We are thrilled to announce the CryptScrow Codeathon, an exciting hackathon where developers and innovators can showcase their skills and revolutionize the world of escrow transactions. Join us as we bring together talented minds to build scalable escrow platforms, solve real-life escrow challenges, integrate with external services, and streamline bounty payouts with Ubiquity DAO. 

CryptScrow Codeathon Overview

With submissions starting May 31st at 12:00pm EST, the CryptScrow Codeathon is a unique opportunity for developers, designers, and blockchain enthusiasts to collaborate and create groundbreaking solutions in the realm of escrow transactions. Our codeathon offers a range of challenges and prize pools.

Challenges at a Glance

Automated Trades via Escrow Contracts – $4k Prize Pool:

• Develop a system that facilitates automated trades between users without direct counterparty involvement. Create secure escrow smart contracts, match users based on desired assets, and provide a seamless user experience.

Decentralized Escrow Arbitration – $3k Prize Pool:

• Design and implement a decentralized escrow arbitration system to resolve disputes during trades. Ensure fairness, transparency, and efficiency in dispute resolution through innovative approaches and user-friendly interfaces.

Building a Scalable Escrow Platform – $9k Prize Pool:

• Build a comprehensive and scalable escrow platform leveraging provided or custom escrow smart contracts. Focus on platform architecture, user registration, transaction management, security, scalability, and documentation to empower users across various industries.

Increase Gas Efficiency on Ubiquity’s Bounty Payments by Using EON – $1k Prize Pool:

• Integrate Ubiquity DAO’s UbiquiBot payout process with EON for cost-effective bounty payouts. Optimize gas efficiency, deploy the Permit2 contract, ensure compatibility with the Gnosis Safe, and enhance the user experience.

Enhance the Functionality of Ubiquity’s UbiquiBot – $1.2k Prize Pool:

• Improve the user experience of Ubiquity’s UbiquiBot for contributors, partners, and managers. Simplify compensation claiming and management processes, automate tasks, and provide an intuitive UI/UX for seamless operations.

Guarantee the Diamond Storage Hasn’t Been Tampered With – $800 Prize Pool:

• Develop a solution to ensure the integrity of the diamond storage and prevent tampering. Address the highlighted issues related to continuous integration and testing, enhancing security and reliability.

Participation and Judging Criteria

Participants will be evaluated based on specific criteria relevant to each challenge. Functionalities, innovation, security, user experience, scalability, and documentation will be considered to determine the winners of each prize pool.

CryptScrow Codeathon Schedule

Join the CryptScrow Codeathon

To participate in the CryptScrow Codeathon, register on our official website and form teams or work individually. The hackathon provides an incredible opportunity to collaborate with like-minded individuals, network with industry professionals, and gain recognition for your skills and contributions.

Mark your calendars for the CryptScrow Codeathon, where we aim to redefine escrow transactions and build a brighter future. Together, let’s unlock the potential of blockchain technology and make escrow transactions seamless, secure, and accessible to all.

Stay tuned for updates, detailed guidelines, and additional resources on our website. 

Get ready to showcase your talent, solve real-world challenges, and be part of the CryptScrow Codeathon revolution!

Be sure to stay up to date with us on our Twitter and join our Community on Discord! If you’re interested in receiving future developer-focused updates, be sure to join our Developer Newsletter list here. 

Bringing decentralized oracle capabilities to the fast growing EON ecosystem and supporting a wide range of use cases 

We are excited to announce a strategic partnership with Band Protocol, a cross-chain data oracle platform, to provide real-time price feeds and reliable data for Horizen EON, our EVM-compatible smart contracting platform. The partnership will bring decentralized oracle services to the growing EON ecosystem, supporting a wide range of use cases, including DeFi, gaming and NFTs.

Horizen’s EON is a fully EVM-compatible smart contracting platform and the first of many smart contract sidechains on the Horizen ecosystem. Band Protocol’s flagship oracle solution enables Horizen EON to gain access to real-time price feeds for tokens across different chains, providing a safe and reliable source of information for EON as it builds out its DeFi, gaming and NFT ecosystem. 

By aggregating and connecting real-world data and APIs to smart contracts, Band Protocol allows smart contract applications to be built on EON without relying on the single point of failure of a centralized oracle. This integration allows developers to enhance and extend their smart contract capabilities on EON.

