HOPR & HATHOR — Two cryptos, one target: a permanent solution for privacy and efficient payments

What's up, everyone? I'm Giovanni. Welcome to this AMA session by Cointelegraph. Today we'll be talking about two very interesting projects, Hathor and hopr. Hathor is a scalable blockchain that allows users to build their own digital assets, while HOPR is a blockchain protocol focused on data and metadata privacy. So today I'm joined by Jan Martins, CEO at Hator, and Sebastiel Burgle, CEO at Hopper. How are you doing, guys today?

Hey, thank you very much. Pleasure to be talking to you guys. And telegraph watchers, for sure.

So, Jan and Sebastian will be telling us how their product works, the roadmaps for 2021, and the motives behind their recent partnership. I just want to. Before we start, I just want to remind our audience that this is an AMEC session.

So.

So, guys, feel free to ask your questions writing in the chat, and I will be asking your questions directly to our guests. So just write anything that comes to your mind regarding this project. So let's get started. I would like first to start with you, Jan. So, Jan, can you tell us in a nutshell, what Hathor is about?

Sure.

Well, hacker is a layer one protocol blockchain that we started back in 2018. It's based on the PhD thesis of our CTO and co founder, Dr. Marcelo Brugliato. At the time, he was studying blockchain scalability issues. And so we came up with this completely new architecture for blockchain protocols that in fact combine a dag, a graph of transactions, with a chain of blocks, like in traditional blockchains. So he came up with this architecture to deal with the issues of scalability that we were facing back in 2017, and again, we are facing now. So it's a completely new architecture. It's coded from scratch, it's not a fork. We coded, started on 2018, August. One and a half year of coding before we launched our mainnet. So, yeah, completely new, different architecture.

Okay, cool. We're going to get much deeper into the topic of your mainnet and how this mainnet is actually developing right now. But first I would like to turn to Sebastian and let him explain what Hopper is about.

Yeah, totally. So Hopper is a layer zero privacy solution. Cp. So, as we've just heard about the Layer one, the world of the blockchains, we are a layer under that. And what that means is, you might have wondered at some point, well, how is it actually that my transactions come from my wallet? So, for example, from Metamask onto that blockchain, onto nodes Running a blockchain node. Right. And currently that is one of the many aspects in the crypto space which is missing a privacy solution. So what Hopper provides is basically a layer zero data exchange protocol that provides a private means of transmitting data from A to B. So basically when I'm talking to some other party, this data is currently exposed for the world to see, even if it's end to end encrypted. Right. So even if you have end to end encrypted data, you still see who is talking to who. And that is what Hopper is solving on the network layer so that you don't expose, for example, your IP address. So Hopper is an incentivized mixnet that relays data packets via A, B and C. So intermediate relay hops before they get to a destination and thereby provides metadata privacy. Can get into more details later on. But again, on high level, it's a layer zero solution that provides privacy on a network layer for any sort of application. Especially interesting here, of course, for this crowd. Of course, Blockchain interactions.

Okay, that's pretty cool. I am very happy to see that our audience is very much engaged and they are already asking a lot of questions, guys, for you. So keep going, keep going. And we'll be asking all of them if. Yeah, if the time allows us. So I just want to make sure that people understand why we are conducting this live stream with you two guys together. So if you can briefly explain what is the connection between your projects between Hathor and Hopper and explain the motives behind the partnerships that you built, maybe Jan can start. You are muted, Jan.

Sorry. Sure.

So when we first got in touch.

With Hatcher through some mutual connections, we immediately saw that we had a lot of ideal shared. I really much like their idea of being completely decentralized from day one, which is something that we also very much care about and do on Hatcher Network. And, and also privacy. Data privacy, of course, is central for the days that we have right now. So if we can use Hopper technology and hacker to make sure that we make our nodes more secure, our wallets, all the infrastructure that we have by using Hopper technology, that's something that pretty much will make us much stronger and really believe that Hopper is making something significant in the space. As I mentioned, they are layer zero. So it's a building block for future chains. And that's where we want to be.

Awesome. Okay, so I think that we can already start asking questions from the audience because there are a lot of them. So Bob Stepnicka is asking, is ator Building bridges to Ethereum or are they trying to replace it? That's a question for you, Jan.

