Hathor Network AMA

12 min readJun 26, 2020

26th of June, 2020.

Hi folks! My name is Marcelo and I’m the founder of Hathor. It is a pleasure to have you here in our first AMA. We have the following plans for today:

5 minutes: Team Introduction & Announcements
2) 40 minutes: Questions & Answers

Marcelo Salhab Brogliato
My name is Marcelo and I’m a Computer Engineer. I graduated in the class of 2009, and immediately started my master’s in business. At the time, I had just joined as a business partner in an ISP & IT Services company in Rio de Janeiro, where I worked for 9 years. During this period, I’ve met and worked with @pedrosferreira, @obiyankenobi, and @jansegre in many engineering projects. I first heard about Bitcoin from my advisor during my master’s in 2011. I want through Bitcoin’s commit history to learn how it evolved and which technical problems the core developers were facing.

Pedro Ferreira
Hi everyone! I am Pedro and 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 Martins
Hi everyone, I’m Yan (or obiyankenobi). I’m also a computer engineer, had the honor of graduating at the same university as these other guys. After that, worked in the Silicon Valley for a while but decided that wasn’t the life I wanted. So that’s why I’m now in crypto.

Jan Segre
I’m Jan, another Computer Engineer, I’ve interned for 2 years at @msbrogli’s ISP company where I met @obiyankenobi and @pedrosferreira and went to work full time after I graduated in 2015. I moved on to a WiFi software startup for a while before joining Hathor in late 2018.

Marcelo Salhab Brogliato
1) We’d like to announce a partnership with BlockUnify (@Cryptfaux @armedvito @bazerka @Infinitel00p ). They will help us in community management, mainly improving our communication and transparency.

Yan Martins
We want to make sure the community is well taken care of while the core team can focus on the tech and business

Marcelo Salhab Brogliato
2) We are still preparing an official bounty/contribution program, but we’ve already had some members contribute to Hathor. Here’s the list we compiled. We are still going to determine the rewards for each of them. Please, let us know if your contribution is not listed here.

Marcelo Salhab Brogliato
3) Finally, for those of you who’ve been with us since the mainnet launch (Jan 3rd), you might remember that we had a problem releasing an updated version of the wallet connected to the mainnet. This prevented miners from getting a Hathor address and we, the Hathor team, were the only ones mining for about the first hour or so. We promised to redistribute these mined tokens at a later date and will do it soon enough. We’ll announce in the next few days how this will be done.

Marcelo Salhab Brogliato
What is Hathor? Why does it exist in the first place?
Consider YouTube. There are millions of videos about every single topic on YouTube. What if anyone could create a blockchain as easily as we upload videos to YouTube? What if any 13-year-old could create their own blockchain? It would be possible to explore any use case, even the craziest ones. This is the way to bring about a million ideas, and let the best rise.
Hathor was born to fix two gaps in the market: (i) usability, and (ii) scalability. Our goal is to build a platform that anyone can use without being a blockchain expert. Our novel technology is flexible and different platforms can be built on top of it, and after some market research and some pivots, we decided to develop the tokenization platform.
You just need to fill out a simple form, and, in less than a minute, your token is ready to be used. No complex smart contracts are required. You don’t need to know about “gas”, “solidity”, or “ERC 20” paraphernalia.
Creating a new token to explore a new use case must be just as trivial and mundane as taking a photo. You take 20 pictures and keep only the best. You create 20 different tokens and keep only the best one; you play around with new use case scenarios. The whole community can use Hathor in the search for the killer apps for blockchains, the most profitable ones, the most charitable ones, and so forth.
We did that because the tokenization market is already a reality, there are a lot of use cases that use it. But we don’t plan on stopping there. We have several items in our roadmap to add new functionalities to the network and enable Hathor to be used on other markets. I think that’s our “not-so-short” and “not-too-long” answer, lol

Marcelo Salhab Brogliato
What is the history of the project?

