ZenCash Rebrands to Horizen,To Feature Censorship Resistant Publishing

To regain popularity and get noticed by the market, corporates sometimes rebrand themselves. Rebranding can be in the form of a change in the name, logo, term, design or a combination of one or more of these.

Rebranding is not just about marketing, but also to envelop the identity of the firm with new vision. ZenCash is one such crypto which has rebranded to Horizen.

Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain technology has been existence for almost a decade. Initially, most of the projects were focused on the development of a fiat alternative. However, as time advanced, most of the projects realized that merely providing an alternative for fiat could never make cryptos popular, but a new financial ecosystem based on crypto is required for mass adoption.

To achieve this, many crypto projects have rebranded themselves in the past. This includes Raiblocks rebranding into NANO and Antshares rebranding into NEO. Likewise, earlier this week, ZenCash has rebranded to Horizen.

ZenCash rebranding to Horizen

ZenCash, a fork of Zclassic, which again is a fork of Zcash, was launched on May 23, 2017. The crypto mainly focuses on privacy. As a result, users will be able to perform absolutely secure and anonymous transactions, publishing and messages. It also shares Bitcoin’s characteristics in the sense that it uses Proof-of-Work consensus and has a total supply of only 21 million coins. Furthermore, ZenCash, which is identified using ticker symbol ZEN, can be mined using the equihash algorithm.

Even though, ZenCash has renamed to Horizen, the ticker symbol ZEN remains unchanged.

ZenCash President and Cofounder Robert Viglione said

“The ZenCash project has greatly evolved since its inception more than a year ago, and it’s now time to expand our brand to more accurately reflect our mission to promote the fundamental human right of privacy worldwide. What initially launched as a privacy-focused cryptocurrency has transformed into a much broader and deeply capable platform that will host a variety of privacy-focused applications, including secure messaging and publishing.”

Viglione further explained his vision under the new brand
“The Horizen brand completely embodies our technically-innovative mission and the sentiments of our community — we are a visionary privacy platform in which people can believe and to which they can belong.”

In addition to a change in name, tagline, color schemes, and logo, new features such as censorship-resistance publishing, facility to build privacy-based applications and a treasury voting system that enables community members to vote on new work proposals would be made available. Furthermore, the refurbished project is also planning to build a ZenVault wallet. To achieve scalability, blockDAG protocols is also planned to be developed.

It can be remembered that ZenCash was hit by what seems to be a 51% double-spend attack on June 3, 2018. The hacker walked away with about 23,000 ZEN coins. To prevent such untoward incident from happening again, the team has implemented a short-term strategy in which the number of confirmation has been increased considerably.

Now, to resolve such issues permanently, the team is planning to implement a penalty system for delayed block submission. The new protocol will be integrated with the network after testing it completely.

The mainnet also underwent a software upgrade (technically a hard fork) on July19, 2018. The newly implemented version (Zen 2.0.14) includes deployment of Super Nodes. Furthermore, the upgrade has also implemented a change in mining rewards, with 70% of rewards going to miners, 10% to secure nodes, 10% to super node operators, and 10% to the treasury.

One important point to note is that the changes do not affect ZEN coins in any manner. Additionally, no changes related to the address or technology running the Horizen system has been implemented. The team has cautioned that some wallets may continue to bear the same name and logo, but will be soon changed. The implemented changes do not affect mining pools in any way.