 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 Hopper. Hathor is a scalable blockchain that allows users to build their own digital assets, while Hopper is a blockchain protocol focused on data and metadata privacy. So today I'm joined by Jan Martins, CEO at Hathor and Sebastian Burgl, CEO at Hopper. How are you doing guys today? Hey, thank you very much. Pleasure to be talking to you guys and the Cointelegraph 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. Before we start, I just want to remind our audience that this is an AMA session. So guys, feel free to ask your questions right 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, Hathor is a Layer 1 protocol blockchain that we started back in 2018. It's based on the PhD thesis of our CTO and co-founder Dr. Marcelo Brugliatto. 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 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 newer texture. It's coded from scratch. It's not a fork. We coded it started on 2018 August. One and a half year of coding before we launched our mainnet. So yeah, a completely new different architecture. Okay, cool. So 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 0 privacy solution. So as we've just heard about the Layer 1, the world of the blockchains, we are a layer under that. So 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 Nils running a blockchain not quite. 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 0 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 destination and thereby provides metadata privacy. You can get into more details later on, but again on high level it's a Layer 0 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'm 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 and we'll be asking all of them 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 a 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 Hathor through some mutual connections, we immediately saw that we had a lot of ideas shared, you know, I really much liked their idea of being completely centralized from the one which is something that we also very much care about and do on Hathor network. 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 Hathor to make sure that we make our nodes more secure or wallets, all the infrastructure that we have by using Hopper technology, that's something that pretty much will make us much stronger. And I do really believe that Hopper is making something significant in this space. As I mentioned, they are layer zero. So it's a building block for future change. 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 Stepnichka is asking, is Hathor building bridges to Ethereum or are they trying to replace it? That's a question for you, Jan. Okay, that's a cool question. Now, I think like Ethereum is amazing product, of course, you have built so much faith, so many stuff. And we do have currently some bridges being built actually by the community, which is awesome. You know, communities actually building some bridges to have some cross chain tokens from Ethereum through our network. And we really do envision that, you know, we can be used side by side. It's not like we're going to completely take all the market from Ethereum, but there's very particular things, 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 Hathor for that purpose. So yeah, we do have some bridges being built already by some partner companies. And I do believe that we're going to get some market share from Ethereum, but yeah, not everything. You know, they are really like a big, you 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 questions from the audience to Sebastian. So NAMBEO 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 Bayer technology, which we so far tested only in a testnet, to being a useful decentralized protocol, right? 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 whole 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. So, 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 the hopper network doesn't require any fees. So in order to conduct transactions on a hopper, there are no fees required. So how can how can Hathor sustain itself without any fees? That's a question for you. Yeah, sir. So first of all, as I said, it's a new architecture that we have. So our transactions are actually in a bag 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 with 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 a transaction 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 them 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 having Bitcoin, where you need to choose to make sure you have the highest profitability, you're just going to point to two transactions on the DAG of transactions. And then it's confirmed that block of transactions. Let's say, sorry, block is not who we're here, but 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 teeth. So I'd say this is a combination of this new architecture and also the merchant 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 Tranggo 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 the 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 are doing. So as an example for Hopper, what we're aiming for is to hide this connection metadata. So how this works is that instead of sending data directly to the receiving party, right, 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. And thereby it entirely obfuscates who is talking to whom, how much data they're exchanging and how frequently they're talking to one another. So 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 or 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 Yan was talking about. So Muhammad Aslan asks, if Hathor has zero fees, how will miners make money? The number of tokens 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 a number of tokens will keep building up, where is the reward? Yeah, sure. I mean, it's correct. Like 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 at digital assets, a 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 Hathors. And so like Hathor is central for our network. In the same sense, all the future services and products that we develop in public network, like upcoming Nino contracts, SIDACs, which is our version of a sidechain, they are all going to be based around the Hathor token, which is central for us. And that's why we believe that it's so important and why it's going to be used in our network. But miners, they get Hathor tokens in every new block. And yeah, it's a low emission. We currently are at 32 Hathor per block. We have yearly having until we reach 8 Hathor per block, and then it's going to continue at that level. Okay, thanks. So I just want to make sure that the audience understand that the upper and the upper are in a partnership. So we have a lot of questions actually asking regarding this partnership. Yo Ruben is asking, how will hopper and Hathor work together? Will the hopper token be on the Hathor network? Maybe Sebastian can answer this one. Yeah, 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. And the initial version will work on Ethereum just because we have to get started somewhere. But absolutely, Hathor is one of the hottest chains that we're exploring right now. We're right now at the stage where we are basically finalizing the hopper protocol. And what that means is that there's a lot of a lot of kind 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 Hathor 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 mainnet for Hathor. So goboonboot is asking how many people are using Hathor right now? What's the volume process through the platform? Yana, 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'd 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 much to Bitcoin. So that's we share the Genesis block just 11 years later. And so we've been building our our our mainnet since just over one year. And it's grown much, much more than we envisioned for this first year. You know, we've got a lot of community, a lot of miners. You know, when we first started, we only had GPUs. Now we have EZX and half of that's a hash of mining power. So yeah, it's been growing really great, much better than we were expecting for this first year. 