Matic AMA Recap with HOPR Founder & President, Sebastian Bürgel

On the 29th of October, 2020, Sebastian Bürgel, the Founder & President of HOPR, was live at the Matic Network telegram AMA Session, to provide the Matic community with insights on HOPR’s privacy-focused protocol. The session was moderated by Arun Philips, Matic Network’s Marketing Specialist.

In order to ensure clarity to my readers, this article has been divided into two segments; the first segment, gives full account of the questions asked by the moderator of this AMA session (Arun Philips), while the second segment, gives account of the questions asked by Matic community members.

Arun—

Hello Sebastian, welcome to the Matic community. Let’s get started with this awesome AMA we have planned today!

Question 1— Could you please tell us a little about yourself and HOPR?

Sebastian —

Of course. First of all hello to all Matic friends!

Before founding HOPR, I was co-founder and CTO of a blockchain education service company and a fintech company. In my previous life before blockchain, I worked in academia as an engineer on microtechnology for biomedical applications. I’m a strong believer in the web3 vision. I think the world needs a more private and resilient web and we need to challenge unfair and inefficient corporate power structures.

HOPR contributes to this vision at the most fundamental layer: data transfer. Despite the strong privacy movement in crypto, data and especially metadata privacy is still rudimentary or entirely missing. HOPR is a decentralized incentivized mixnet which uses what we call proof of relay to ensure that node runners are properly paid for relaying data privately.

Question 2 — There definitely seems to be a lot of interest in HOPR’s Incentivized Testnets, can you explain how it’s been going so far?

Sebastian —

Thank you Arun. The response has been really amazing. Our first testnet, Säntis, had over 500 participants, but our current testnet on Matic blew past that in the first 24 hours. There have been a few technical hiccups, of course, but that’s the point of testnets.

The community has generated a ton of helpful data and feedback which has allowed our dev team to make huge improvements with each iteration. There was no way we could get these node numbers ourselves internally, so we’re seeing how the network works at scale for the first time. There’s still plenty of time left on the Basódino testnet, and you can visit network.hoprnet.org to see how to set up a node.

Question 3 — That’s awesome to see many users interested in data privacy and setting up nodes to serve as infrastructure. What are the major milestones HOPR has achieved so far and what are in the future pipeline?

Sebastian —

HOPR is still a young project, but we’ve made a huge amount of progress in that short time. In addition to our two testnets, we’re proud of our focus on accessibility. Too much of crypto is complicated, confusing, and beyond the reach of normal users. For example, providing Windows support has been a pain, but it’s really important, and I’m glad we took the time to do it. There is still a small amount of first-time setup which people need to do, and we’re working on eliminating, but running HOPR is already very close to just being one-click.

We’re also particularly pleased with our HOPR hardware nodes, in partnership with AVADO. Those really are plug-and-play. The fact that 700 people, many of them without much technical experience, have been able to join our testnet so easily is hugely gratifying.

As for the future, well there’s mainnet and the HOPR token, of course, and on the tech front there’s mixing, automated routing, and the gradual introduction of our full suite of privacy features. But I’m also particularly excited about what we’re doing on the governance front. We’ve put a lot of effort into building a legal foundation which is both decentralized but also equipped for the realities of doing business in the real world. We’ll be talking a lot more about that in the coming months, but I really think it’s a game changer for how we think about crypto governance.

Question 4 — I think there are many in the community who would love to be part of the HOPR network, how can people get involved?

Sebastian —

The easiest and best way to get involved right now is to join the Basòdino testnet. Just go to network.hoprnet.org and follow the instructions to set up a node. Participants will relay data for a chance to earn a share of 200,000 HOPR tokens.

Question 5 — Superb! Can you tell us a little bit about how your experience was building on Matic?

Sebastian —

We are very close to the Ethereum ecosystem at HOPR. HOPR is designed to minimize on-chain transactions without compromising security, but we still have smart contracts to call, and the sky-high gas prices of recent months are incompatible with a testnet. So we decided to move to another chain. It was especially nice to see how seamless switching from mainnet Ethereum to Matic can be — just deploy your smart contracts, change your RPC endpoint and blockchain explorer and you’re done! Then you have amazingly fast blocks at minimal cost. Seeing that, it was obvious that Matic was a great choice for our testnet.

Question 6 — We’re glad to hear the experience was seamless! Now I know many are interested in aspects like your token sales and tokenomics, can you share if there any plans of token sales?

