Layer One Blockchain-based Technology with Rob Viglione

Today we are talking to the co-founder and CEO of Horizen Labs, Rob Viglione. Horizen Labs is a layer one blockchain-based technology company that focuses on data privacy and security. Horizen Labs was created in 2017, but Rob has been working with cryptocurrency since 2012. He says he first heard about Bitcoin while working and living in Afghanistan, where currency is often unstable. He quickly realized this new currency is needed all over the world. Rob says in the US we’re used to relatively stable currencies, but it’s a different story in most other places around the world. A decentralized finance option was desperately needed.

After working in Afghanistan, Rob went back to University in 2014 to get his PhD in finance. He did his dissertation on crypto finance, and so he got a lot of research into it. That knowledge led him to launch what is now Horizen. While building out Horizen, Rob was focused on value and privacy. They launched as a privacy currency before pivoting to a blockchain operation. Now they’re focused on unlocking a broader sense of things that go beyond money. Rob says with programmable blockchains, the sky is the limit on what can be built on them.

Side chains are Horizen’s answer to scaling. Rob says scaling has been a hot topic since 2014 when people realized that trying to jam too many transactions through a single ledger was challenging. Some people’s answer was to do a bigger block size, but at Horizen they decided to do many blocks in parallel. Their technology allows them to have up to a thousand blockchains operating parallel to each other, and from there you can scale indefinitely.

Rob says people choose Horizen over other blockchains because it is completely in your control, you don’t have to worry about being de-platformed. There’s no convincing other groups to do anything, it’s completely yours. You also capture all the economics of it. Developers can even configure their percentage of transaction fees. Finally, because they have their own dedicated blockchain, they aren’t competing for bandwidth.

If you’d like to follow Horizen’s progress and check out their various projects, visit www.horizenlabs.io. If you’d like to follow Rob, he can be found on LinkedIn or on Twitter @robviglione.

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