24/02/03 AMA about the NEW HORIZEN
thanks to WINDZEN Korea community
You can listen AMA
https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1MnGnMjlnEXKO?s=20.
Person 1 00:00
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Person 2 02:55
How’s how’s my audio?
Person 3 02:59
Hey, John sounds good, sounds clear here husband sounds good the ego
Person 4 06:21
Hello hello my check Hey Angie sounds good.
Person 4 08:00
So while we wait for folks to join Gustavo John Diego Have you guys made a quick met check?
Person 2 08:10
Yep I think I’m good but worth another check.
Person 3 08:16
Perfect Coming through good
Person 4 08:26
Gustavo I couldn’t hear you Can you hear me?
I don’t think you’re coming through for me.
Person 4 09:10
Okay we have people joining us so why don’t we get started?
Hello everyone Happy Thursday.
We are live now here with our horizen Labs in horizen Twitter space.
The topic for today is a very special one.
We’re going to be talking about exploring New horizen, what that means and a lot of different and exciting activities that the horizen Labs and horizen team have been working for the various months.
Person 4 09:44
So welcome everybody. As people are joining us, we’re just about to kick off.
My name is Angie. I’m a project manager at horizen Labs and like I said, we’re going to be talking a little bit about New horizen and what that entails for the ecosystem.
As mentioned previously, the horizen Ecosystem team and the horizen Lax Teep team have been working on exciting new development for the horizen ecosystem.
And we are incredibly excited today to formally be announcing New horizen.
Person 4 10:15
So we’re going to be taking a deeper dive into what exactly this means and why we are so excited to share this with the world.
So I would like to let my coworkers introduce themselves and then we can start and initiate the conversations around New horizen Who would like to start?
John Would you like to introduce yourself?
Person 2 10:38
Sure thanks. Angie. Hey everybody John Camardo I’m the Director of Product at horizen Labs.
I’ve been with horizen Labs for about two and a half years.
I think if any of you joined any of the previous kind of discord town halls that we had, I think I spoke a couple of times but it’s been quite a while since I’ve been engaged on any sort of public communications.
So really happy to be back and excited to share the New horizen concept with everybody.
Diego You want to go next?
Person 3 11:13
Yeah thanks John. Hey everybody I’m, I’m probably an unfamiliar face for most of you but I’m a product marketing analyst here at horizen Labs and I’m thrilled to be speaking on my first Twitter space.
I’ve been working closely with John as well as the rest of the team on this New horizen initiative so I’m very excited to talk more about it today.
I’ll hand it off to Gustavo.
Person 4 11:55
Good stop where you think you were muted
Person 4 12:03
No I don’t think your oddy is coming through Gustabo but if you want to try rejoining and in the meantime, why don’t we talk about a little bit about what’s New horizen from a broader perspective John Would you like to walk us through the concept?
Person 2 12:20
Yeah of course thanks Angie.
The first thing I’ll say is New horizen is kind of the internal name that we’ve been using for kind of like revamping the horizen ecosystem.
The name is very much subject to change and happy.
There are a couple of discussions I think in our discourse around what that actual name will end up being but it is a concept right now and it’s a concept that is kind of still going through a bunch of iterations.
We’re kind of changing things as we go as is
Person 2 12:57
it’s probably going to continually be the case as we kind of learn new things, experiment with new technologies.
But in any case, it is an initiative where we’re trying to attack the sort of modular blockchain space.
And what we’re really trying to do is focus on breaking out a piece of settlement which Diego will go through the components of a modular blockchain system.
But we’re really focused on the settlement piece and given our sort of expertise, horizen Lab’s expertise in ZIK technology
Person 2 13:36
and given what we’ve worked on in the past with Zendu and scaling, we think this is a really important place where we can play because we really want to focus on proof verification, which is a big component of the way that ZIK roll ups in the ethereum space ultimately settle a lot of their transactions onto Ethereum.
And so we want to make the horizen we want to turn the horizen main chain into essentially a new main chain
Person 2 14:06
whose sole purpose is to verify proofs from either the Ethereum ecosystems EK roll ups or potentially in the future we plan to build a settlement layer in the horizen ecosystem so that ZK roll ups can exist within the horizen ecosystem and ultimately have their proofs verified on the horizen main chain.
And so that’s kind of really high level what the concept here is.
And we’re kind of working right now on bringing a proof of concept to a test net that we can show you all.
Person 2 14:43
So that’s super, super high level.
I think we’ll get into a lot more details as the conversation continues and as we start to address some of the questions that have been asked.
