doesn’t. It’s a Base L3 with full EVM compatibility — you build with the tooling you already know, and choose the confidentiality primitive that fits your use case.

ZEN is the governance and utility token of the Horizen ecosystem - empowering holders, builders, and partners to shape and share the future of private onchain finance.

ZEN has privacy roots dating back to 2017.

Originally a fork of Zcash (ZEC), and since migrated to Base in 2025, ZEN sits at core of Horizen’s economic engine – powering the ecosystem through DeFi, staking, governance, and dApp utility.

In July 23rd 2025, ZEN successfully migrated to Base as an ERC-20 token - marking a new chapter in Horizen’s evolution.

This migration gives ZEN access to Base's scalability, liquidity, and institutional reach while preserving its mission: building a secure, verifiable privacy layer for Web3.

All holders of legacy ZEN tokens can claim their migrated assets 1:1 on Base.

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.

ZEN is the coordination, value-routing, and governance token of the Horizen ecosystem. It is a standard ERC-20 token that lives on Base and bridges to Horizen Chain via LayerZero's OFT (Omnichain Fungible Token) framework. Note: ZEN is not used to pay gas fees.