Three months ago was when I first heard of the Horizen Network and ZEN their native cryptocurrency token. Horizen Network and the ZEN token was only bought to my attention by a comment from  Crypto king epiX .

Having never heard of the ZEN token, I was intrigued and curious. So I decided to check their faucet out for myself and maybe after a couple months I would do a review for Publish0x. About a week ago the ZEN token reached $13.41 AUD and a surging market value is sure to focus my attention. This deserved a more in depth review than just a review of the ZEN faucet. 

The Horizen Family Tree

Zcash          ➡️         Zclassic          ➡️        Zencash          ➡️          Horizen Network

The Horizen Network was rebranded from Zencash in 2018, after being hit by a 51% attack.   Zencash was forked from Zclassic, which itself was a Zcash fork. 

What is the Horizen Network?

Horizen is a privacy-focused, zk-SNARKs based blockchain platform.

• Secure Nodes on the Horizen blockchain ensure all network communication remains encrypted. The Secure Nodes maintain the network and provide secure tunnels for encrypted Horizen data to pass through. Secure Node operators need 42 ZEN in a transparent address per Secure Node and receive 10% of the block rewards.

• Super Nodes, which will serve as a supporting network for future sidechains. Super Node operators need 500 ZEN in a transparent address per Super Node and receive 10% of the block rewards.

The Horizen Network includes a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), ZenChat (a private messenger), ZenPub (an anonymous publishing platform), and ZenHide (TOR-like endpoint masking). 

• ZenCash – The original aim of Zcash was to be an anonymous financial tool, and that tool is still available in Horizen. It has simply been expanded upon to provide a full suite of options for enterprise users.

• ZenPub – Publishing documents can be a risky (and often difficult) business in many countries. Even in the U.S., where freedom of press is among the first Constitutionally guaranteed rights, journalists can be silenced. ZenPub uses anonymized addresses to publish documents to IPFS to ensure an open and free press is always maintained.

• ZenChat – Our communications are constantly monitored, and ZenChat uses AES-256 encryption for transaction of end-to-end encrypted messages.

• ZenHide – Countries like China setup firewalls that can block processing to essentially disable a cryptocurrency within its geographic borders. ZenHide uses proxy-like technology to pass data through HTTPS to bypass such restrictions.

Horizen Network isn’t your typical privacy coin, as they provide a full suite of secure and private tools for use by the institutions.

ZEN Tokenomics

There is a total supply of 21,000,000 ZEN.

The ATH so far for the ZEN token was $65.16 on January 9, 2018.

No Horizen ICO was held. Instead, Horizen (then known as ZenCash) forked from Zclassic (ZCL) on May 23, 2017 at block 110,000. At this time, ZEN was issued to ZCL holders at a 1:1 ratio.

ZEN is mined using the Equihash Proof-of-Work (PoW) mining algorithm. The block reward is set at 12.5 ZEN, with a block mined approximately every 2.5 minutes. Rewards half approximately every four years and are distributed:

• 20% split evenly between Secure Nodes and Super Nodes

• 10% goes to the Horizen team treasury

• 70% rewarded to miners

ZEN is traded on a wide variety of cryptocurrency exchange markets, including Binance, Bittrex, DragonEX, Upbit, OKEx, Sistemkoin, and COSS. ZEN trading pairs include BTC, ETH, and USDT.

ZEN uses commercial content distribution networks (CDN) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) to ensure secure transfers. It also uses the same zero-knowledge Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARKS) cryptography that ZCash does. This means ZEN transactions can be both pseudonymous and anonymous, providing the highest levels of privacy and security.

Sphere By Horizen (ZEN Wallet)

Setting up the Sphere wallet was straight forward enough. You create a seed phrase in case you need to restore your wallet and funds. The wallet is linked (verified) directly to the Horizen Faucet.

The Horizen Faucet

• no intrusive ads like the third party faucets.

• use the faucet every 20 hours. Crypto king epiX was right it does not require much effort

• Horizen have their own wallet called Sphere. If you verify the wallet by signing a transaction, 1.5x reward multiplier

• ZEN is paid instantly to your Sphere wallet address

• link Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter accounts, 1.9x reward multiplier

• download or use the Brave Browser, 20% extra rewards

• HODL the Zen in the Sphere wallet for 24 hours and get up to 3x rewards, depending on amount HODL

• up to 2x daily loyalty multiplier, miss a day and it resets.

• invite friends and earn a special Bonus round for every referral. Each bonus round can win you up to 1 ZEN! Minimum Bonus round is 0.0025 ZEN

After 10 weeks I have claimed 0.11345535 ZEN from the Horizen Faucet. I like that it is only a once a day task and with only a 20 hour wait period it doesn't matter if you are a bit late one day. It doesn't slowly get later and later each day.

I have noticed that as the value of the ZEN token has shot up the amount received has decreased accordingly. Except the amount you receive from the referral Bonus Round has remained constant at 0.0025 ZEN.

HODL ZEN on your Verified address for at least 24 hours and you earn extra rewards. Is it worth buying 10 ZEN to get the 3x HODL Bonus multiplier? Maybe, it works out about about a little bit 5%.

The End

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