But for now I think I’ll turn it back over to ang to kind of go through the rest of the agenda that we have prepared.
Person 4 15:01
Absolutely. Thank you John.
Yeah so when we, when we say modular and when we think about modular blockchains, the text stack, I would like maybe for Diego to tell us a little bit about what this means in a broader web 3 perspective and the ecosystem.
So Diego feel free to walk us through that.
Person 3 15:22
Yeah thanks Angie. So I’ll start by providing the differences between monolithic and modular blockchains because I think that provides some important context but the core difference lies in how the two operate.
And currently there are four blockchain layers each focused on different functions.
Therefore execution, consensus, data availability and settlement
Person 3 15:51
and monolithic blockchains handle all of these functions within a single protocol while modular blockchains concentrate on specific functions and optimize for them while delegating other functionalities to separate block chains.
So I can give a little more details about each of the layers but the execution layer is pretty much focused on processing transactions on chain and hosting smart contracts and applications pretty much where end users interact.
Person 3 16:25
The consensus layer determines the validity and order of transactions and the data availability ensures that there’s accessibility of transaction data so that anyone can ensure that it hasn’t been tampered.
And lastly, the settlement is what confirms and stores the final transactions records.
So that’s the, the four layers.
But let’s continue with a little history.
Person 3 16:55
So until a few years ago, tribalism and maximalism ruled Web 3 with the primary conversation in this space being debates revolving around what blockchain would rule them all.
We can kind of refer to this era as the era of monolithic blockchains.
But at the time the pursuit of performing everything for everyone came at a cost, compromised performance.
So in order to tackle scalability issues
Person 3 17:24
later two solutions emerged which segregated execution from the other blockchain functions then all considered a part of settlement.
This was just the beginning of the journey towards modernization and it really started gaining traction with Ethereum layer twos, which were built to address Ethereum scalability congestion and high fees by isolating execution from the other functions and allowing more transactions to be processed on those layers so that they could scale the theorem
Person 3 17:59
going forward. In this kind of historical overview, I’ll focus on a Ethereum centric narrative to illustrate the concept of modularization effectively because I think it’s easier to imagine when you have examples with the rapid adoption of layer two’s scaling a theorem.
There’s both think of the arbitrums, optimisms, polygons, ZCS, ET cetera.
The limitations of relying on monolithic blockchains for data availability became evident
Person 3 18:32
at the time data availability was a part of the settlement layer.
So this prompted the development of solutions that segregated data availability from the rest of the settlement functions such as data availability networks like Celestia and Avail.
These essentially introduced a new layer that hadn’t existed before and was previously considered part of the settlement.
This mirrors what we’re trying to accomplish with New horizen because we’re proposing
Person 3 19:00
to essentially further modulize the settlement layer by creating a new layer dedicated to proof verification.
So in summary, modular blockchains are blockchains that are dedicated to one or a couple of the blockchain functions and optimized for these while monolithic block chains are generic and perform all the functions of Yeah This is important because we believe that the trend towards modernization provides the horizen ecosystem an opportunity to not only modernize our technology
Person 3 19:32
but also to make a strategic leap forward towards a more efficient, secure and potentially most important collaborative web three space
Person 4 19:45
Well, a quick question that just came to mind because we’re talking about okay proof verification we’re talking about the different layers.
When you say proverification, you mean that this is going to impact let’s say the various and independent layers, settlement consensus and so on and so forth.
Or is it are we taking a look at a more holistic view of all the way that the blockchain operates?
How do you see that? Or if you can enlighten me with this?
Person 3 20:10
Yeah so here what we’re actually doing is we’re trying to break out one of the existing functions of the settlement layer and isolate it so it will, it fits into the larger stack because it’ll be compatible with, it’ll be compatible with the other layers and the other ones can use it as essentially as a service, a proof verification service.
So yeah
Person 4 20:41
I see Okay Okay great Thank you so much for answering that.
Okay so I think let’s say we can also talk about for example, what this means for the horizen ecosystem in a broader scale.
John Would you like to walk us through this?
And also if there’s anything else you would like to add as well from what Diego just mentioned please
Person 2 21:03
Yeah thanks and great summary Diego so I mean, I think it’s really this is kind of a way to bring horizen kind of into the conversation which I know has been kind of like what everyone’s been hoping for kind of along the way as we’ve been developing things like Sendu and, and Eon and all of that kind of thing.
But this really I think represents kind of a leap frog event for horizen
Person 2 21:36
and puts us it will put horizen at the center of conversation when it comes to what we believe will be kind of the future of block chains which are ZIK roll ups.