Okay, that's a cool question. I think Ethereum is an amazing project. Of course, it has built so much paint, so many stuff. And we do have currently some bridges being built actually by the community, which is awesome. Community is actually building some bridges to have some cross chain tokens from Ethereum to our network. And we really do envision that, you know, we can be used side by side. It's not like we're gonna completely take all the market from Ethereum, but there's a very particular thing, especially if you consider all the gas fees that we have nowadays that people want to just trade fast and cheap and they can use heter for that purpose. So yeah, we do have some bridges being built already by some partner companies and I do believe that we're gonna get some market share from Ethereum. But yeah, not everything. You know, they are really like can do anything you want with Ethereum, but we do have a lot of space there to grow.

Okay, now I would like to ask a question from the audience to Sebastian. So. So Nambo is asking, what is your project's main target in 2021 and what is your vision and mission in the hopper? Marketing. So I guess the question is about how do you plan to enlarge your community in 2021?

Absolutely, yeah. So first of all, I have to say that we're starting only recently, right? So Hopper is very early on its journey. And what this means is that over this year of 2021, we want to take this bare technology, which we so far tested only in a testnet, to being a useful decentralized protocol. So that is our main goal over the course of 2021. And what this means also for marketing and community perspective is that we need to engage in an increasing fashion to those who want to run nodes, make their life easier, and also communicate. Right. So if you want to run a Hopper node because you want to monetize your unused home Internet bandwidth, then we have to reach those folks, right? So we have to reach them on a technical level. We also have to reach them through our kind of incentivization campaigns and games that we have ongoing.

Okay, cool. So I want to remind our audience to actually like this live stream and subscribe to our channel and also continue asking questions because I see that there is a lot of engagement. But before, I would like to go back to our narrative of questions. So I'm curious to know regarding the economics behind your project. So I read that Hathor, the Hathor network doesn't require any fees. So in order to conduct transactions on Hathor, there are no fees required. So how can Hathor sustain itself without any fees? That's the question for you, Jan.

So first of all, as I said.

It'S the new architecture that we have, so our transactions are actually in a DAG of transactions and the blocks are just linking to it. So in a sense it's different from traditional blockchains where the transactions are inside the blocks. So our blocks are kind of empty and they just link to transactions in the dag. So this is an important difference for us.

And in that sense, all you need.

For propagating a transaction is resolving some proof of work. So there's some small mining involved in propagating transactions and anyone can do that. So you don't need to pay any fees to just broadcast it and then your transaction is going to be confirmed when the block layer comes in. But from the miners perspective, they really incentivize and just mining and they don't need to select the transactions that they're going to have inside their blocks because there's no limit in that sense. Like you have Bitcoin where you need to choose to make sure you have the, the highest profitability. You're just gonna point to two transactions on the DAG of transactions and then just confirm that whole block of transactions. Let's say, sorry, blocks, not Google here, but like all the transactions that are linked to it. And I think one of the things that we're going to be talking a bit later on, hopefully it's about merchant mining, which really incentivizes the miners to mine even though they don't have the transaction fees. So I'd say this is a combination of this new architecture and also the merge and mining.

All right, so I would like to ask the same question to Sebastian regarding how your economics work. But first I have an interesting question from the audience regarding Hopper. So Trang NGO asks, protecting users members data and privacy has become a problem that many companies must face in their development. So can you explain a bit about how Hopper Security works?

Yeah, totally. That's a great question. So what we currently see is for example, in this Zoom call. Right. Let's take this Zoom call as an example. So Zoom currently learns about the IP address of every of the connected parties and it's probably not just Zoom, but it's also a bunch of other third parties that learn information that are not exactly necessary to do the business that they're doing. So as an example for Hopper, what we're aiming for is to hide this connection metadata. How this works is that instead of sending data directly to the receiving party, in this case it might be a Zoom server. It hops via intermediate relay hops to the destination. Now, every single relay hop is keeping a data package for a short amount of time, caching it and mixing it up with other packets that go through that node at the same time. Thereby, it entirely obfuscates who is talking to whom, how much data they're exchanging and how frequently they're talking to one another. That is basically something you could say that you could integrate in a metadata private zoom or in a metadata private browser. So similar to the Tor browser, but more private, more decentralized, and actually incentivized for you who wants to run a node and actually support this network.

Okay, actually we have a question from our audience regarding. It's a follow up question to what Jan was talking about. So Muhammad Aslan asks, if Hator has zero fees, how will miners make money? The number of token will keep building up, where is the reward? And is there a cross chain plan for Hathor? So I guess these are two separate questions. Maybe you would like to reply to make clear about the first one. So how will miners make money? And the number of tokens will keep building up, where is the reward?

