From Anonymity to Accountability: the New Era of Compliant Privacy by Zain Cheng | EPS 2025 Workshop

[applause] Hey everyone, I'm Zay and um CTO of Horizon Labs. I'm excited to be here. I'm talking about privacy and the path from anonymity to accountability uh the new era of compliant privacy. Uh special thanks for Paulo Capelli who's uh our engineering manager, the lead for Horizon and the brains behind this. Uh the broad strokes are a quick backstory around DAP's privacy liquidity, our contribution as the Horizon protocol and a road map.

The backstory uh this is uh Ethereum's transition triangle. It was introduced by Vitalik about two years ago and it talked about how to take Ethereum from a young experimental technology to a mature tech stack and it requires three transitions. On the bottom left we have scalability through roll-ups and that's in full swing. We have the rollup ccentric road map with many successful L2s such as base and arbitrum. And on the right we have usability with smart contract wallets.

ERC's 4337 uh is fully live and it's being adopted as we speak. Privacy is still early and um we at Horizon are focused on this piece of the triangle. Fast forward to this week. Uh, Vitalik did his Ethereum in 30 minutes uh the annual talk at Dev Connect Devcon and uh there was a quick uh slide around privacy and the different layers of it. And earlier today he and Roger uh from tour talked about onion services and making Ethereum uh compatible with Thor and onionizing it.

But it's not just Ethereum. We have uh this report from A16Z showing um how crypto is reaching more and more mainstream users and the need for privacy is more urgent than ever. This is the report just from last month. Uh on the top left you'll see privacy related um Google searches spiking, total flows through rail gun steadily increasing through the year. uh Zcash private pools increasing and then all these notable privacy efforts uh including the Ethereum Foundation's new privacy team uh the wallet Kohaku uh Paxos's uh partnership with Lao Zcash's new wallet and um Noir with um the language uh from Aztec uh around programming for ZK and uh OFAC officially uh lifting sanctions on tornado cash.

So all great things in this movement for privacy for us at Horizon, most businesses and financial enterprises, privacy is practical concern, not just an it ideological one. This is the world we're building for at Horizon. And that's our focus. But who is Horizon? We started out as a privacy coin.

You'll see our legacy logo right there. Um, alongside with Zcash and Monero, as the landscape evolved, we have we see privacy chains like Aztec, uh, Secret Network, apps like Tornado Cache, Rail Gun, and privacy pools. And where we are now is that we're in in the world of compliance, regulatory compliance, and privacy. Another angle to look at privacy and efforts is to look at liquidity. In the blue you see uh base uh we've highlighted here as one of the top TVL chains 13 billion as of just a few days ago.

Uh that is always um going back and forth with arbitum. What we're showing here is that many of the privacy efforts are uh unique in their way they're tackling the problem. And so um the layer ones not they're not immediately tapped into liquidity of Ethereum nor base. Uh same with um other layer 2s like Aztec and we believe that uh there's this underserved market to tap into liquidity and privacy. So at Horizon we're focused as this privacy layer for Bass.

We were part of the initial cohort when Bass launched their L3s app chains earlier in the year and we're excited to continue uh building it.

But what is Horizon? What is the protocol? What is our contribution?

The Horizon protocol is really consists of two large pieces. The first is the chain that I just mentioned. It is um it is a L3 OP stack chain that rolls up directly to base and then we have a comp confidential compute environment really is a trusted execution environment that runs alongside um this chain um ho uh is currently in test net and we're on our way to mainet um it hosts several privacy oriented DAPs and it has this unique connection to the the confidential compute environment. We're immediately we're tapping into the liquidity base through Stargate via layer zero's interoperability stack. Liquidity pools of native assets are deployed on each supporting chain.

So we leverage the instant guaranteed finality that is that requires no waiting no [clears throat] waiting for challenge windows. You'll see later that we're constantly improving this bridging um this bridging to base. Uh the [clears throat] the horizon cce that's the confidential compute environment. We are everything outside of the CC is encrypted and encryption is pervasive throughout. All DAPs can leverage this and these two things uh form the horizon protocol.

The way these uh the two components interact is that you can see on the right the DAP front end interacting with our Horizon smart contract. Uh that gives you access to the TE. Uh what's included is this orchestrator that loads DAPs um after they're registered then saving their state in an encrypted way into the data layer. All all applications have to do is write their application code, their UX and uh focus only on their workflow. Horizon will take care of the private state, the input actions, the output actions as well as any deanmization requests.

Uh so that means that their state is fully encrypted and persisted in a reliable data layer. action types are and parameters also encrypted as well. Uh and you define the events our platform will encrypt them and for those uh and authority requests can be uh registered and it is the DAPs that define the granularity of it and you let our protocol do the rest. So application code automatically gets deployed as a W was in the TE and all the data outside the TE is encrypted. Um and auditability prevents any concerns from regulators.

So that is uh our protocol on a high level. In terms of our road map, this is our near-term road map. I talked a little bit about base anchoring uh and liquidity alignment. So in about two weeks we will launch to mainet uh as an OP bedrock rollup and um we'll feature this fast crosschain bridging from Stargate. Next is our uh Horizon CC the confidential compute environment.

we uh will release that with a built-in compliance and uh authorization framework and then we'll build this uh toolbox of KYC accreditation and privacy preserving identities. Lastly, we'll we're working to improve that native bridge with validity proofs where we'll leverage OP succinct risk zero Kyua and uh take that traditional 7-day window down to minutes. the longer term research roadmap uh so those phases all are part of stage zero uh which is really taking that trusted execution environment uh and bringing it to life uh those bullet points are some of the DAPs that we uh are planning to support they're in test net now going to mainet uh stage one consists of privacy apps that our research team is working on including drip filters which help with um dart tools, auditable private logs, which allow for folks to go through encrypted logs to find uh things that they're looking for. But really, stage two is taking that hardware TE and moving it into cryptographic TE. And lastly, we want to be prepared for a postquantum world, uh, which is where we're, uh, which is the long-term goal.

I'm glad. Thank you for seeing us. uh with us here. Uh this is our contact information. Come to our website.

Um our white paper is going to be released shortly and uh connected with us on Twitter.

Thank you.

Thank you.