Horizen Builder Ecosystem Fund

Horizen is an EVM-native ecosystem for private onchain finance, built on Base. Season 2 of its builder fund backs apps where privacy is a working feature, with a pool of over 100K ZEN and up to $150,000 for select projects. It favors teams that use Horizen's Vela confidential compute layer (TEE) or zkVerify (ZK proofs) and that add utility for the ZEN token.

There are three lanes. Core apps answer Horizen's RFPs, starting with private agentic trading vaults and a private borrow-lend protocol, for up to $150,000. Complementary apps and projects migrating from other chains get mid-size grants. New projects, public goods and wildcards get smaller grants, including audit funding and go-to-market support.

Funding is paid in USDC against milestones: 10% at approval, 20% when you prove your core privacy capability, and the rest split between a security audit (half before, half after passing) and real mainnet usage. Most funded projects also agree to join the ZEN staking rewards pool, for example by sharing protocol fees.