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 that hopper relies on a decentralized governance system called the 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 work? Sure, yeah. So many times we see this approach of teams that they call stepwise decentralization. And 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 testnet were 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, hell, fuck this, we introduce a DAO now. We empower our community today. So actually, our community was entirely in charge of the Hopper launch. So the Hopper token distribution that actually started yesterday has been entirely decided upon by the Hopper Genesis style, which is over 3000 participants from our testnet who have the entire decision making power of how that happened. And in fact, actually, initially, I didn't I didn't even personally particularly like that proposal, that there wasn't the winning proposal, but whatever, you know, community voted. So we went with it anyway. And that is the initial governance decision of the Hopper protocol rests in the hands of these 3000 participants. And when the Hopper token is finally completely launched, there will be a main net DAO comprising all Hopper token models. 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 Qcoin. So I would like to know from Yan 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, Qcoin is a top amazing exchange in the 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 it's very solid. Our listing there honestly was much better than we were hoping. Right now, we are getting over $5 million dollars daily volume. And if we got recently a report from a bot, an AI bot, that HTRI is one of the, it's first on the top five and will trend on Qcoin for the last few days with the USDT pair. And, you know, this is not like a purchase opinion. It's not like someone saying that, you know, 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 Qcoin. And now that everyone's back from the new year holiday, which is well-deserved, we're going to work hard with them to correct this ASAP and continue our successful partnership. And since we are talking about our friends at Qcoin in 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 we deserve the stress. So yeah, it's been wonderful, the listing on Qcoin. 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 you 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 Hopper. Hathor is a scalable blockchain that allows user to build their own digital assets. And Hopper is a blockchain protocol focused on data and metadata privacy. So moving on to the question I would like to ask you because there are a lot of people asking this question is, are there any plans for Hathor to get listed on other exchanges this year apart from Qcoin? Yeah, sure. It's one of the questions we get the most. Obviously, as I said, the Qcoin 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 force in it. And yeah, definitely it's something that we want for the community to 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 what in what phases is this token sale being conducted? And specifically, yeah, like 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. Okay, so this is purely done by the community. We basically said, okay, 8.5% of the total hoppers 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 presale. And that is what is currently running. So those 3,300 people who participate in our test nets, they are right now in a presale phase. And every one of them can purchase hopper tokens with $800. So everyone can purchase $800 worth of hopper tokens in this presale. And yeah, it's running for two days. So right now we are at about 24 hours in. But the thing 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 presale is 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-sale smart contract on the x-dial 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 test net did actually participate in the sale, which is amazing. We were really blown away by the participation of our test net 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 uniswap. Looks very similar actually. And we're doing a balancer liquidity bootstrapping pool. So what this means is the price will start super high. And it will start at over one dollar 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 Dutch auction and then automated market makers such as Uniswap. So that's then the next phase after the pre-sale 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 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 basic maths and languages and stuff. I hope that in middle school you learn how to secure a 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, you know, five to 10 year time horizon that really people manage their own assets in a non custodial censorship resistant 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 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 Web2 platforms emerge in a Web3 fashion that kind of is breathing the ethos of a Web3 world which are self custody of money and data. Okay, cool. So yeah, maybe you can give us your vision regarding the perspectives of DeFi of bringing mass adoption. And then I will follow up with a more technical questions regarding Hathor. Here, hard to follow after Dr. Burrow, but it's so thinly. But yeah, I guess we're going to get more adoption. I mean, you're seeing right now institutional adoption on blockchain. It's 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 we really are on the pivotal point for the crypto space. DeFi obviously is going to play a big role in it. We are starting our age to see this clash with traditional markets kind of this crypto ethos that we had with the whole Reddit and GameStop debaco. 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, you know, say game changing experiences on crypto. And I agree with Sebastian, when he says like three to five years, really it's not something that's going to happen overnight. 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 technically on. So I know that Hathor is based on a two decimal system. So can you explain in more in details what is this decimal system and how it works? I mean, when we launched Hathor, we just shows that we would have only two 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 two decimals. Yeah, and say there's no like big secret about it. But yeah, that's the only reason we thought people are already used to it. So that's let's use what people are 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 Hathor BTC? Okay, I think they're starting to talk about when there are some regions being developed. Yeah, this is one of the things that it's our list for roadmap to tackle. Probably for custom tokens, 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 a HDR, 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. Yeah. Okay, now I would like to ask Sebastian another technical question. So you are 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, right? So we don't want to be seen as a, 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. And 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, we need to have a ton of money and otherwise you can 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 a very minimal stake. The catch is just the more you stake, the more you can relay and the more you earn, right? 