Grayscale Investments is making a $6.3 million investment in the cryptocurrency ZEN. The investment will be through a new fund whose entire focus is on Horizen, a small and relatively unknown platform that hosts a cryptocurrency, called ZEN.
Grayscale Investments is best known in the cryptocurrency community for their Bitcoin Investment Trust (GBTC), which enables retail investors to gain exposure to Bitcoin through their traditional brokerage accounts, without having to deal with any of the issues and complexities involved in buying physical Bitcoin from a cryptocurrency exchange.
What is Horizen and ZEN?
ZEN is a privacy focused cryptocurrency underneath the Horizen project, and it hosts several unique features, including censorship-resistant publishing, a platform to build privacy applications on, and the generation of universal basic income through personal data ownership.
Grayscale invested in the Horizen project by purchasing ZEN, which is essentially the Horizen project’s cryptocurrency. Horizen came about after the ZEN team conducted a rebranding of sorts, in which they expanded what was originally called the ZenCash platform in order to focus more on its privacy features and other features. Horizen became the general name to refer to the project, while ZEN became the cryptocurrency of the project.
Grayscale’s ZEN Investment Comes After 51% Network Attack
ZenCash was originally founded in 2017 and rebranded to Horizen this summer.
The rebranding came about after ZenCash was the victim of a 51% attack in June, in which hackers essentially took control of the majority of the network’s nodes, enabling them to falsify transactions and to steal ZEN.
Horizen’s co-founder, Rob Viglione, claimed that the Horizen team quickly contained the hack, and has since updated the network’s security in order to prevent this type of attack from occurring in the future. The attack, however, already generated a significant amount of negative press, which was likely the impetus for the rebranding.
Grayscale is now investing $6.3 million in the Horizen project, proving that the investment group believes that the platform has sufficiently fixed the network’s flaws and is developing a unique enough product to compete with its competitors, including the popular cryptocurrency, Zcash.
While speaking about the multi-million-dollar investment, Grayscale’s managing director, Michael Sonnenshein, said:
“We’ve been very impressed with the Horizen team and its vision for ZEN as a leading privacy coin. Grayscale is at the forefront of asset management in this emerging industry, and we will continue to offer our clients access to the most interesting blockchain projects in the world.”
Horizen’s co-founder and president also spoke about Grayscale’s investment, saying:
“The launch of the ZEN Investment Trust on Grayscale’s platform marks a significant milestone in the continued global expansion of the Horizen platform and the services we offer. Grayscale conducts unparalleled research and due diligence on their investment products, striving to offer regulated and professionally managed exposure to the digital currency market for institutional and accredited investors worldwide.”
Horizen (ZEN) was trading up nearly 5% at the time of writing, trading at $18.49 according to CoinMarketCap.
Featured image from Shutterstock.