Horizen relaunched its mainnet as an EVM-native Layer 3 on Base on December 9, 2025, marking a strategic pivot toward “auditable privacy.” The project also migrated its ZEN token to Base as an ERC-20 earlier in July 2025 and retains a fixed supply of 21 million tokens, a move aimed at unlocking liquidity and DeFi composability inside the Base ecosystem.
Architecture, privacy model and ecosystem positioning
Horizen’s relaunch as a Layer 3 intends to combine privacy features with the operational advantages of Base: Solidity compatibility, lower fees, faster finality and access to Base’s liquidity and distribution channels. The architecture processes transaction activity inside Horizen’s appchain and then batches verifiable proofs that settle on Base, preserving security assumptions from the underlying L2 while allowing Horizen Labs to concentrate on middleware and application-layer services. The shift also reflects a market-driven trade-off, with the team framing the move as a response to regulatory pressure that has penalized projects seen as “too private” and as a way to make privacy interoperable with compliance frameworks.
Horizen centers its privacy model on selective disclosure and ZK cryptography. Selective disclosure lets participants reveal only narrowly defined data elements for audit or regulatory need, while the core verification mechanism relies on ZK-SNARKs that allow a prover to demonstrate the truth of a computation without exposing its inputs. To reduce on-chain cost and latency for complex proofs, Horizen integrates with an external proof-verification chain (zkVerify) that offloads heavy ZK computation, with use cases described across confidential institutional trades, privacy-preserving payroll and auditable ad impressions where discretion must coexist with oversight. This architecture is presented as compliance-forward, leaving an auditable trail when required rather than providing blanket anonymity.
ZEN migrated to Base as an ERC-20 on July 23, 2025, a transition that involved sunsetting the legacy Horizen mainchain and EON sidechain and required holders to claim migrated tokens through a dedicated portal. Governance discussions under ZenIP 42407 are underway to adjust token incentives and utility in the new modular appchain context, with Horizen’s launch adding a privacy-first appchain to a Base ecosystem that already includes DePIN, gaming and AI projects and cites USD Base Coin (USDbC) as a liquidity anchor. Looking forward, Horizen plans a Confidential Compute Environment (CCE) using Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), targeted for Q4 2025 or Q1 2026, to enable private computation with jurisdictional compliance modules.
The relaunch reframes Horizen from a standalone privacy coin to a privacy-layer service inside Ethereum’s modular stack. For treasuries and trading desks, the key implications are improved access to Base liquidity and composability, accompanied by a re-engineered privacy model that prioritizes selective disclosure and regulatory alignment over absolute anonymity.