So it kind of aims to accomplish two things.
One is that we can essentially horizen can essentially be viewed as a or a New horizen could be viewed as a service provider for the ZIK roleps that exist in the Ethereum space.
And it could do that by having those rollups continue to operate entirely as they do today
Person 2 22:16
but change one thing which is rather than send the proof of their transaction validity data to Ethereum, send it instead to New horizen and reduce the costs super significantly.
So that’s kind of like one thing which is kind of again being a service provider to the ZK roll ups that exist in Ethereum.
The potentially more interesting piece though for horizen stakeholders is that we also want horizen to have the ability to have ZIK rollups exist in its own ecosystem.
And so again, this is where
Person 2 22:57
what I mentioned before, where we might build the settlement layer where ZIK rollups can sit on top of that settlement layer.
Essentially that settlement layer would mimic very much what a Theereum does but maybe in a more highly optimized way and the ZIK rollbes can deploy on top of that again, send their proofs for verification of their transaction validity to New horizen and grow the new, the horizen ecosystem rather than just being rather than horizen just acting as a service provider
Person 2 23:32
to ZIK rollups that exist in another ecosystem.
And I think that should be really exciting for, again for horizen stakeholders because it can help grow this ecosystem to be what we had sort of envisioned it would be with the development and deployment of Zandu and with the development and deployment of Yan.
Person 4 23:58
I like that John Just a compliment to what you’re saying you were saying okay, some of the benefits are of course reduced costs in terms of lower fees, more scalability.
Could we say that that’s, let’s say what we’re pointing towards
Person 2 24:15
yeah I think that’s ultimately what we’re pointing towards the first iteration and I might be getting a little bit into the roadmap to implementation now but the first iteration of what we’re really trying to do is bring a horizen proof verification chain to Testnet and then ultimately to Mainnet.
And that’s really, really focused almost entirely on reducing the overhead costs that ZIK rollups that operate in the Athereum space currently incur.
Person 2 24:46
And those costs are pretty significant.
They’re in close to 50 million dollars a year is what we’re kind of internally estimating and we anticipate that’s going to grow significantly as technology gets better for these ZIK roll ups and as more of them come into existence.
And then to your point, Angie the reality is we’d love for better scalability for these EK roll ups.
And so that’s where this settlement layer kind of comes into play
Person 2 25:16
for what we, what we’d like to build in the horizen ecosystem where we’d have a highly optimized version of an EVM chain where maybe there isn’t any sort of competition for computational or data resources except for the roll ups that are deployed there.
Person 1 25:34
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Person 2 25:39
And so yeah, we kind of hope to achieve that as well.
Person 4 25:43
I like that. Thanks John.
I would like to introduce Gustavo Let us know if you can hear us.
I know you are having some issues but if not, we can always come back to you stab so you can injure yourself.
Person 4 26:05
No I’ll, I’ll come back to you Gustavo in a minute.
All right so you were starting to talk about the roadmap John Are there any other let’s say milestones that you would like to share or that you consider important?
We haven’t touched on the point of security and I know it’s one of the always has been since forever one of the major components and also a major challenge in our industry right so if, if there’s anything you would like to add around that topic or even Diego for that matter please.
Person 2 26:40
Yeah thanks Angie. I actually just finished putting a sort of a public roadmap together that will hopefully be posted relatively soon to kind of provide a lot more information about what people can expect and when they can expect it.
But our first milestone is really focused again on this proof verification blockchain and we aim to have a TESNA set up by right around the end of Q1 where there will be a ZIK roll up that is operating on Supolia Testnet which is an Etherium testnet
Person 2 27:26
and we might try to mock a bunch of transactions just so there’s something to actually roll up to Saapolia and we’ll have that roll up posting all of everything that it would normally post to Zapolia except for that proof that proof will get sent to the New horizen main chain which will also be in a testnut very early testnut we can call it an alpha testnut.
That proof will be verified on this main chain which will be purpose built to do proof verification and we’ll be able to do so
Person 2 28:04
in a really highly optimized way relative to where it currently gets verified today which would be Ethereum.
And then that Testnet will send a sort of attestation back to Sapolia so that the roll up can get confirmation that its proof was verified in our blockchain in the Nucaris and blockchain and so that all should be kind of publicly viewable by the end of Q1.
And then from there we really want to begin to kind of address a number of things like
Person 2 28:48
ion migration, zen migration.