Yeah, sure. I mean it's correct.

We have a traditional blockchain. So with every new block you have the mining rewards that the miners get for their work in securing the network. And in that sense, as for the economics, for instance, we are right now currently a tokenization platform, a digital asset blockchain where you can easily create your token in less than 60 seconds without no coding. And for that, if you want to create your tokens, you need to lock some hackers. And so like Hatter is central for our network in the same sense. All the future services and products that we develop on top of the network, like upcoming Nano contracts, Sidedex, which is our version of sidechain, they are all gonna be based around the Hatter token, which is central for us. And that's why we believe that it's so important and why it's gonna be used in our network. But miners, they get Hator tokens in every new block. And yeah, it's low emission. We currently are at 32 Hatter per block. We have yearly halving until we reach 8 Hatcher per block and then it's going to continue at that level, definitely.

Okay, thanks. So I just want to make sure that the audience understands the. That Hopor and Hopper are in a partnership. So we have a lot of questions actually asking regarding this partnership. Jo Ruben is asking, how will Hopr and Hator work together? Will the Hopper token be on the Hator network? Maybe Sebastian can answer this one.

Exactly. So we didn't launch on Mainnet yet. Right. So that's actually going to happen. End of next week we have our Mainnet release. The initial version will work on Ethereum just because we have to get started somewhere, but absolutely. Hawthor is one of the hottest chains that we're exploring right now. We are right now at the stage where we are basically finalizing the Hopper protocol. What that means is that there's a lot of architectural things that we are finalizing for the Mainnet. But yes, actually having a connector that does not just connect to Ethereum but also connects to Hawthor is one of the things that we have on the architecture and implementation roadmap for 2021.

Okay, and we'll get more in details regarding your plans for 2021 soon, but let's talk about the current status of your projects right now. So there are a lot of questions regarding the status of the main Net for Hathor Bongoboon, but is asking how many people are using Hathor right now? What's the volume process through the platform? Jan, maybe you can reply to this one.

Sure.

I mean, we do have a public.

Supporter that people can easily see the amount of transactions going on. I have to get the latest numbers.

I don't have it by heart right.

Now, but in terms of adoption, I'd say that We've been over one year, just over one year on our mainnet. It was launched on January 3rd, the same day as Bitcoin, actually, the same time we made sure of that as homage to Bitcoin. So that's the. We shared the Genesis block just 11 years later. And so we've been building our our mainnet since just over one year and it's grown much, much more than we envisioned for this first year.

We've got a lot of community, a lot of miners.

When we first started, we only had GPUs. Now we have ASICS and half an exahash of mining power. So yeah, it's been going really great. Much better than we were expecting for this first year.

Mm. Okay, cool. So now I would like to talk a little bit about the system of governance of your project. So, Sebastian, I know that Hopper relies on a decentralized governance system called Hopper Genesis Dao so could you explain a bit how this system works and in what sense it introduces some novelties into how governance usually works?

Sure, yeah. So many times we see this approach of teams that they call stepwise decentralization. It basically goes like this. You have a team that launches a project, launches a token, and then after a few years they introduce some on chain governance or they introduce a DAO or whatnot. And at Hopper we realized, hey, we actually have a pretty sensible community who have helped us a ton on the testnet times. Right? So the economic incentives for participating on our test network really, really low. So it was not really like a huge airdrop like we've seen in Defi. So we had actually a community who provided reasonable feedback, who were really helping us a lot in the testnet phase. And so we said, hellfact is we introduce a DAO now. We empower our community today. So actually our community was entirely in charge of the Hopper launch. The Hopper token distribution that actually started yesterday has been entirely decided upon by the Hopper Genesis Dao, which is over 3,000 participants from our testnet who have the entire decision making power of how that happened. In fact, actually initially I didn't even personally particularly like that proposal that there was in the end the winning proposal. But whatever community voted, so we went with it anyway. And that is, yeah, the initial governance decision of the Hopper protocol rests in the hands of these 3,000 participants. And when the Hopper token is finally completely launched, there will be a mainnet DAO comprising all Hopper token holders.

Okay, cool. So now I would like to move on. Talking about your. As you mentioned, Sebastian, you, you are conducting right now a token sale which started yesterday. So Athor already launched its token in January on Kucoin. So I would like to know from Jan how the listing went and why you chose this specific platform to launch your token on.