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 hopper 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 these projects 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 hopper, which is the merged mining feature. So hopper 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 most battle tested consensus algorithm out there. And we also chose the same algorithm as Bitcoin. So you can do merge mining with Bitcoin or actually any other of the other charts you have six 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 the way actually to grow our hash rate pretty quickly because being a proof of work chain, the hash rate is super important for security reasons. So actually, there's a post back from Satoshi in 2010, I think, from Bitcoin Talk, that he laid out this idea of chains sharing the work. And at the moment, we are around 500 petahash to one extra hash. It's been fluctuating that range. We have already two community-created pools where you can merge mine, Hathor, 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 look into one board, even larger, more traditional mining pools. And actually, there are some piece 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 Hathor. So it's going to make the network even more safe and better and healthier. And for the miners, of course, the advantage is that you're going to be mining two coins. You don't have any losses when mining Bitcoin of Bitcoin Sv or Bitcoin Cash. So for their style, it's really their only gains. So that's interesting. I would like to understand a little bit better. Can you explain exactly like what is the benefit for miners to mine simultaneously Bitcoin and Hathor? Why would they want to mine these two coins simultaneously? Sure. I mean, I'd say from the vision of some of them, right, if they support the mining, which I guess it's only the minority and it's okay because at the end mining, it's 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 mine with Hathor, they're going to be getting more coins. So they're going to be becoming more profitable. It's not like they are going to be taking a hit from their Bitcoin earnings or like, okay, so they're going to have to share in the sense that they're going to mine last Bitcoin because of it. So no, it's really just a win-win scenario for them. And for us, in our case, what we gain from that is like having the higher hash rates and making the network more secure. Okay. So I think that we can move on talking about your plans, the plans for 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 a start and just summing up what are the main milestones that Hopper is aiming to achieve in the course of 2021? 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. So 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. So that is the second major thing. And the third one would be that we are introducing not just the Genesis DAO, which is currently managing the governance of the protocol, but that we have actually the full blown Hopper 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 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 note, right? So imagine if you could send a metadata private transaction that goes from your MetaMask through Hopper to a blockchain note or to Infura, right? So it could even be a centralized endpoint, but that central endpoints 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 MetTech 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 to just do 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 the headquarters 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 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 Jan. So would you like to just briefly explain what are the main milestones that Hopper 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. You also bring it to Hatter and Hatter Wallets and Hatter notes. Absolutely. Yeah, and yeah, really, really powerful. For us, as you mentioned, we have 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 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 NNL contracts for a second semester. Also, we have our version of side chains 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 dream of. We actually already see that. We have HTR FTC, 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 Kether community. And for me, I really want to incentivize this community, the health 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. 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 Hatter network. So let's say, yeah, we want to see the enterprise adoption and we're baffling 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 you, I want to ask you a question regarding a technical aspect of your roadmap. So Hatter 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 in the Ethereum is this had like, they have an amazing sign, you know, like 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 like a subset of those features that you have on smart contracts. They're the most used ones, like, because if you follow like Pareto law, you get like 80% of the use cases are only going to have the using 20% of features. So for tokenization, you already see that people go with with their 20 or 71 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, you know, native in our protocol. So people can can create their their own protocol on nano contracts without being had without having to program anything or being an expert. So it's kind of a mix between usability and flexibility. You know, you're not going to have all the features and and and do all the stuff which is too incomplete with Ethereum, which quite honestly, most people don't need you. But you're going to have like a subset of it that's easier to use and faster to apply. 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 the people want to know, is there anything that the community can do in order to support a site spreading the world? So besides spreading the world, what can the community do in order to make your projects succeed? Sebastian, what would be your answer to that? So we have actually, we will start next week again, our our main network so you can run notes and you can give us feedback on that. We know it's going to be an early release. It's not that we have, you know, 40 engineers for four years working behind the scenes and close 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 us on the technical matters. Actually, some people think that running a note is hard. We really try to make it simple. So what we have prepared is actually a hardware note. So we have actually made these little hardware notes. So it's a customized avatar note. So you can run your hopper note 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 any theory note or any of the other notes that are on supported in the Avado ecosystem. So that's something that you can do. Yeah, hoppernet.org slash note. 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 we 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 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 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 Natsvillishvili is asking, how is the Hathor footprint in Asia, Jan? Okay, well, I mean, we as I mentioned, we have this very successful listen on Kucoin, which is an Asian exchange. And we definitely plan on growing our footprint there. So after after all this coronavirus situation is true, hopefully we can make live events Asia, you know, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, KL, Singapore. Oh, yeah. And if if you are ensuring any of those locations that 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 and getting this local communities. 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 project, 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 Zinatkin, joint investor and supporter of the two projects. And I would say if you want to get involved with Hopper, please check out our Telegram channel. It's at Telegram Hoppernet. So at 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 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. I want to thank you guys. Sebastian here. Also, I know that you're busy with the coming launch. Congratulations for the successful. And yeah, I mean, for Hopper community, just let's keep building on it, making amazing products on top of the network. And because that's what's going to make a project stand on the so proud market, and make sure that we are going to be there in the end of five years and be one of the top projects. And we're going 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 reserved long holidays because as you know, you guys were 24-7 throughout the year. So it's really good to have the Asian traders back online. It's the year of the ox or as I'm prepared to say in the year of the bull. So let's make counts 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 asked 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.