Hathor (HTR) AMA with SPECTRE Group on 12/27/2020
Date/Time: December 27th, 2020 10 am EST
Participants:
Yan Martins (Founder and Core Developer)
Pedro Ferreira (Founder and Core Developer)
Guto Martino (Marketing Manager)
Johnny Zcash (AMA moderator)
Braggo (AMA moderator)
Note: This transcript has been edited to improve readability. The original conversation can be viewed at the Telegram: https://t.me/SPECTRE_GRP
Johnny
Welcome Hathor Network team! Yan, Pedro and Guto can you please introduce yourselves?
Pedro
Hi everyone! I am Pedro, one of the co-founders and core developers of Hathor. I graduated in computer engineering in 2013. I worked with Marcelo for 4 years (as an intern and after I graduated) and, during this time, I’ve also worked with Yan and Jan. After that I worked in some projects of IoT and VR before I joined Hathor.
Yan
Hey Johnny and the community, happy to be here. I’m one of the co-founders and I’ve been working on Hathor for more than 2 years now. I’m a computer engineer and one of the core developers, although nowadays I do a bit of everything on the project.
Guto
Hey, everyone. Super glad to be here at the SPECTRE. Thanks, Johnny.
Name is Guto, and I joined Hathor in November as the Marketing Manager.
I’ve been involved with crypto since 2016, where I worked with many blockchain orgs and projects.
Braggo
Welcome guys, thanks for taking the time today. Will start with a first question that drew me into HTR early on which was the concept of Nano Contracts. What are Nano contracts and how do they work now?
Pedro
The development of nano contracts will start in Q1 2021. We envision smart contracts capabilities on top of Hathor to be as simple and easy-to-use as our current tokenization features. According to Pareto’s Principle, we can expect 80% of the real-world use cases for smart contracts to be based on 20% of the full possibilities they can offer.
So Nano Contracts will be focused in bringing a bulletproof and radically accessible version of "that 20%". This can be very relevant for mass adoption, specially when paired with the scalable nature of Hathor's architecture.
We want everyone to be able to create contracts with only a few lines of information. They're not going to create the most complex dApps in the world, but 80% of their needs should be fulfilled in a few minutes.
Braggo
So would you equate nano contracts to be hand in hand with helping ease of adoption? Aka much easier to use/manage than a full smart contract so to speak?
Yan
Definitely. It’s the same idea as we have with token creation at the moment. Just a few clicks and it’s done
Johnny
Amazing! With nano contracts being realized on the network do you foresee any DeFi initiatives popping up on Hathor Network?
Yan
Yeah, that’s one of the plans for Nano Contracts. Of course the DeFi space is relatively new and there’s still a lot of innovation going on there, so our philosophy for Nano Contracts requires us to study the most used features of that and make them easy to use on our network.
One clear demand emerging out of DeFi is the need for oracles, which we’ve been planning to couple with Nano Contracts since the beginning and even had a basic PoC working. But we’re also looking to the market and studying the latest ideas, such as decentralized oracles. It’s something we already started looking into. Liquidity pools are also hot at the moment and would fit nicely here. And there are “traditional” markets that we have always planned to support, such as derivatives and betting.
Braggo
That sounds amazing guys, defi has plenty of opportunities and having this be a strong focus of HTR would be great to see! So would HTR be formulating its own oracle solution? Or would you utilize existing solutions with multiple projects/partners?
Yan
That’s an excellent question. When we started and even developed the initial version of Smart Contracts, we had our own solution. We still intend to support that, but also add other options.
Decentralized oracles are obviously a trend at the moment, but there are also interesting solutions such as Coinbase price feeds and Open Price Feed model
Ideally, we want to be able to support multiple types of oracles and the users can choose what’s best for them
Braggo
That’s great! So a built in solution but also flexible to support others as well. Ok, so for the next question…I’ve read that you guys are looking to introduce a concept of side-chains similar to Polkadot. But you refer to these as “Side-DAGs”. Can you tell us how these will work and how they compare to traditional side-chains in the context of Polkadot?
Yan
There are some similarities with Polkadot’s parachains, especially with the idea that these side chains can have their own logic and data structure that the main chain doesn’t need to know about. On Hathor Network, these side chains will be connected with the main DAG with special transactions that will live on the main network and also point to the side DAG. That way, the accumulated work (mining) done on the main network also secures these side networks, guaranteeing their safety
We have a RFC with the basics idea, which are planning to expand on a research phase on this first semester of 2021: https://gitlab.com/HathorNetwork/rfcs/blob/side-dags/0000-side-dags.md
Braggo
I think that has been a big draw of DOT is their projects building their parachains, it’s super interesting that HTR will have these similar features/ecosystem in play as well
Yan
But it’s important to note that we don’t see that as incompatible with PolkaDot or a direct competitor. We believe the crypto ecosystem can benefit from all of it and having these networks cooperate is the best solution. That’s why we are starting an interoperability work group.