Sebastian —

Unfortunately our legal team is very insistent that we can’t share details of any potential token sale, but of course we’re keen to get our token out into the wild and we’re currently looking into various options. The first of these is the testnets running now: you can run a testnet node and relay data for a chance at a share of 200,000 HOPR tokens. We also have plans for more technical bug bounties and hackathons further down the line.

Question 7 —Got it, but HOPR tokens can be earned on the Testnets. What are the prizes for HOPR Testnet like?

Sebastian —

Yes exactly! There are 200,000 HOPR tokens available as prizes. They’re shared between the top 200 scorers on our leaderboard, with the top scorer getting 40,000 HOPR. The testnet has been running for a little while, but everyone still has a chance to get on the leaderboard.

Question 8 — So let’s talk a little bit more about the future of Blockchain, what do you think about the future of Blockchain and messaging?

Sebastian —

That’s a great question Arun. I have big hopes for blockchain and the broader web3 movement. The corporate legacy world has got itself into such a ridiculously broken state. We need a new way forward, but it’s on us to lay the foundations of future digital interactions, where people aren’t just seen as a data source to be harvested by governments and big business. But web3 and blockchains need a data exchange foundation that is first and foremost privacy preserving. That’s been sorely neglected so far, and it’s what we’re building with HOPR.

Question 9 — Before we conclude and move to community Questions, any final thoughts you would like to share with the community? Please share the best way to stay informed about HOPR.

Sebastian —

First, I’d like to say I’m a huge admirer of the achievements of the whole Matic team. As a new and upcoming project it is impressive to see how the team and the community have grown over the past few years into the current production version of Matic. At HOPR we’re still at the beginning of that journey — there’s a lot to do for us and our community and those who join and contribute earlier shall be rewarded for the success of the overall network. If you want to learn more about HOPR, join our Telegram or follow us on Twitter. You can also visit our website which contains all links at hoprnet.org

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SEGMENT 2

Community Question 1 — You said something about users gaining HOPR on the testnet by competing to be part of the top in the leaderboard. How do we get on board and also what’s the benefit of being at the top of the leaderboard?

Sebastian —

So you can just install a HOPR node, get verified with a tweet and then earn points for having your node stay online. in the end the top scorers will win HOPR tokens. Checkout instructions on network.hoprnet.org

Community Question 2 — You organized an AMA session very rewarding and received a lot of questions related to utilities and technology, future vision, So now I want to ask what do you want to receive from the community?

Sebastian —

So one thing that I want to make clear is: We (the people building HOPR) do not own or run the network. That is purely up to the community. So we want to engage and educate you to support you in running HOPR nodes because that is what gives the whole network utility and value.

Community Question 3— Does running a HOPR node expose your IP?

Sebastian —

It depends. So on the one hand, any decentralized network exposes your IP to other peers in the network. But we’re trying to limit what other people really learn about you: Other nodes right now only learn that you’re using HOPR (not much leaked). For actually relaying traffic you’re protecting your IP. That is in fact the whole motivation and primary purpose of HOPR: By not directly sending data to another IP address (and port) but instead sending it through HOPR, you are protecting your IP and other metadata.
So for example, today when you send a crypto transaction through HOPR, your internet service provider (ISP) and potentially other people such as wifi providers or DNS providers learn that you are in this very moment sending a crypto transaction from your wallet. When sending a tx instead through HOPR, that information stays private.

Community Question 4— Can regular users compete with bigger stakers when mainnet is launched?

Sebastian —

So the great thing about HOPR is that it is up to the application developers or users to define a route through the HOPR mixnet that keeps their data private. This means that you do not have to trust any of the whale nodes at all. On the one hand it’s good because they do efficient mixing but OTOH you may not like whales. So maybe small nodes are trusted even more than big ones!

Community Question 5— What are some use cases of HOPRnet?

Sebastian—

Beyond providing privacy for crypto projects we see a huge amount of data that is being used in highly regulated environments such as med tech. You can read more about that here in one of our first partnerships: Medium Post The short version is here: Youtube Video

Community Question 6 — Would you consider it a win if criminal activities take place with/on HOPRnet without them getting caught?

Sebastian —

Certainly not a “win” but I am happy if people start solving issues of digitalization without giving up all of our privacy, IMO med tech is such a huge example of that: Do you want creepy cloud providers to have access to intimate medical info about yourself? these are the examples that I’m much more excited about.