Yeah, sure.

It was a really great listing, to be honest. Well, obviously Kucoin is a top amazing exchange in our top 10 CoinMarketCap. They have over a billion dollars daily volume right now. So I think by any metric they are one of the top exchanges and very strong, but very solid. Our listing there honestly was much better than we were hoping. Right now we are getting over $5 million daily volume.

And.

We got recently a report from a bot, an AI bot, that HDR is one of the. It's first on the top five bullet trend on Kucoin for the last few days with the USDT pair. And this is not like a purchase opinion. It's not like someone saying that it's an AI bot. As a wise advisor of mine says, AI can fly. So for us it's been really, really successful. There's also one thing I would like to address that our community is aware right now that we've been having some issues with withdrawals on Kucoin. And now that everyone's back from the New Year holiday, which is well deserved, we're going to work hard with them to to correct us ASAP and continue our successful partnership. And since we are talking about our friends at Kucoin and the New Year, I want to also welcome back all the miners, all the traders in Asia and wish them a happy New Year. Happy holidays and you deserve the stress. So yeah, it's been wonderful. The listing on Kucoin.

Cool.

And actually there are a lot of questions about your projects of possible future listing on other platforms. But first I would like to thank our audience for being so active and so engaging the conversation. So please continue to ask your questions. Also, I would like to remind you of liking the video and subscribe to our channel. And also for those who just joined the conversation, I would like to remind you that this is a presentation of two very interesting projects, Hathor and hopr. Hathor is a scalable blockchain that allows users to build their own digital assets and HOPR is a blockchain protocol focused on data and metadata privacy. So moving on to the question I would like to ask, because there are a lot of people asking this question, is are there any plans for HOPOR to get listed on other exchanges this year apart from Kucoin?

Yeah, sure. It's one of the questions we get the most. Obviously, as I said, the Kucoin listing has been going really well. We've been working with them every day almost. But yeah, we do have plans on listing on other exchanges that we are working on. Obviously the New Year's slow things down a bit, but now everyone's back, we're going to go full force in it. And yeah, definitely it's something that we want for the community, make it easier for people to access the token, having more liquidity.

Okay. And Sebastian, now we would like to know more about the token sale that you are conducting. So can you maybe briefly explain in what phases is this token sale being conducted and specifically how it is going?

Yeah, exactly. So first of all, maybe just to highlight that again we don't facilitate the sale, actually we don't raise any money from this. So this is purely done by the community. We basically said, okay, 8.5% of the total hopper's token supply goes to the community, which is the largest part of the initial circulating supply. And the community decides what to do with it. And what the community did decide was to do a pre sale. And that is what is currently running. So those 3,300 people who participate in our test nets, they are right now in a pre sale phase and every one of them can purchase hopper tokens with $800. So everyone can purchase $800 worth of hopper tokens, eight in this pre sell. And yeah, it's running for two days. So right now we are at about 24 hours in. But I think what was really crazy is we started yesterday so we thought on a Sunday things would go a little bit slower. But actually, so this pre sale will max out at $2.5 million. So that means every single person invested. And what happens is actually that after five minutes, this pre sales smart contract on the xdai blockchain had raised already half a million dollar. And then after about half an hour, we were at 1.5 million. So now currently this thing is at around 93% maxed out. So 93% of all people who were in the testnet did actually participate in the sale, which is amazing. We were really blown away by the participation of our testnet community in the sale. So, yeah, this is going really well now. What is coming next is that we will on Wednesday start a public distribution so anybody can participate. And that will happen through the Balancer platform. So some of you who follow Defi a bit more are probably familiar with Balancer. It's like a generalized uni swap. Looks very similar actually. And we're doing balancer liquidity bootstrapping pool. So what this means is the price will start super high and it will start at over $1 and then decrease over time until people decide that this is a fair market price and people start buying in which will increase the price again. So it's a little bit kind of a mashup of a Dutch auction and an automated market maker such as Uniswap. So that's then the next phase after the presale concludes.

Okay, so now I would like to ask you guys something a little bit more, I mean less technical, but more regarding your visions for the future. So the vision that you have for blockchain and defi in general, we have a question about it. So to the moon ask. Next phase blockchain adoption will be coming from the Defi space. What is your view on this? What are Hopper plans for blockchains? Mass adoption Maybe that's a question that I'm going to ask you, Sebastian. But then I would like also to know like what's Jan's vision on this?