Braggo
But for what seems an even simplified / easier method of adoption if I gather correctly
Johnny
Wow this is interesting! How does the interoperability group work exactly?
Guto
Gabriel, our bizdev, started the interoperability work group in early december and the project will running fullon starting in January. The idea here is to create working groups between Hathor and another blockchain group, where we research ways to develop interoperability. We are still in the early stage of it, and we first spoke with Polkadot and they were super nice and helpfull.
Like many other projects around (like NEAR, Fantom, Solana, etc) we believe interoperability is the way. We´ll have a panel about Layer1 late this week with those projects.
Johnny
Looking forward to seeing the collaboration
Braggo
Thanks guys, really excited to learn more about that coming up. So for 2021 What is the Marketing Strategy? How to convey all these messages?
Guto
Our main focus for marketing for 2021:
— As we said, Interoperability Group is one of the main goals to bring awareness to Hathor and what we do.
- Development grants is another great focus — for example, there is a really early stage project HathorSwap (Dex) for Hathor
- Community initiatives: our focus is on building our community through education. We love how our community is engaged and we want to pave the way to get even better.
Johnny
Hathor Dex, i need this!
Guto
There is a lot to communicate this year and I hope I can due it in due time.
Johnny
Can you share some other use cases currently being built on Hathor?
Guto
Hathor, through Hathor Labs, is a corporate-oriented solution provider and paves the way to HTR usage and adoption.
We are now in discussions with a few companies, where we provide consulting for blockchain solutions. Some of these companies didn´t even think that they could use blockchain technology due to lack of knowledge or being too hard/costly to implement.
These are the ones that we can talk a bit now:
- We developed a proof-of-concept for STOs. Though we are still under NDA, we expect to publicly release in Q2 2021. This unleashes Hathor’s potential for what could be a large security token offering in Brazil.
- The second one has to do with Humanitarian initiatives using our network.
- other 3rd party developments we want to support: HathorDex, for example.
That is why grants will be a leading force towards bringing new builders on our network.
Johnny
Wow STO’s are going to be huge, I love that Hathor is already working on this!
Braggo
Blockchain through humanitarian efforts is quite needed with all the corruption and uncertainty out there of whether your donation actually gets put to good use….that’ll be something I keep an eye on for sure. Nice that they are choosing HTR as the platform
So here’s a question I’m sure many have been thinking if you guys can share a bit.. What happened with the listing process of HTR? Can you tell us which exchange will list you first and in the next months?
Yan
I was personally involved in the process and can say that we learned a lot during it. It ended up being much more time consuming than we were expecting. In part because we didn’t want to have HTR listed on any exchange, so we wanted only to have discussions with top tier exchanges
Also, we ended up talking to 2 top-tier exchanges, instead of just one. That proved to be an excellent decision. As we announced yesterday, one of the listings was just cancelled due to external circumstances. Although we’re disappointed, we also have the listing on this other strong top-tier exchange coming up, which will be amazing for the project
Obviously we cannot disclose the exchange name, as they’ll be the ones doing the announcement first. For the future, we expect that follow-up listings will go much smoother. First because being listed in a top tier exchange makes things much easier. And all we learned in the last few months will also help us a lot.
Johnny
I’m looking forward to the exchange announcement and good to see the transparency from the team!
Braggo
I know that there is a lot going on with regulations and such, was the listing on the other exchange truely canceled or is it still ongoing but pushed back?
Yan
At the moment, it’s cancelled. But as I mentioned, it happened due to external circumstances. Both Hathor and the exchange were very excited to see this happening. So we’re still in touch with their team, which has been super supportive an professional throughout this process, to start the process again when conditions allow us
Johnny
It’s great that you were in discussions with multiple exchanges
Yan
That’s with one of the exchanges. The other one is still good to go
Johnny
Another hot topic, no pun intended..
Tokenomics and pre-mined coins is a huge discussion on Hathor groups. Is there any burn scheduled?
Pedro
As described in our token economics, a burn of 20% of the premine is planned and will be executed in the beginning of 2021. We also have a 18% of the premine in a 5-year lock that will be re-evaluated in the future. We may burn this portion fully or partially in the future if we understand that it will not be necessary for the project and can help the security of the network.
Braggo
Thanks Pedro, less premine will always raise community sentiment so thanks for considering this aspect
About the halving. The website states that it comes on the 3rd January. Are we on time? When does it comes and what to expect?
Pedro
The halving will happen when a defined height is reached in the network (height 1,051,200). Just like in Bitcoin, our mining is probabilistic, so even though it was planned to happen on January 3rd, the date changed a bit and now will most likely happen on January 5th. We are currently at height 1,026,471 and we have 2,880 blocks per day, so the math comes from here.
After the halving, the quantity of blocks mined per day will continue the same, the only change is in the amount of HTR issued in each block. Right now the miners receive 64 HTR per block, giving 184,320 HTR per day. After the halving they will receive 32 HTR per block, with a total of 92,160 HTR per day.