We want to introduce a zenip for the settlement layer that I’ve been referring to.
After that we will really come in the will really start to address some of the harder work which is the decentralization of this proof verification layer, which it kind of gets to the point that you brought up Angie around security.
We need to have a pretty highly decentralized chain for this to mimic the security levels that that are kind of in the Etherium space.
Person 2 29:23
And then we want to start to address the decentralization of the settlement layer.
And then from there we have some ideas on how we can potentially help roll up operators optimize their stacks and optimize their business processes but that would be much further out.
So just to reiterate a testnet by let’s say April 1st, some Xenips that introduce the settlement layer some of the migrations in the second quarter the settlement layer tests that somewhere in Q3, Q4
Person 2 30:01
and then from there things get a little bit fuzzier.
So I won’t give timelines for any of the other things but you can look at the roadmap as soon as we post it which shouldn’t be too too long just needs to go through a bit of socialization internally here at horizen Labs and a little bit of a pertification and then we’ll put it on a website and make sure everybody has the opportunity to look at it and ask any questions that they might have.
Person 4 30:27
Absolutely yeah and I think that’s amazing.
So just recapping and again for the folks joining us, we’ve been talking about this proof verification chain still to be named settlement layer and then this milestones that John was just mentioning.
I’ll like to, to maybe ask Diego because Diego, you have a lot of insights on market these days.
So
Person 4 30:51
for you to, maybe just tell us from your perspective like things that are lacking things like these opportunities which of course are let’s say one of the various reasons we are working very hard towards a new horizen and things that you think could improve or could be done better.
So if you would like to share anything, any insights from the market and from your perspective please
Person 3 31:17
yeah definitely. Thanks.
So just before answering that question, I’m going to talk about the next steps that are not technical.
So we’re actively working on the Zenate for the proof verification chain and anticipate its publication soon.
We’ve already written an initial draft which is currently undergoing several revisions and this is because we’re taking it very seriously and want to ensure that it addresses the community’s questions and all their inputs.
Person 3 31:48
And in the meantime, I suggest that all of you guys check out our discourse post introducing the concept and feel free to share any questions or feedback that you might have there.
So now back to your question Angie in the past there’s many of our horizen technologies have been technically innovative but also complex, which has led to limited adoption.
And this was partially because our development process was tech driven and not based on existing user and market needs.
Person 3 32:26
However, we have now shifted from a technology focused or solely technology focused paradigm.
Learning from our previous experiences in our new philosophy is to and not just create excellent technology and hope that users will come, but to build technologies with our users in mind and to meet the existing and future needs of the industry.
As John previously mentioned, our research has shown that
Person 3 32:52
while there are many trying to tackle the data availability problem, no one has specifically honed in on proof verification, a gap that’s already costing ZK rollups tens of millions of dollars.
And with more ZIK roll ups in the pipeline and the release of development frameworks that are making it even easier to launch ZIK roll ups, we expect the demand for such a solution to only increase.
Person 4 33:21
Thanks Diego I would like to pass the word to Gustavo Gustao if you’d like to introduce yourself.
Welcome
Person 5 33:28
Hi guys Can you finally hear me?
Yes Perfect. Okay sorry for all the technical issues my computer wasn’t collaborating.
So hello everyone I am Gustavo Program manager at the Risen Foundation and I’m here today representing the foundation and I’m really excited with the New horizen direction and I personally think that New horizen represents a major breakthrough and we’ll have horizen lead the industry in this particular segment that is
Person 5 33:56
proof verification and settlement.
Okay and I’ll pass speck to you Angie.
Person 4 34:02
Thanks Gustavo and welcome so nice to have you here.
You’re of course one of the horizen Zen Ods.
We also have a few other Zen slash horizen ojes in here in this call.
So always, always happy to see familiar faces.
And yeah, I think this is very interesting what Diego and John have been walking us through before we move on
Person 4 34:24
we’re about to be 30 minutes in to the community questions because there were a lot of questions and we would like to address each one of them.
Is there anything else John that you would like to refer to or to talk about before we, we move on with some of the questions.
Person 2 34:40
Just one quick thing, which is I, I think that like this has been a super high level overview and it probably if you’re just getting introduced to the concept or have a little familiarity with the concepts that we’ve introduced here is relatively confusing.
So I would encourage everybody.
I see a lot of familiar faces here from our Discord and
Person 2 35:07
from discourse I would encourage everybody to ask any questions that you might have.
I’m pretty active in Discord and I’m happy to address them all directly and feel free to ask any more and add any more to the questionnaire that was sent out.
