The Shielded Pool will be Permanently Disabled on the Horizen Mainchain on February 7th

On February 7th, 2024, at approximately 12:00pm UTC, ZEN 5.0.0 will perform a network upgrade on Mainnet via hard fork at block #1502800. As previous communications have stated, after this hard fork it will no longer be possible to perform any transactions involving shielded addresses. It is highly recommended to move funds out of the shielded pool before then.

Failure to remove shielded ZEN from shielded addresses prior to the hard fork will result in the loss of your shielded ZEN. It’s important to note that transparent ZEN is not affected by the hard fork, just shielded ZEN.

This move came with the successfully passed ZenIP 42207 earlier this year, which enabled the complete removal of the shielded pool from the Horizen mainchain. This change built upon the deprecation of access to the shielded pool enacted by ZenIP 42204 and is a response to the evolving regulatory environment around privacy tokens, re-confirming and showcasing the project’s strategic pivot away from privacy-focused features. As a result, it will no longer be possible to conduct a private transaction on Horizen or access private addresses as of February 7, 2024.

This is a complete removal of all private payment features from Horizen, effective Feb 7, 2024. There will be no private payment capabilities in Horizen as of this change. Regular public payments, just like Bitcoin, will continue to be supported by Horizen. Horizen will not be a privacy cryptocurrency anymore when this takes effect on Feb 7, 2024.

Again, we strongly recommend that all users with existing funds in private addresses transfer their funds to their own transparent addresses using Sphere by Horizen or zen-cli before February 7th, 2024. After February 7th, 2024 it will not be possible anymore to transfer any funds inside of the shielded pool to any other address. Unshielding funds directly to exchange deposit addresses is strongly discouraged.

There is a guide on the Horizen Blog on how to De-Shield ZEN on Sphere Wallet, users will need to de-shield any ZEN in a shielded address by transferring it out from the shielded pool.

The Horizen Ecosystem Team remains readily available to answer any questions around this, please open up a ticket, or reach out to us on our Discord.

About Horizen EON

Horizen EON (https://eon.horizen.io/) is an EVM-compatible smart contracting platform and the first of many smart contract sidechains in the Horizen ecosystem. Horizen EON allows developers to efficiently build and deploy decentralized applications (dapps) on Horizen while benefiting from EVM compatibility. Horizen EON is built with scale and user experiences in mind, on Horizen’s powerful horizontally scaling protocol, Zendoo.