We will have 3 halving events, one each year, until we have 8 HTR being issued per block.
Johnny
Thanks Pedro! One last question before we open it up for general questions. Can you let us know the status of Ledger support for Hathor?
Yan
Yeah, we’ve been getting this question a lot
We already completed the app development and submitted to the Ledger team for review, since Q1 this year. Unfortunately, it’s up to them now to add it to the official Ledger app so it can be installed on people’s Ledger
Hopefully, the listing event will draw more attention to the project and help us there, with the Ledger team.
Braggo
Yes while the wallet is great and ridiculously fast to send HTR, I know much of us would prefer to store on Ledger
Yan
But since there seems to be a lot of community interest in this, we can prepare a “developer’s mode” tutorial for getting Hathor app on Ledger before its officially available there
Braggo
I have a few IRL friends they were super impressed with the HTR wallet and speed of transactions. Once we open it up I’ll pick the first (3) HTR addy’s I see and send 50 HTR to each just to show this if you guys want?
Then community questions… I think we are going with 2 that team will pick
Johnny
We’ll let the Hathor team answer a few of the questions. I’d like to thank @obiyankenobi @pedrosferreira and @gutomartino for taking time out of their busy schedule for us. Thanks Hathor team!
QUESTION 1:
As a community driven project; how can I contribute my quota to your success? Do you have a Global ambassadorial Program or Referral Reward System?
Guto
Yes.
We have a community programm running now focusing on education.
You can apply here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1brVbY7RC6GK3hMdPJXVxtUw7Xrpp7XZ6VQLWjBtseSU/edit?usp=drive_web
QUESTION 2:
Why Hathor choose the same hash as Bitcoin? Hathor miners can get Bitcoin and Hathor, can Bitcoin miners get Hathor too?
Yan
We chose sha256d so we could leverage off merged mining and get hashing power to our network. This is super important for security reasons, which in the end is important for use cases which run on the network.
Miners can mine BTC and HTR by using merged mining, just connecting to a pool or software that have support for it.
QUESTION 3:
Q1 — How will Hathor build a thriving community that truly cares about and supports the project for a long time, rather than just gaining temporary benefits?
Q2 — Is there any plan to better connect with the community? Just like the social media type system, where can people share ideas and suggestions? Because we know the power of the community to easily create famous projects?
Guto
Good questions here.
Q1 — Through our community initiative we aim to create a strong bond between the members through education. Many great projects out there went this route and it feels like a delight to join a group where the members have knownledge and are kind. Our community is like that and we plan to reward even further positive engagements
Education is the road.
Q2 — For now we are sticking with Telegram + Discord but that might change soon.
QUESTION 4:
Let’s say I mint a token on the hathor network and I want to list that on an exchange that has hathor already listed. Would the exchange have to integrate a new wallet SDK or can they leverage existing integrations with hathor to also get my token listed with minor code additions?
Pedro
Every custom token created on Hathor is exactly the same (in terms of tech) as our native HTR token, that’s one of the reasons we say the security of any custom token is the same of our native token. There is no need to code anything, what makes they all pretty much the same and with less risks to have vulnerabilities. Because of that, any exchange integration can be done with minor customizations, reducing the exchange integration time for any custom token built in Hathor (if the exchange already has HTR listed)
QUESTION 5:
Collaborations and partnerships are some of the most important cornerstones to help improve adoption. Can you tell us about $Hathor current partners, plans for partnerships and what everybody stands to gain from these partnerships?
Guto
Partnerships will be announced in due time according to WHEN and HOW they happen.
We chose to not push useless partnerships for solely purposes of “number go up”. This is against the ethos from Hathor.
Our team developed a very strict process for announcing a partership, which is development towards the goal being made by both parts (Hathor and the partner).
Right now we do have some in early stages and we plan to announce when development is being made.
Yan
Yeah, this is something we faced every time we approached a company or someone wanting to develop a use case. Few people truly understand blockchain technology and, to be honest, we don’t believe most of the end user should really have to understand it deeply. It’s too technical. We believe the best way to achieve adoption is removing this barrier, making the product easy to use that most don’t even realize there’s a blockchain underneath it
QUESTION 6:
How does Hathor support the growth and development of the Hathor ecosystem?
Guto
1 — Support from Hathor Labs
2 — Our SDK and libraries for integration with the Network
3 — Grants (in due time)
QUESTION 7:
Can you explain what is the main focus of Hathor project?
What is the basic product and services that Hathor provide?
What great achievements has Hathor achieved so far? What difficulties and risks did you face during project implementation and what factors help motivation you to overcome the difficulties?
Pedro
The main focus on Hathor network is usability and scalability. We want to bring products and services to our users as simple as filling a form. We already have in our network a tokenization platform where you can create your own token to your use case. We have in our roadmap other products that we will bring to the platform, e.g. nano contracts and side dags with the same idea of usability and scalability.
Johnny
Thanks again guys for answering some questions. Looking forward to Hathor in 2021!