Yeah, so that's actually an interesting one. Right. So what is this mass adoption of blockchain really look like? I hope that blockchain mass adoption will mean that people actually ultimately I think it's down to education. So I hope that in three to five years people learn about blockchain in like middle school. So I hope that teenagers will not just learn about, you know, basic maths and, you know, languages and stuff. I hope that in middle school you learn how to secure an mnemonic. Right. So mass adoption I think will come when people are really in charge of saving and securing their own crypto assets. And I am hopeful that we will get there within a five to ten year time horizon that really people manage their own assets in a non custodial, censorship resistant and private fashion. So that is my hope for blockchain and crypto assets. And of course we see that. That's the part that I'm very excited about is this web3.3 ecosystem. What does it bring except for just money? And I hope we do see kind of more private ways of, for example, Facebook, Twitter. Right. I do hope that we see some of these amazing web 2 platforms emerge in a web 3 fashion that kind of is breathing the ethos of a web3world which are self custody of money and data.

Okay, cool. So Jan, maybe you can give us your vision regarding the perspectives of Defi of bringing mass adoption and then I will follow up with more technical questions regarding Hathor.

Sure hard to follow after Dr. Burrow put it so thingly. But yeah, I guess we're going to get more adoption. I mean you're seeing right now institutional adoption on blockchain is different from 2017 where you just had speculators and now we're actually getting some serious companies and people getting into the space and paying attention. So I think really, really are on the pivotal point for the crypto space. Defi obviously is going to play a big role in it. We are starting already to see this clash with traditional markets, kind of this crypto etos that we had with the whole Reddit and GameStop debacle. And so yeah, I do believe that Defi is probably the most interesting use case right now we have on crypto and when we start getting also companies, more traditional enterprises also adopting it and that's when we're going to have real game changing experiences on crypto And I agree with Sebastian when he says like three to five years really is not something that's going to happen overnight. You know, it's going to take a while, but we're going to get there for sure.

So now I would like to ask you a question which is more technical, Jan. So I know that Hathor is based on a two decimal system. So can you explain more in details, what is this decimal system and how it works?

Sure. I mean when we launched Hator, we just chose that we would have only 3 decimals for our coin, that we felt that people were already used to it because that's what all the coins, I mean traditional coins they trade with. So that's why we decided to go with 2 decimals and say there's no big secret about it. But yeah, that's the only reason we thought people already used to it. So that's, let's use what people already used to.

But I guess there are like some technical issues with this system. Isn't it a problem for wrapped high price tokens like HAT or btc?

Okay. I think they're starting to talk about when there are some bridges being developed. Yeah. This is one of the things that it's, it's on our list for a roadmap to tackle probably for custom tokens on our network. We want to enable them to have a custom number of decimals that they can use. That's different from what we have for hcr, which is our native token. But yeah, at the moment we don't think it's a problem. But as we get adoption and grow, I say it's going to be a good problem that we're going to have.

Okay, now I would like to ask Sebastian another technical question. So Joa Ruben is asking HOPPER is a proof of relay. Are there any more details available about how much minimum HOPPER is needed to run a node? How will you make sure it will be accessible as possible with privacy in mind?

Yeah, so that's actually part of the reason why we opened up to the community. We don't want to be a central gatekeeper in this whole thing. We don't want to be the central gatekeeper when it comes to the tokens. That's why we give it out to the community free of charge without getting anything back for it. At the same time. It means that anybody can get access to these tokens which is required to run a node. So so far we have not introduced any minimum stake because we want to see kind of small stakers on the HOPPER network. We've been actually discussing to introduce a minimum stake of 10 hopper per node, just to make it a little bit more predictable what will happen when you start a node and fund payment channels. So the minimum amount of hopper token required per node is actually extremely low. So you might see some other especially proof of stake chains where you need to have a ton of money and otherwise you can't run a node for hopper. That's certainly not going to be the case. So you will be able to run a hopper node with very minimal stake. The catch is just the more you stake, the more you can relay and the more you earn. So the higher you fund your node, the more rewards you can make by relaying traffic for other people. And if you have sufficient Internet bandwidth, which by now most of us do at home, then yeah, you can monetize that by running a hover node.