Horizen EON is currently live on its permanent public testnet, Gobi, which is supported by a network of products, integrations and tools, including Band Protocol. The integration is already live on Gobi, and documentation and codebase is available here. Try it out now!

With the partnership between Horizen and Band Protocol, the EON ecosystem is poised to welcome a wealth of dApps and services in the coming months.  The combination of EON’s EVM compatibility, Horizen’s zero-knowledge enabled cross-chain protocol and Band Protocol’s decentralized oracle services will create a permissionless, interoperable and customizable blockchain ecosystem for developers and users alike.

About Horizen

Horizen is a layer 0 public blockchain that enables the zero-knowledge network of blockchains powered by the largest node system and a massively scalable cross-chain protocol, Zendoo. Horizen offers tools for developers to custom-build private or public blockchains and dApps with a level of flexibility unmatched by others. Horizen is EVM-compatible through its sidechain EON. By building on Horizen, developers have the freedom to fully customize their blockchains including consensus, speed, privacy and crypto-economies. Blockchains built on Horizen produce massive throughput without compromising decentralization.

For more information, visit https://horizen.io/. 

About Band Protocol

Band Protocol is a cross-chain data oracle platform with the aspiration to build high-quality suites of web3 development products. The flagship oracle solution aggregates and connects real-world data and APIs to smart contracts, enabling smart contract applications such as DeFi, prediction markets, and games to be built on-chain without relying on the single point of failure of a centralized oracle. Band Protocol is backed by a strong network of stakeholders including Sequoia Capital, one of the top venture capital firms in the world, and the leading cryptocurrency exchange, Binance*.*

Website | Twitter | Discord | Telegram | Blog | Youtube | Linktree

The latest release of our ZEN software 4.0.0 is available for download.

The new version ZEN 4.0.0 is available to download on GitHub at, in the APT Repository and via Docker.

This release includes new key features and introduces a hard fork

• A hard fork to support V2 sidechains (See V2 Sidechain New Features) will activate at  block #1363115, which will occur on June 7th, 2023 at approximately 13:00 UTC.
• ZEN 4.0.0 sets the upcoming deprecation date to block #1422426, which will occur on September 19th, 2023 at approximately 12:00 PM UTC.

Main V2 Sidechain New Features:

• Non-ceasable Sidechains: The Horizen mainchain verifies each sidechain and ensures its integrity. Unlike traditional sidechains that have a limited time to produce a valid proof to keep exchanging information with the Horizen mainchain, sidechains declared as V2 and non-ceasable don’t share this constraint. The certificate can arrive at any time. Non-ceasing sidechains makes the verification process more flexible and frictionless without compromising the security of the system.
• Key Rotation: A security enhancement that gives the ability to sign transactions and certificates using keys that are not stored locally, that are instead in a separate trusted execution environment
• One Version: Starting from this version, Bitcore versions of Zen binaries will no longer be released. There will be only one version, which includes the AddressIndexing features (previously included in bitcore version).

Meanwhile, the EON sidechain is already live on testnet check it out! We take this opportunity to also thank everyone for the continued support.

Please let us know if you have any questions or you need further support.

Dune and Yuma are both temporary testing environments for Horizen EON.

Since the successful launch of the permanent testnet Gobi, both Dune and Yuma testnets will be deprecated. Dune and Yuma will no longer receive any upgrades or support. Both environments will be removed at a later time after the EON mainnet launch.

If you have deployed smart contracts on Dune or Yuma, please be sure to migrate (redeploy) your projects to Gobi for testing. 

Thank you again for supporting and testing Dune and Yuma! Join #eon or #dev-chat on Discord if you have any questions about this deprecation. 

We were excited to join Consensus in Austin, TX this year as a sponsor. Connecting with our community, partners, and other projects in Web3, was incredibly rewarding and educational for our team.

