Veteran privacy project Horizen transforms into Base Layer 3, betting on the new track of "compliance-optional privacy"

There’s an old project called Horizen that started working on privacy as early as 2017, and recently they’ve made a major pivot.

They’ve directly scrapped their original mainnet and the EON sidechain, and now the whole project has migrated to Base to run as Layer 3. Simply put, they’re building a dedicated privacy network on top of Base’s infrastructure. The most interesting part of this revamp is their concept of “optional compliance privacy”—it’s not just blind anonymity, but customizable disclosure based on regulatory requirements in different regions.

The ZEN token has also been relaunched and is now circulating on the Base chain, with listings on several top exchanges and compliant platforms. The project team is willing to spend big, planning to allocate 100 million ZEN over the next five years to incentivize developers, with a focus on privacy applications in finance, gambling, and social sectors.

This architecture is pretty clever—the modular structure allows for flexible compliance parameter configurations across different jurisdictions. For use cases that need both privacy protection and regulatory compliance, it’s indeed a workable solution. Now it just depends on whether the ecosystem can gain traction.