Making Privacy Practical: Rolf Versluis on Bringing Business Onchain

🎙️ Guest: Rolf Versluis, Co-founder of Horizen (@horizenglobal)
🕒 Duration: ~42 minutes

Episode Overview

Public blockchains unlock composability, liquidity, and open infrastructure, but they also put every transaction on display. For builders and businesses, that transparency can be a dealbreaker: competitors can trace customers, vendors can infer pricing, and payroll becomes a public ledger.

In this episode, Lindsey McConaghy sits down with Rolf Versluis, co-founder of Horizen, to talk about why privacy can’t be an “either/or” choice, and how Horizen is building toward selective, auditable privacy as a privacy-first L3 on Base. Rolf shares his unusual path into crypto, from serving as a U.S. Navy submarine officer and nuclear engineer, to scaling a Cisco networking business, to early Bitcoin mining, before co-founding Horizen (originally ZenCash) to bring business-grade privacy to onchain payments.

They dig into why stablecoins in their current form still don’t meet the needs of many real-world businesses, the lessons Horizen learned navigating regulatory constraints, and the technical toolkit powering privacy today, from TEEs and ZK proofs to MPC and fully homomorphic encryption.

They get into:
• Rolf’s journey from Navy submarines to Cisco to Bitcoin mining and building in crypto
• What “business-level privacy” means, and why it matters for adoption
• Why Horizen migrated ZEN to Base and launched a privacy-first L3 appchain
• The compliance challenge: selective disclosure, auditability, and regulation-friendly design
• The privacy stack in plain English: TEEs, ZKPs, FHE, and MPC, and their tradeoffs
• Why many businesses still won’t use stablecoins (yet) without privacy
• Horizen’s grants program and what they look for in builders (aspirin, not vitamins)
• Founder lessons on surviving cycles, managing runway, and solving real problems outside Web3

If you’re building in payments, stablecoins, identity, or privacy infrastructure, and you’re thinking about what it takes to bring serious businesses onchain, this episode is for you.

Where to Listen

🔹 Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/making-privacy-practical-rolf-versluis-on-bringing/id1799063494?i=1000742523713
🔹 Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/episode/2T8LtH4uDfJXtlFZZtA7by?si=40c00fc77472473e
🔹 YouTube → https://youtu.be/PviLtKtDyQM

Connect with Horizen & Rolf

🌐 horizen.io
🐦 X: @horizenglobal

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🐦 X: @TokenThoughts_ | @lindsey___I
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