Kicking off #Consensus2023 in style! Be sure to stop by Booth #713, grab some swag and meet our incredible team! https://t.co/0IAE6dUVhH pic.twitter.com/PF8ItXEBWI

— Horizen (@horizenglobal) April 26, 2023

Fantastic start to the final day of #consensus2023 @robviglione @Zainlabs @HorizenJordan @Angievii pic.twitter.com/NnNAyLlITB

— Horizen (@horizenglobal) April 28, 2023

This year, we showcased all that is new with the Horizen ecosystem and some of the various projects we are working on. The main focus of discussions was around our EVM-compatible sidechain, EON, which just recently launched onto the permanent public testnet, Gobi, our innovations around zero-knowledge technology, and our focus on education and documentation with our Horizen Academy, EON documentation, and more!

Horizen Presentations

The Co-Founder of Horizen and Horizen Labs, Rob Viglione, led a presentation on Why Enterprises Haven’t Embraced Blockchain En Masse. The presentation focused on scale, privacy, and control on the final day of Consensus. After his talk, Rob was joined by Zain Cheng, CTO of Horizen Labs, and Jordan Calinoff, VP of Strategy and Revenue at Horizen Labs for a panel discussion moderated by Angie Villarreal, Project Manager at Horizen Labs.

Currently, Consensus pass holders can view the discussion here, with the video becoming publicly available soon!

The Horizen dAppy Hour

Horizen hosted a side event during Consensus, called dAppy Hour, with our partners Horizen Labs, Immunefi, Zellic, and Auros, where guests enjoyed food, drinks, and networking! We had live music at the event, featured an interactive photo booth, and it was a great opportunity for Consensus attendees to network and unwind, during a busy event week, welcoming over 300 attendees throughout the evening!

Final Thoughts

Consensus was a great opportunity for the team to catch up with our community, learn more about what the latest in Web3 was, meet our new ecosystem partners, and more. We look forward to seeing everyone again next year.

Enhanced blockchain data aggregation process for developers to efficiently build on Horizen EON

We are excited to announce our new partnership with Covalent, a web3 data provider trusted by over 40,000 developers. This partnership will bring about massive data accessibility and transparency to Horizen’s new EVM-compatible smart contracting platform, EON, and provide its developers billions of data points and comprehensive insights into on-chain data.

Horizen’s EON is a fully EVM-compatible smart contracting platform, and the first of many smart contract sidechains on the Horizen ecosystem. EON is built with scale in mind, on Horizen’s powerful horizontally scaling protocol, Zendoo. Combined with the powerful nature of blockchain customization and unmatched design flexibility, the integration of Covalent with Horizen EON will accelerate the process of achieving a permissionless, interoperable, customizable sidechain network on Horizen.

The integration with Covalent will allow developers to leverage an increasingly accelerated volume of blockchain data points to efficiently build and deploy decentralized applications (dApps) on Horizen EON.

“Our integration with Covalent is an important step for EON, our EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine). Developers using the Horizen network are at the forefront of all we do – and we seek to provide them with access to industry-leading tools and data that offers visibility to billions of web3 data points. Covalent was the clear choice for this partnership.”

– Rob Viglione, CEO and Co-Founder, Horizen Labs.

Horizen EON is currently live on its permanent public testnet, Gobi, which is supported by a network of products, integrations and tools, including Covalent. This network of strategic integrations and partnerships ensures the rich capability and user-friendliness for EON developers and end users, starting day one. 

As a result of the integration, Horizen’s Gobi public testnet data is now available on-chain in the API, powered by Covalent. The final step will be the data offered on the mainnet, which is scheduled to take place later this year.

“We are proud to back Horizen’s sidechain ecosystem that offers enhanced security to users, developers, and enterprises. This is a major milestone in our ongoing efforts to support the builders of web3 and elevate the world of zk-SNARKs.”

– Ganesh Swami, Co-Founder and CEO at Covalent.

Covalent’s Unified API brings forth visibility to billions of web3 data points, offering the most robust blockchain data API and infrastructure for the entire blockchain ecosystem. Covalent has already indexed over 100 blockchains, providing unmatched insights and visibility. The data is cloud-based, with no infrastructure or extra code required.

Horizen and Covalent are both committed to advancing the blockchain industry and providing users with more transparent and secure solutions. This partnership is a testament to their shared vision and commitment to innovation in the web3 space. 