Awesome. So I just want to remind our audience to ask any question that they came to their mind, either something related to the vision of this project or any technical issues that you want to know about. I will be asking Jan and Sebastian about it, but I think that now I would like to touch upon a very interesting feature of Hathor which is the merged mining feature. So Hathor offers a merged mining feature that allows miners to mine both Bitcoin and the Hathor token. So Jan, can you tell us a bit more about how this function works?

Yeah, sure.

So as I mentioned, we are a proof of work network. It's for us it's the battle tested consensus algorithm out there and we also chose the same algorithm as Bitcoin. So you can do merged mining with bitcoin or actually any other of the other sha256 coins out there at the moment. We actually share a lot of the hash rate power with Bitcoin SV and Bitcoin cash. And for us this was a way actually to grow our hash rate pretty quickly because being the proof of work chain, you know the hash rate is super important for security reasons. So actually there's a post back From Satoshi in 2010, I think on bitcointalk that he laid out this idea of chains sharing the work. And at the moment we are around 500 PETA hash to one hexahash. It's been fluctuating that range. We have already two community created pools where you can merge mine hetero and one of the other bitcoin chains. It's been growing a lot I'd say. Like when we started back in 2010, it's only GPUs and quickly, it was dominated by the ASICS, and now we actually onboard even larger, more traditional mining pools. And actually, there are some pieces of news that I just had just before this call just one hour ago from a big data center in Central Asia that we are really close to getting an agreement to having them onboard some of their mining powers to Hector. So it's gonna make the network even more safe and better and healthier for the miners. Of course, the advantage is that you're gonna be mining two coins. You don't have any losses when mining bitcoin or bitcoin SV or bitcoin cash. So for their side, it's really. They're only gangs.

So that's interesting. I would like to understand a little bit better. Can you explain exactly what is the benefit for miners to mine simultaneously bitcoin and Hator? Why would they want to mine these two coins simultaneously?

Sure. I mean, I'd say from the vision of some of them, if they support a coin, they mine it, which I guess it's only the minority. And it's okay because at the end, mining is like an economic incentive for them. It makes sense because as I said, they're not losing anything. So if they're mining bitcoin or any of their chains and they just merge mining with Hator, they're going to be getting more coins, so they're going to be becoming more profitable. It's not like they are taking a hit from their bitcoin earnings or like, okay, so they're gonna have to share in the sense that they're gonna mine less bitcoins because of it. So, no, it's really just a win win scenario for them. And for us, in our case, what we gained from that is like having the higher hash rate and making the network more secure.

Okay, so I think that we can move on. Talking about your plans, the plans of Hathor and Hopper for 2021. I know that Hathor is about to launch a detailed roadmap in a few hours, but also I would like to know the same regarding Hopper. So maybe Sebastian can give us a start. And just summing up, what are the main milestones that Hopper is aiming to achieve in the course of 2020 and 21?

Yes, certainly. So first of all, the one, the obvious one that is imminent is the launch of our Jungfrau release. So that's how we name it. Our releases are always named after Swiss mountains that will come out end of next week. That will work with the mainnet version of the Hopper token. So that is the One that is the milestone that is imminent. Then the next step is that around three months later, we will have our next major release that will introduce cover traffic. So cover traffic is effectively bogus traffic that is indistinguishable from real traffic and what it provides for you. If you consider running a HOPPER node, you will make extra rewards for relaying traffic. So initially, of course, like in most networks, there's not going to be a lot of traffic. So to solve this chicken and egg problem, because traffic is required to provide privacy, in our case, we introduce cover traffic that is indistinguishable from real traffic and provides privacy for users and provides a return on the token investment for the node runners. That is the second major thing. The third one would be that we are introducing the, not just the Genesis Dao, which is currently managing the governance of the protocol, but that we have actually the full blown hover Dao, which is in fact, and this is something that is that I'm personally very excited about as I'm a big DAO fan. So this main Hopper dao will not just decide on the technical parameters of the network, but also on the legal entity behind. So if you want to induce a change in the board of Hopper association, you can vote with your Hopper tokens on that. So these are some of the, I think, pretty cool things that we're working towards over the course of 2021.

All right, and I would like actually to follow up on this, Sebastian, because we have a question from our audience. Ricardo Andrade is asking what are the first most probable use cases that you, Sebastian predicts for for Hopper. So you mentioned about the possibility to use Hopper to have some sort of voting powers, but are there any other use cases that you can mention?

