Today, Web3 has proven itself for securing assets and moving money. But when it comes to protecting data, maintaining confidentiality, and enabling truly private, compliant applications, the tools remain fragmented and siloed. There’s still no native, generalized “privacy-first infrastructure” for Web3: one that combines confidentiality, regulatory alignment and seamless composability across chains.

Enter Horizen. Horizen is launching its mainnet with Caldera as a dedicated appchain built via Caldera’s Rollup Engine — a full production-ready environment where privacy meets interoperability, moving beyond testnets into live deployments. Horizen is an EVM blockchain built on Base for secure, regulatory-compliant confidential trading and DeFi applications for individual traders and financial institutions.

The Horizen testnet is already live, and open for users to explore and developers to launch applications.

Building the Infrastructure for Confidential Web3

Horizen is delivering what many blockchains promise but few deliver: a modular, EVM-compatible chain optimized for confidential, compliant, developer-friendly applications.

Key elements of Horizen’s vision:

• Privacy by design: integrating technologies like zero-knowledge proofs, trusted execution environments and selective disclosure.

• Compliance aware: giving enterprises the tools to build onchain privacy solutions while retaining auditability, regulatory alignment, and control.

• Developer-first: EVM-compatible, enabling development with familiar stacks (Solidity, Ethers, Viem, and Foundry) so privacy isn’t the barrier but the enabler.
  
  Now, by launching on Caldera, Horizen gains access to a high-performance, sovereign rollup environment that’s already connected into a broader interoperable network — giving the chain the advantages of both privacy sovereignty and cross-chain reach.

Why Horizen Needed a Dedicated Appchain

In its evolution, Horizen recognized three core limitations of building on a generic shared layer:

1. Deep protocol customization for privacy
Horizen needed to embed confidentiality, selective disclosure, and custom governance directly into the chain’s native execution model. Only a sovereign rollup can give that level of control.

2. Economic sovereignty and token utility
Horizen’s native token (ZEN) and privacy stack required bespoke fee models, staking mechanisms, and ecosystem incentives aligned with confidentiality and compliance use-cases. A dedicated chain enables full alignment.

3. Uncongested, predictable performance
Privacy-enabled applications demand consistent performance and reliability—not subject to the traffic surges of generic DeFi and gaming activity. A dedicated chain ensures resource availability and premium UX.

How Caldera Powers Horizen’s Vision

Caldera brings the infrastructure so Horizen can focus purely on privacy innovation:

• Production-ready infrastructure: Caldera’s Rollup Engine handles sequencer operations, batching and settlement, so Horizen doesn’t have to build chain operations from scratch.

• Built on Base: As a Base L3, Horizen can tap into the network effects provided by one of the top rollups on Ethereum. Horizen’s token, ZEN, has already completed its migration to Base, unlocking access to liquidity and enabling the onboarding of privacy-focused token holders.

• Sovereign yet connected: Horizen retains full protocol sovereignty while being part of a wider Internet of Chains — the best of both worlds.
  
  
  

A New Primitive for the Internet of Chains

With Horizen’s appchain launch, Caldera’s ecosystem gains a powerful new building-block: a privacy-centric rollup that any other chain in the network can tap. The flywheel is real:

• Other chains in Caldera’s ecosystem can plug into Horizen’s privacy primitives: identity systems, confidential finance modules, developer tooling.

• Liquidity and value propagate: ZEN via Metatoken moves across chains; developers on Horizen build tools that serve users elsewhere.

• Network effects intensify: each added chain (Horizen included) doesn’t just bring more users — it brings unique capabilities that strengthen the entire network.
  
  
  

The Future is Interconnected, Confidential, and Sovereign

Horizen’s launch shows that the next wave of on-chain innovation isn’t about just decentralizing finance — it’s about privacy, compliance, sovereign execution, and interoperability. By combining a dedicated appchain architecture with the connectivity of Caldera’s Metalayer, Horizen can pioneer a new category of apps: confidential, developer-friendly, multi-chain.

As more projects like Horizen build on Caldera, we’re not just adding chains — we’re adding distinct capabilities that raise the baseline for everyone. The Internet of Chains isn’t just about scaling users. It’s about scaling possibilities.

We’re proud to power innovators like Horizen as they push the frontier. Congratulations to the Horizen team on this major milestone.

About Caldera

Caldera is powering the next internet. Its architecture consists of two core components: the Rollup Engine and the Metalayer. The Rollup Engine is a modular operating system used to launch high-performance, custom chains on leading chains and frameworks like Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, and ZKsync. The Metalayer then automatically connects every chain into one network. Through this interoperability protocol, all chains access shared liquidity and secure, intent-based bridging that transforms fragmented networks into a unified Internet of Chains. And now with the launch of the Caldera Bridge Preview, Metatoken, and Stablecoin Module, this expands the product suite and market size that Caldera is tackling.

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