About Horizen: Horizen is a layer 0 public blockchain that enables the zero-knowledge network of blockchains powered by the largest node system and a massively scalable cross-chain protocol, Zendoo. Horizen is EVM-compatible and offers tools for developers to custom-build private or public blockchains and dapps with a level of flexibility unmatched by others. By building on Horizen, developers have the freedom to fully customize their blockchains including consensus, speed, privacy, and crypto-economies. Blockchains built on Horizen produce massive throughput without compromising decentralization. Please visit https://horizen.io for more information. 

About Covalent: Covalent provides the industry-leading Unified API bringing visibility to billions of Web3 data points.Developers use Covalent to build exciting multi-chain applications like crypto wallets, NFT galleries, and investor dashboard tools utilizing data from 104 supported blockchains. Covalent is trusted by a community of 35,000+ developers and 3000+ applications including 0x, Zerion, Rainbow Wallet, Rotki, Bitski and many others.

Accelerating the development of innovative products and use cases on Horizen’s new EVM-compatible smart contracting platform, EON.

We are excited to announce our partnership with Buidlbox, a comprehensive hackathon platform, to empower web3 builders and developers, within our new and fast-growing EVM-compatible ecosystem, EON (Ethereum Open Network). 

This partnership comes alongside the testnet launch of Horizen EON. EON is designed to bring EVM compatibility to the Horizen ecosystem, on top of its powerful cross-chain protocol and horizontal scaling solution, Zendoo, providing solidity developers the ability to deploy custom logic to the blockchain and continuous innovation without changing the protocol. As EON is opening up the Horizen ecosystem to more efficient development and usage of a wider range of dApps and services than ever before, it is the top priority in our EON mission to accelerate web3 community innovation and development that will ultimately drive the industry forward. 

Buidlbox, with its extensive experience in organizing and launching virtual and in-person hackathons on the Gitcoin platform, will provide all the necessary tools to help turn innovative ideas into reality within the Horizen ecosystem. We will collaborate in launching hackathons and encouraging web3 developers, creatives, and solution providers from all verticals to join the mission of creating a permissionless, interoperable, and customizable blockchain ecosystem.

The newly launched EON public testnet, Gobi, is supported by a network of products, integrations, and tools that ensures rich capability and user-friendliness for EON developers and end users starting on day one. With the partnership between Horizen and Buidlbox, the EON ecosystem is expected to welcome a wealth of dApps and services in the coming months. By leveraging Buidlbox’s expertise in organizing hackathons and offering a wide range of tools and resources, Horizen aims to foster growth and innovation in the EON ecosystem.

About Buidlbox

Buidlbox is a comprehensive hackathon platform that aims to empower builders and guilds with everything they need to gain new skills, earn prizes, grow communities, and build a better ecosystem together. The end-to-end platform offers a range of powerful tools and resources for developers and entrepreneurs looking to create decentralized applications (dApps) and blockchain-based projects. Buidlbox also enables teams to launch their own hackathons from start to finish, engage with their builder community, and track performance metrics. Since 2019, the Buidlbox team has organized and launched hundreds of virtual and in-person hackathons on the Gitcoin platform, gaining knowledge and expertise in helping ecosystems grow. With this experience, Buidlbox aims to provide all the necessary tools to help turn blockchain ideas into reality.

About Horizen 

Horizen is a layer 0 public blockchain that enables the zero-knowledge network of blockchains powered by the largest node system and a massively scalable cross-chain protocol, Zendoo. Horizen offers tools for developers to custom-build private or public blockchains and dApps with a level of flexibility unmatched by others. Horizen is EVM-compatible through its sidechain EON. By building on Horizen, developers have the freedom to fully customize their blockchains including consensus, speed, privacy, and crypto-economies. Blockchains built on Horizen produce massive throughput without compromising decentralization. 

Q1 was a quarter full of growth and exciting new milestones for the Horizen ecosystem, including the launch of our EVM-compatible sidechain EON on various testnet stages, bringing an influx of developer activity onto Horizen; enhanced the security of the Horizen network by fixing a vulnerability in our node application; and approved an important ZenIP that will make Horizen more resilient and scalable.  

We launched several new products and upgrades, grew the team, welcomed our EVM sidechain, EON, to testnet, and more! We are excited to continue meeting new milestones with our growing community. 

We achieved several major milestones in the development of EON, Horizen’s public EVM-compatible sidechain and smart contracting platform. These milestones include the releases of two separate testnet environments, Dune and Yuma; a new version of Cobalt wallet to support EON testnet functionalities; and other developer tools such as explorers and test token faucet.