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So as I was briefly mentioning before, my dream use case is really to see a collaboration between a wallet and a blockchain node. So imagine if you could send a metadata private transaction that goes from your metamask through Hopper to a blockchain node or to Infura. Right. So it could even be a centralized endpoint. But that central endpoint such as Infura should not learn, or alchemy or whatever it may be, should not learn about your identity and your IP address. So that's something that I'm personally very excited about to see in the crypto space. Beyond that, actually, we have a use case that we're piloting with from the medtech industry. So it's actually a device manufacturer that provides kind of sensor solutions for hospital settings and the problem that they're facing is the hospital has to send data from this little sensor that's embedded in a wall to a cloud facility. So you have to basically bridge this gap between a highly regulated environment to a largely unregulated environment. And in order to do that, and this is really a European Union compliance requirement, gdpr, that requires them to have a solution like Hopper. So this is our first pilot in that direction. And I have the feeling there's a lot more use cases that simply need privacy, not just because of school. I also like privacy because I find it useful and the only way to go. But large corporations need it because it's simply a legal requirement for them.

Yeah, and actually, before actually moving to Jan and asking him regarding his plans for 2021, I would like just a quick comment from you, Sebastian, regarding the location of your company. As far as I understand you are based in Switzerland, right?

Yes, exactly. So the Hopper, actually our primary entity, is not a company, but it's an association. So Hopper association is based in Zurich in Switzerland. So, yes, that is our headquarters, our office, our team is currently semi distributed with a headquarter in Zurich in Switzerland. Yeah. Because Switzerland is actually a country that is both actually having a long history on protecting privacy as well as like a basic democracy that is embedded in the. In the mindset there. So we think it's a very suitable location to launch such a democratic privacy project.

For sure. So let's move on to Ian. So would you like to just briefly explain what are the main milestones that Hathor is aiming to reach in 2021?

Sure, yeah. Just before that, I want to say that Sebastian's dream use case is really interesting and hopefully we can collaborate on that to also bring it to Hator and hetero wallets and hetero nodes.

Absolutely.

Yeah. And yeah, really, really powerful for us. As you mentioned, we had the roadmap being released later today. The main goal for this year, it's definitely getting adoption. I say that most projects in crypto are looking for it. And you know, right now, as I mentioned, we are in a really different state, as in 2017, that we have actually corporations, enterprises getting into this game and seeing the value of blockchain. So that's what we are aiming for. So we had this first year of, I'd say, a lot of learning. We are strengthening our network, making our tools easier to use. We are creating what our community is very excited about, the Nano contracts for second semester. Also we have our version of sidechains with the side decks and So I guess on the technical roadmap we have a lot of exciting stuff. But I'd say that personally I'm really excited about the involvement of the community and what the community can create, because I'm sure that they're going to create some amazing use cases that me, myself or the rest of the team cannot even grow. We actually already see that we have HTR ftt, a company out of Canada. They're already building a Hatter Swap, which is a clone of Uniswap and Hatter. They're also building some other amazing products for commerce and other stuff. Also have the community involved on strengthening and spreading the word, let's say the caterer community. And for me, we really want to incentivize this healthy community of builders. We think it's very powerful. And it's one thing also that hasn't been released yet that we're going to do very soon. It's the first time we're talking about it. Here is the grants program that we're going to have that incentivize people with grants to build products or use cases on top of header network. So I'd say yeah, we want to see the enterprise adoption and we're battling for it, but at the same time we really want to have the community on our side and building and telling us what's the features that they want to have and coming up with really new products that we never thought about.

Okay, but also I saw that I want to ask you a question regarding a technical aspect of your roadmap. So Hathor would be using a system based on nano contracts. So which nano contracts, as far as I understand, are simplified version of traditional smart contracts. So can you explain shortly how these nano contracts work and how exactly they differ from smart contracts?

Yeah, sure. What we see right now on Ethereum, as I said, they have an amazing design, you can do a lot of interesting stuff, but it's also very complex and very hard to use. So what we want to do with nano contracts is get a subset of those features that you have on smart contracts. They're the most used ones, like, because if you follow Pareto law, you get like 80% of the use cases are only going to be using 20% of the features. So for tokenization you already see that people go with the ERC20ER7 one and all that. So basically what we want to have for nano contracts is also getting the most used features from smart contract and making them really easy to use and native in our protocol so people can create their own what we call nano contracts without having to program anything or being an expert. So it's kind of a mix between usability and flexibility. You're not going to have all the features and do all the stuff which is turing complete with Ethereum, which quite honestly most people don't need to, but you're going to have a subset of it that's easier to use and faster to deploy.