So please ask questions and help us.
Well, number one help us clarify those for you but also help us develop a better understanding and harden our understanding and our position
Person 2 35:35
that this is a really important aspect and problem in the market that we need to be addressing.
Person 4 35:42
Absolutely. All right so why don’t we move on with the community question?
So the first one that I see here is it says a new horizen shows a modular blockchain like Celesia Polygon that we’ve been talking and addressing on a high level.
What are the strains of horizen compared to this?
Person 2 36:05
I, I’ll jump in just to start I mean I think it requires the question, requires a little bit of, like clarification.
So it’s really important to note we’re not a competitor of Celestia.
Celestia is tackling an entirely different problem.
So that part of the question I don’t fully agree with but I do think that to Diego’s point, we are addressing a very, very specific problem that is yet to be addressed.
Person 2 36:34
And so I’m not really sure that we necessarily need to compare ourselves to those block chains because we are kind of again just trying to address a completely different space that they are not tackling.
Celesty is focused on data availability which was a piece of settlement.
And so we are similarly trying to break off a piece of what was known as settlement in that modular blockchain system which is proof verification and tackle that.
And we hope to do it really, really well because
Person 2 37:09
of our expertise that we’ve been developing at horizen Labs since the inception of horizen and the inception and development and deployment of Zenu and Eon from there.
So I can turn it over. I think maybe Diego has a couple of other insights to add here but I would just say again, it’s something different than Celestia and it’s something different in my opinion than what Polygon is really focused on.
Person 3 37:40
Yeah thanks John. I think he did a pretty great job summarizing it.
And pretty much what I would just add is that if anything you can think of as modular blockchains as puzzle pieces.
So those are completely different puzzle pieces and we can actually ideally integrate and create for example those aren’t competitors but ideally would potentially be users or partners.
So we could work for example, with Celesia and Polygon and not necessarily see them as competitors because
Person 3 38:22
yeah, we’re selling a completely different.
Person 4 38:29
All right okay moving on to the second question I see here this is a comment and I, I would imagine it becomes a question.
So it says some people could be concerned that New horizen could end up like Sindu there’s obviously a lot of development work going on but what about Attraction?
So Diego, would you like to maybe talk a little bit more about that?
Person 3 38:55
Yeah definitely I think I might have jumped the gun on this one and talked a little bit about it before.
But I think in short, our renewed approach to our technology development is really what will ensure that there will be traction.
We’ve done extensive research and we’ve seen that there’s a market need existing and we only expect it to grow.
So while in the past, our technologies have been, like I said, very innovative but complex.
Person 3 39:29
This is meant to be much simpler and built to serve an existing market need.
Thanks.
Person 4 39:39
I like that. The next question is, has New horizen been brought in front of major investors such as DCG for example to see if there’s traction?
I don’t know who would like to jump into this one maybe John
Person 2 39:52
I’ll, yeah I’ll, I’ll address this the, I just want to underline really quickly on the last question though like I think I don’t know who asked this question.
It’s a good one but anyone who, anyone else who’s asking themselves this question or has had this question about having concerns that New horizen will end up like Zeneu, has to ask themselves why it was Zen Due not widely adopted
Person 2 40:19
and I think the answer is that the technology was really complicated.
I think the market moved quite significantly from Zendu is built for Utxo chains.
It wasn’t built for account based chains.
Zendo is built on top of you know, a non programmable blockchain programmable blockchains like a Theereum are sort of what everyone is focused on right now.
So I think when you, when you ask yourself this question, you kind of have to think like Zendu was not an easy thing to use and also
Person 2 40:53
wasn’t necessarily something that you know, addressed the same things that developers were looking for except for the scalability problem and the market moved kind of as this was being implemented.
So some of the things that we’re doing to Diego’s point are we’re trying to get real clear market feedback prior to developing features as opposed to after developing features we’re trying to develop much more quickly and iterate more rapidly so that we can put
Person 2 41:30
things in market. And you can see that based on what I said before that we’re trying to be an attest that by the end of Q1 we want that Testnet to be something that people can provide feedback on so that we can go back and if we need to pivot or change what we’re sort of working on or the features that we’re planning on delivering, we can.
And so
Person 2 41:50
you’ll have to take my word for it but I’m relatively confident that we will not end up in the same situation as we did with Zendu because of the approach that we’re taking.
Now with respect to the actual question that I was asked, I’ll address that.
Now New horizen has I mean, I can’t really provide any like super detailed information here.
It’s horizen Labs is a private company and so