Introducing Vela: The Confidential Compute Layer on Horizen

For years, the Horizen community has known that the lack of privacy on public blockchains was the problem holding serious adoption back. Today, we're ready to show you what we've built to solve it.

If you've been following Horizen's development closely, you know about HCCE: the Horizen Confidential Compute Environment. That was the engineering name for something we've been quietly hardening for production. Today HCCE has a proper name, and it's open for developers to build with.

Meet Vela.

Vela is the confidential compute layer that powers private execution on the Horizen Chain. It's the infrastructure that makes privacy practical.

Blockchain transparency created something genuinely valuable: open, permissionless liquidity accessible to anyone. But it also created a structural problem for serious market participants. Every position, every rebalancing decision, every institutional move is permanently visible to competitors, front-runners, and bad actors.

Over $600 million is extracted annually from public blockchain participants through front-running and sandwich attacks alone. In February, the Axiom insider trading case, where platform employees used internal dashboards to track user wallets and trade ahead of them, demonstrated the problem even more starkly: when a platform can see your activity, the only safeguard is human trust. Human trust fails.

Vela's operator-blind architecture eliminates that attack surface at the hardware level. Not as a policy or as a promise, but as a cryptographic guarantee.

The timing matters too. Regulatory clarity is converging at the same time. MiCA is live. The SEC issued its joint staff statement on tokenized securities in January. ERC-7943 is standardising the compliance interface at the token level. The infrastructure for institutional DeFi is being built, and the missing piece has always been confidential, auditable execution. Vela is that missing piece

Vela executes applications inside Trusted Execution Environments: hardware-isolated enclaves where every computation is cryptographically attested and no one, including us, can observe what's running inside.

The only information that reaches the public ledger is an encrypted state root and a proof that the computation ran on verified hardware. Your logic, your positions, your data stay sealed.

This is how Horizen delivers on its core promise: privacy that protects strategy and commercial activity while remaining auditable and regulatory-compatible. Confidentiality you can prove.

Three capabilities work together to make this real:

• Private from the public. Every execution starts clean, inside an isolated enclave. Nothing persists between runs. The public sees only encrypted outputs.

• Private from the operator. Hardware-level isolation means even Vela cannot observe what's running inside. There is no internal dashboard to abuse.

• Transparent to the regulator. Compliance is verifiable through cryptographic proof, not manual data dumps. MiCA-compatible. Travel Rule compatible. On your terms.

Vela is currently available as a local development environment. The starter kit gives you a fully working sandbox to start building confidential applications using Go, Rust, or any language that compiles to WASM. No circuit design. No ZK expertise required. No new cryptographic paradigms to learn.

Start here: 👉 Vela Starter Kit on GitHub

Supporting repositories:

• vela

• vela-common-ts

• vela-common-go

• vela-nova

Vela is the confidential compute layer that makes privacy-first applications on Horizen Chain possible. We're building it in public, and we want the community to shape what comes next.

Build with the starter kit. Tell us what you need. File issues. The roadmap is influenced by what we hear from builders.

If you've worked through the starter kit and want to go further, we can deploy a dedicated Vela instance for your team on the Horizen chain testnet on request. We're prioritising two features before opening testnet to a wider audience: multi-app support and self-deployment. When those are ready, testnet access opens fully. Subscribe to receive the announcement directly to your inbox.

In the meantime, if your team is ready to move beyond the local sandbox, reach out. We'll get you set up 👉 Get Early Access

• Read the Vela Whitepaper

• Explore Vela Documentation

• Visit Vela Website

Have questions? Find us at Discord

Vela is built by Horizen Labs. Documentation, repositories, and the starter kit are publicly available at the links above.
See the full press release from Horizen Labs