Major Announcements!
New crypto hardware provider, new liquidity pools, HOPR Playground and more
Hello privacy enthusiasts!
Lots has been happening the last few weeks and we’re eager to share the latest news around HOPR and privacy.
TL;DR
The HOPR DAO moved a total of $ 750,000 liquidity
Our ETH2 merge research has been published
We launched the HOPR Playground, D.E.R.P. and our Non-Private NFT to get people to care about privacy in web3
Three major announcements from our event in Istanbul
More Liquidity on Gnosis Chain
The HOPR DAO’s liquidity pool is one of the deepest in crypto. In our first DAO experiment back in May 2021, the DAO voted to keep these funds entirely on Uniswap, but transition them to the recently launched Uni v3.
But that was a long time ago. In the intervening months, HOPR has developed a much closer relationship with the Gnosis Chain founders and team, it’s also where our staking program and HOPR Boost NFTs live. Of the major non-Ethereum EVM chains, the Gnosis Chain values match most closely with our own; it’s also a preferred ecosystem for our community because of the cheaper gas fees.
To build on this foundation, we thought it made sense to move some of the DAO’s liquidity to Gnosis Chain. How much and to which DEX, however, could only be decided by the DAO.
As a result of the DAO Experiment v0.4 the DAO moved
a total of $500,000 in liquidity from its HOPR-DAI pool on Uniswap on Ethereum to a HOPR-xDAI pool on Swapr on Gnosis Chain.
a total of $250,000 in liquidity from its HOPR-DAI pool on Uniswap on Ethereum to a HOPR-ETH pool on Uniswap on Ethereum. The fee structure remained the same.
Additionally, a total of $250,000 in liquidity will be moved from its HOPR-DAI pool on Uniswap on Ethereum to a HOPR-xDAI pool on Uniswap on Gnosis Chain, once support for Gnosis Chain launches. The fee structure should remain the same.
For maximal transparency the instructions for the DAO multisig were outlined in the HOPR forum ahead of its on-chain execution.
Our ETH2 Merge Research
The Merge is fast approaching. In September, the Ethereum chain will switch from proof of work (PoW) to proof of stake (PoS). The HOPR team has been leading research into the functionally identical Gnosis Beacon Chain (GBC) in collaboration with the Decentralized Systems and Security Group at Imperial College. We’ve identified large perverse incentives for validators to conduct sniping attacks on each other in an attempt to poach their block rewards.
Obviously, as transport-level privacy project, we’re going to endorse a transport-level privacy solution. But the reality of course is that a variety of solutions should be adopted, across every layer. The blockchain is the fundamental source of truth that underpins everything we build on top of it — no effort is too small to ensure its integrity and security.
Find the long-form version of our ETH2 validator sniping research on our Medium account.
The HOPR Tools
HOPR is a little over two years’ old, and over that time we’ve used many different narratives to draw people’s attention to the huge privacy issues which plague Web 2.0 and web3. Everyone we engage with agrees with our mission to change privacy for good but getting people to actually take action has always been a challenge. However, this year we managed to crack through some of the apathy and convince people to put their money where their mouth is on web3 privacy with the tools below.
HOPR Playground
Today, web3 is mostly used for buying and selling digital collectibles or trading cryptocurrencies. We’ve built HOPR Playground to make data privacy great again! In less than 5 seconds and without any installation the HOPR Playground lets web3 enthusiasts see how the HOPR protocol and several dApps on top of our protocol work.
D.E.R.P
With D.E.R.P. we’ve built a tool which takes a hidden issue and puts it directly in your face. D.E.R.P. replicates the functionality of a standard RPC (remote procedure call) provider, making it painfully transparent how careless today’s crypto services are with your metadata. In real-time, you’ll see exactly what and how much information is requested from third parties every time you use a crypto service.
Non-Private NFT
The Non-Private NFT joins our D.E.R.P. tool in showing just how easy it is to expose your IP address and maybe even your whole identity with many of today’s crypto services. This educational project makes the metadata visible that typically centralized webservers collect when your wallet loads your NFT.
HOPR in Istanbul
This week we’re in Istanbul visiting our Turkish community, with a series of events hosted by Altcoin Turk.
While there, our co-founder Rik was able to share not one, but THREE major HOPR announcements.
First, HOPR has partnered with leading crypto hardware provider DAppNode to produce a special HOPR version of their DAppNode x Gnosis Chain device. The 16GB machine comes with four Gnosis Beacon Chain validator nodes preloaded and funded, which is the equivalent of 4 GNO. You’ll also receive a share of the 48,535 HOPR tokens which the HOPR DAO voted to allocate to growing the HOPR hardware node network.
The node will be available for purchase from August 26th, with delivery from September 26th. The initial run of this device is limited to just 50 machines.
Second, we teased a new privacy alliance, of which HOPR is a founding member. The alliance will bring together privacy projects from across the web3 stack to actively and constructively promote data privacy in crypto and beyond. Look out for more details at Devcon in October.
Finally, we’re excited to announce that we’ll be returning to Istanbul in April next year for a special event and hackathon: ETH Istanbul. This hackathon will mark the culmination of our mission to integrate HOPR with web3 wallets to bring privacy to the most fundamental aspect of crypto: your transactions.