Also during Q1, we released three core software upgrades with functionalities to support EON, and fixed a security vulnerability in the ZEND node application.  

EON Testnet Environments – Dune and Yuma

Dune is the pre-alpha and invite-only testnet for EON. It was launched on January 18 and welcomed a small group of 90+ developers to test the platform. Yuma is the temporary public testnet for EON that came after Dune. Yuma testnet is public and accessible for anyone to test and try out Horizen’s first public EVM. We were excited to see an even larger influx of developer activities on Yuma, releasing the testnet to a wider pool of testers. Much of their feedback was tremendously helpful in gearing up for our permanent public testnet, Gobi!

Both testnets are important milestones before launching EON to Gobi.

Yuma testnet is a big upgrade of Dune with key new capabilities and improvements:

Learn more about these new capabilities on Yuma here.

EON Developer Tools and Resources

We released a set of easy-to-use developer and end-user tools to the EON platform:

• EON App with support for backward transfer 
• Test token faucet 
• Cobalt wallet with built-in testnet faucet and other EVM support
• Testnet status dashboards
• EON documentation
• EON tutorials

EON Partnership and Integrations

In addition to the tools built-in-house, the EON platform is integrated with supported by popular 3rd party tools and products that provide developers and users a streamlined and easy user experience. 

• ThirdWeb: A low-code web3 development platform, offering smart contract libraries and deployments along with a series of SDKs and APIs including connectivity with Shopify.
• Revoke.Cash: A preventative tool that helps users practice proper wallet hygiene. 
• Chainlist: Chainlist is a list of EVM networks. Users can use the information to connect their wallets and Web3 middleware providers to the appropriate Chain ID and Network ID to connect to the correct chain.
• BlockScout: The first fully-featured open-source blockchain explorer available for use by any Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chain
• Web3.js: Ethereum JavaScript API
• Remix: The Integrated Developer Environment (IDE) with a GUI for developing smart contracts.
• Truffle: A popular development environment, testing framework and asset pipeline for developing applications on EVM-based blockchains.
• Hardhat: A popular Ethereum development environment for developers
• MetaMask: A popular self-custodial wallet that interacts with the Ethereum and EMV-compatible blockchains.

• Multichain: A popular cross-chain bridge with high transaction speeds and no-slippage swaps.

More integrations and products are being added to the EON ecosystem.

What’s Next for EON – Gobi & Mainnet Preview

With Yuma, we have registered the first non-ceasable sidechain in testnet. We had to fork the mainchain to upgrade ZEND ahead of time. Gobi will be non-ceasable as well and on the official track.

Gobi will be registered with a setup that will be the same as we will have in mainnet.

47 validators will be active in securing the chain, while there will be more nodes to serve our public RPC other than the nodes dedicated to the EON block explorer.

Among the new features Gobi will bring:

• Improved performance
• Websocket support
• Security improvements
• Autoscaling RPC nodes based on demand

When the EON chain is up and running, the team will bring the secure enclave for certificate signing as well.

We will also be launching a bug bounty program and developer grant program in the next phases.

There are two industry-significant updates from the Horizen Labs cryptography team: 

Poseidon2: The Horizen Labs team has upgraded the default hash function for zero-knowledge (zk) applications by introducing Poseidon2, an enhanced version of Poseidon.

The Poseidon hash function is currently the default choice for zero-knowledge applications such as zkEVMs, zkVMs, Mina, and various applications within Polygon. Poseidon2 can replace any instance of Poseidon in all zero-knowledge applications, bringing faster hashing speeds to all.

RC64, is another new hash function. There are two scenarios where hashes are needed, in 

1) everyday (cryptographic) plain computations, and 

2) circuit (re: SNARK) computations. 

The Horizen Labs cryptography team created the new RC64 hash function that works best for both scenarios. If there is a need for both everyday and circuit computations, using RC64 is preferable over Poseidon2. 

Team Growth

This quarter we welcomed 6 new members to the Horizen Labs team. These roles will help drive the Horizen ecosystem and project growth in their own ways!

