Horizen

ZenCash split from Zclassic at block 110000, and its own chain began on 30 May 2017. PoW miners ordered UTXO transfers while a treasury model and rewarded Secure and Super Nodes funded development and infrastructure.

The 2018 Horizen name said the ambition had outgrown cash. Zendoo later let the mainchain verify sidechain certificates with zk-SNARKs. This was proof verification for cross-chain state, not a promise that every ZEN movement was invisible.

EON entered mainnet in 2023 as an EVM-compatible sidechain. Forgers and delegators put ZEN into its PoS mechanics, while the older ZEND chain still mined blocks. One ticker now participated in two very different consensus environments.

That split did not become permanent. Horizen chose Base, released final ZEND 6.0.0 and EON 1.5.0 software, and stopped legacy transfers at the 2025 migration. EON was a chapter, not the live chain behind today's product.

On 23 July 2025, EON EOAs and ordinary forger/delegator stakes were mapped to Base addresses. Eligible ZEND P2PKH and P2SH-multisig UTXOs received a claim route. Smart-contract-held EON balances and stakes delegated by contracts were not migrated, a material exception to the word 'all.'

The destination contract is 0xf43eB8De897Fbc7F2502483B2Bef7Bb9EA179229. Its code caps issuance at 21,000,000 and names only the EON and ZEND vaults as initial minters. The ZEND vault owner could load snapshot data before its checkpoint; public code makes that operational trust visible.

The last 5,000,000 unminted ZEN no longer waits for mining. ZenIP 42409 sent 750,000 to the DAO and 500,000 to the Foundation at migration, with remaining allocations vesting over 48 months. A cap survived, but the path into circulation moved from block rewards to governed contracts.

The chain launched on 10 December 2025 as an OP Stack L3 settling on Base. Chain ID 26514 identifies it, a dedicated sequencer orders transactions, and ETH pays both execution and Base data costs. ZEN crosses through an OFT adapter; it is no longer the gas coin by default.

The privacy promise also changed location. Legacy shielded transfers were removed. Current documents point developers to Vela for TEE-based confidential execution and to zkVerify for external ZK proof verification. Ordinary ERC-20 transfers remain observable, and zkVerify is a separate L1 rather than a ZEN-owned sidechain.

ZEN remains the DAO governance token. Yet approved votes pass through Special Council review and Foundation implementation. The Foundation administers assets and contracts, while the L3 adds sequencer, proposer, bridge and integration control points whose complete current key map is not published in the reviewed pages.

ZenIP 42408 first approved the funding: 50,000 ZEN over one year and up to 50% of net DAO liquidity earnings, within a four-year 215,000-ZEN plan renewed annually. The later mainnet how-to documents an open staking service, rather than merely that authorization. It labels DAO bootstrap funding, DAO liquidity earnings, zkVerify node emissions and L3 sequencer fees as live inputs, while application fee sharing is onboarding and Vela is in development. These are the project’s descriptions of reward inputs, not independently audited payments; neither the approval nor the service guarantees yield or selects the sequencer.

ZEN provides a transferable token and conditional participation in governance and staking. The reviewed sources do not establish equity, dividends, fixed-value redemption, ownership of Horizen Labs or the Foundation, or a claim on zkVerify merely from holding ZEN. This is a limit of the reviewed evidence, not a conclusion about every possible legal claim. The asset survived by changing its functions.