Horizen has successfully launched its mainnet on Base, marking the complete transformation of its legacy proof-of-work chain into an EVM-native Layer 3 within the Base ecosystem. This strategic migration, which began with the ERC-20 conversion of ZEN on July 23, 2025 and culminated in a public livestream on December 10, 2025, combines Horizen’s privacy tooling capabilities with Base’s scalability and liquidity advantages.
Layer 3 architecture, privacy stack and strategic positioning
Following governance proposal ZenIP 42406, Horizen’s migration represents a strategic effort to tap into Base’s extensive developer community, on-chain liquidity and Coinbase-aligned infrastructure. The project leverages Base‘s OP Stack to achieve sub-second transaction speeds and fees targeted below one cent, with Layer 3 deployments positioned to reduce transaction overhead by up to 1,000x through alternative data-availability options and predictable gas pricing.
Rob Viglione, CEO of Horizen Labs, described the transition as a pragmatic business decision to enhance distribution and visibility within the Coinbase-backed ecosystem. He framed regulatory-compliant privacy as a “trillion-dollar market” opportunity and positioned the new architecture as an EVM-native rollup that batches and settles transactions to Base while maintaining local execution control and inheriting Base’s security model and Ethereum tooling access.
Horizen’s privacy stack combines zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). The project has also deployed a dedicated ZK proof-verification chain called zkVerify to reduce gas costs and latency for privacy-preserving operations, with early applications at launch including Hubz VCE, Gamblor and a private DeFi application called DarkSwap already demonstrated on testnet.
To support privacy-first application development, Horizen has announced a five-year developer funding program in partnership with Thrive Protocol, allocating 1,000,000 ZEN (approximately $8.8 million). The team has outlined additional use cases including private payroll, verifiable advertising and loyalty platforms, and plans a Confidential Compute Environment using TEEs for encrypted, on-chain computation targeted for Q1 2026.
The token fundamentals remain unchanged: a fixed supply of 21 million ZEN with a current circulating supply of 17,643,649 ZEN, or 84% of the cap. The migration to Base and closer alignment with Coinbase custody and institutional products, including the Grayscale Horizen Trust (HZEN), are intended to enhance liquidity and institutional appeal.
In the Layer 3 context, Horizen can customize execution and economics without maintaining a standalone mainchain. A Layer 3 functions as an application-focused execution layer that settles to a Layer 2 or L1 while inheriting security and connectivity benefits, allowing Horizen to optimise for privacy-first workloads.
Horizen’s transition to a Base Layer 3 marks a significant strategic pivot from an independent blockchain to a modular architecture that combines EVM compatibility with privacy-first technology. This move prioritizes developer accessibility, cost efficiency and regulatory-compliant privacy features while maintaining execution flexibility, positioning Horizen to capture value in both the growing Base ecosystem and the broader privacy-focused application market.