• Senior Legal Counsel – Operations
• QA Engineer – Strategy Investment
• Corporate Strategy Manager – Strategy
• Community Manager – Marketing
• VP of People & Talent – Operations
• Senior Full Stack Engineer – Engineering

ZenIP 42204: Deprecation of Shielded Pools from Horizen Mainchain

ZenIP 42204 proposed the removal of shielded transactions with transparent inputs from the Horizen mainchain. The purpose of ZenIP 42204 is to ensure Horizen does privacy technology the right and sustainable way to drive ecosystem growth and minimize risks. It proposes a solution to eliminate technical debt and avoid regulatory threats that can prevent the greater Horizen community from fully and freely participating in our ecosystem. 

ZenIP 42204 was met with overwhelmingly positive support from the community, when asked if they are in agreement with ZenIP 42204, 75.3% of survey takers are favorable, 12.7% are neutral, and 11.9% are not favorable. 

As the majority of votes and feedback we have received are in agreement with ZenIP 42204, we will be moving forward with this proposal and plan the changes into a future ZEND software release. Episode 2 of our Beyond the Horizen Podcast goes into further detail on ZenIP 42204 and next steps. 

Horizen Academy

The Horizen Academy has a new look these days, receiving a complete redesign to more effectively host our ever-growing collection of articles on blockchain and web3! 

Work began last year with updates and refreshes to all existing articles and the addition of over 20 new articles. In the background, teams across Horizen collaborated to build a new structure and design that would make navigating and learning in the Academy fun and intuitive.

Additionally, 8 new articles have been published on the following topics:

• NFT Marketplaces
• Crypto Lending
• Automated Market Makers
• Blockchain Nodes
• Decentralized Prediction Markets
• Decentralized Exchanges
• Miner (Maximal) Extractable Value
• ZK-Rollups

Beyond the Horizen Podcast

During Q1, we launched the Beyond the Horizen Podcast, a monthly show all about the Horizen ecosystem and Web3 movement! So far, three episodes have been launched: 

• Episode 1 – The Horizen Ecosystem Vision 2.0: This episode dives into the Horizen ecosystem vision 2.0 with John Camardo, Director of Product at Horizen Labs. We also had a special word from our co-founder Rob Viglione and the latest project updates. 
• Episode 2 – Discussing ZenIP 42204 – Removal of Shielded Pools: we welcomed Rob Viglione Co-Founder of Horizen and Horizen Labs and Jordan Calinoff, VP of Strategy and Revenue at Horizen Labs, to discuss ZenIP 42204: Removal of Shielded Pools from the Horizen Mainchain. Erica also provided a quick update on EON, now in public testnet!
• Episode 3 – Growing the Horizen Developer Community and EON: we welcomed Spencer Soloway, VP of Marketing at Horizen Labs, Ben Sherman, Marketing Manager at Horizen Labs, and Angie Villarreal, Product Manager at Horizen Labs. We discussed how the Horizen Labs’ team is working with Horizen to expand the existing community through engaging developers, and how that will benefit the growth of EON.

With new episodes released monthly, be sure to keep an eye out for future episodes of Beyond the Horizen!

Horizen Media Highlights

• NASDAQ, 2023: The Year of Web3 for Enterprise
• Adam Mendler Blog – Focus on What’s Important: Interview with Rob Vilgione, Co-Founder and CEO of Horizen Labs
• CoinTelegraph: A Brighter Future for Crypto on the Horizen thanks to Zero-Knowledge Solutions

Events

ETHDENVER

Some members of the Horizen team were in Denver this year for the annual ETHDenver event! This was an immensely valuable event for the team, we were able to have numerous excellent conversations and reconnect with partners, both old and new. We noticed that the major narratives of the event were cross-chain communication and interoperability, zero knowledge, and a future of easier/more user-friendly onboarding from both the developer and user sides. 

We look forward to hosting events at ETHDENVER next year!

PARIS BLOCKCHAIN WEEK SUMMIT

Members of the team were at Paris Blockchain this year and thoroughly enjoyed attending the event. 

There was a wide range of panels and talks, but some of our favorites focused on Web3 and its impact on various industries such as sports, gaming, luxury, and more, NFTs and DeFi, educational talks around user security, and a discussion on CBDCs. 

We were able to say hello to a few of our partners, as well as friends, overall the event was quite successful! We hope to be in attendance next year as well.