Okay, thanks, Jan. So I think that we can ask one more question from the audience and then have you making like a last statement regarding what our audience should actually know about your projects and about your plans for 2021. So this is a very generic question. You were talking about the role of your community and people want to know, is there anything that the community can do in order to support aside spreading the world? So besides spreading the word, what can the community do in order to make your project succeed? Sebastian, what would be your answer to that?

So we have actually, we will start next week again, our main network. So you can run nodes and you can give us feedback on that. We know it's going to be an early release. It's not that we have 40 engineers for four years working behind the scenes and closed source code. We release early, we release early, we ship early. We know it's going to be quirky. We would be super helpful if you could help us test this, give us feedback on that and help us improve the software that we're building. Also, as I said, our code is all open source, so if anybody wants to contribute, there's like a lot of tickets up for grabs. If you want to get engaged in a really exciting project. That's something that I think could be very exciting. So yeah, I mean, beyond that, there's of course a lot of things currently going on that are pertaining to the Balancer launch on Wednesday, but for the technical community, I'd be super helpful, super grateful if you could support, support us on the technical matters. Actually, some people think that running a node is hard. We really try to make it simple. So what we have prepared is actually a hardware node. So we have actually made these little hardware nodes. So it's a customized Avato node, so you can run your Hopper node there. So it runs out of your home. So that's something that you can do to run Hopper from your home, earn money for doing so, and also run maybe an Ethereum node or any of the other nodes that are supported in the Avado ecosystem. So that's something that you can do. Yeah. Hoppernet.org node awesome.

All right. Jan, what about you? Can you give us a piece of advice to your audience, to your community on how they can help you move on the project?

Yeah, I mean, I think, as Sebastian also said, we're also open source and definitely would love if people would help us there. Anyone is free to contribute and it's most welcome. It's good to get fresh ideas. And as I was just saying, I think that what we kind of expect from the communities is for them to just tell us what tools they need and all that so they can build and create amazing products on top of it. So in the sense, as I was saying, the grants program is going to be super important and just keep giving this feedback, healthy feedback, of course. It's always the best one. And so, yeah, hoping that we can collaborate on building stuff together.

Okay, cool. And actually we have one very last question before we give you the word for one last statement. So Nika, not Natsvilishvili, is asking, how is the Hathor footprint in Asia? Jan?

Okay, well, I mean, as I mentioned, we have this very successful listing on Kucoin, which is an Asian exchange, and we definitely plan on growing our footprint there. So after all, this coronavirus situation is true. Hopefully we can make live events Asia, you know, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, kl, Singapore. If you are in any of those locations and you want to help, want to get started with a local community, please get in touch with us. We are more than willing to support you in getting this local community.

Awesome. So I think that it's a good time to start wrapping the conversation up. So, Jan and Sebastian, if you want to make one last statement, something very important that you want to tell our audience about your projects, this is the time to do it. Sebastian, you can start.

Yes.

First of all, thank you for hosting us here. And again, also thanks for our, yeah, joint partnership that was kicked off by Sinatkin, joint investor and supporter of the two projects. I would say if you want to get involved with Hopper, please check out our Telegram channel. It's Telegram hoppernet. So hoppernet. Same for Twitter, where you find us. There's a lot of announcements coming up over the next days. We would be extremely proud to, if you could join our community and would help us to change data privacy for good.

Okay, cool. Jan, do you want to make a last statement?

Yeah, likewise. Want to thank you guys. Sebastian here. Also, I know that you're busy with the upcoming launch. Congratulate them for the successful and yeah, for half a community. Just let's keep building on it, making amazing products on top of the network because that's what's going to make a.

Project.

Stand on the soproducted market and make sure that we are going to be there in the end of five years and be one of the top projects. We're going to have to have the support of the community. Also I have to mention a special welcome to the Asian markets that are fully back online today. Fully deserve long holidays because as you know, you guys work 247 throughout the year. So it's really good to have the Asian traders back online. It's the year of the ox or as crypto been saying, the year of the bull. So let's make it count and Happy New Year.

Okay, so thanks a lot Jan and Sebastian. That was a very interesting conversation. I also want to thank our audience that was amazingly involved. You ask a lot of interesting questions and so thanks to join this AMA session by Cointelegraph. Don't forget to like the video and subscribe to our channel. I'm Giovanni, your host and see you next time.