Marcelo Salhab Brogliato
During my P.h.D., my original research was in artificial intelligence applied to decision making. Still, I changed it to the scalability of blockchains after all crypto networks saturated at the end of 2017. I’ve learned about DAG models six months before, so I dived deep into its weaknesses and proposed different solutions before Hathor’s architecture came up. At first, adding a Blockchain inside the DAG seemed too simple, and I started to convince myself that it could work only after running some simulations and discussing the results with other researchers.
Actually, before deciding to start Hathor, I was wondering if it could become a relevant cryptocurrency. After all, there were thousands of other cryptos, and the market seemed so crowded. So, I went to the Crypto Valley Conference in Zug, Switzerland, to feel what the community was discussing, and I found many people crying about scalability, but it happened to have only one proposal to improve scalability in the entire conference. This lack of solutions made me believe that there might be a gap to be fulfilled by Hathor.

Ghost of St. Miklos, [26.06.20 07:16]
Would Hathor be interested in an Overledger Connector to achieve interoperability?

Marcelo Salhab Brogliato [In reply to Ghost of St. Miklos]
Sure! Would you send me the details, please?

Ghost of St. Miklos [In reply to Marcelo Salhab Brogliato]
Absolutely.

Bazerka
What seperates Hathor from other similar crypto companies?

Marcelo Salhab Brogliato [In reply to Bazerka]
I think the main difference is that we are focused on both (i) scalability and (ii) usability. We think the community can greatly benefit from a platform that you can use without being an expert.

Yan Martins [In reply to Bazerka]
We’re not like most crypto companies that just want quick profit and be gone. Most just release a flashy whitepaper and fork some other project.We have a Desktop wallet, mobile app and explorer since our testnet. We also coded Hathor from the ground up, it’s not just a fork. You can check our Github for daily activity ;)

Marcelo Salhab Brogliato [In reply to Bazerka]
We also have support for Ledger in our Desktop Wallet. In fact, it is under review of the Ledger’s team, and it is taking way longer than we thought it would be (maybe because of the coronavirus? I don’t know).

vito
I’m going to ask the most obvious one perhaps. How did you guys address the current scalability issues seen across other blockchain technologies. What was the “secret recipe” so to speak?

Marcelo Salhab Brogliato[In reply to vito]
Our technology is a natural evolution of Bitcoin’s blockchain. Instead of arranging the transactions in a Merkle Tree inside the blocks, we arrange the transactions in a DAG — outside the blocks — which are confirmed by the blocks. It is a crypto with a scalable data structure for transactions. Our blocks are lightweight and super fast to sync in the p2p network. There’s no such thing as “max block size”, and it doesn’t matter how many transactions are being confirmed by a block.

Rajesh Garnaik
any updates on marketing and exchanges? what is current tps?

Pedro Ferreira [In reply to Rajesh Garnaik]
Hi @ROHITGARNAIK, about the listing, we get offers every week, almost every day. However, they are mostly for small/medium exchanges and we want the absolute best for Hathor, we want to do it right. We want to be listed on an exchange that will give HTR real liquidity, an exchange on par with Hathor’s quality. That’s why we are pursuing a top tier exchange and expect to be listed in Q3/Q4 this year. As you might imagine, this is not an easy task, so bear with us and keep posted for updates!

Marcelo Salhab Brogliato [In reply to Rajesh Garnaik]
In our last test performed on our testnet with 90 peers, we reached a stable number of 200 tps. We already know where the bottlenecks are, but our current demand is really low (<0.01 tps), so we are focusing on other areas instead of growing this number right now.

Johny Zcash
What separates it from other DAGs like Nano, Iota, DAG etc

Jan Segre [In reply to Johny Zcash]
DAGs are used in many different ways, there are DAGs of blocks, DAGs of only transactions (Iota). We’ve made a DAG of transactions *with* a chain of blocks, basically separating concerns (blockchain for consensus, tx DAG for throughput and easy condensation of the consensus). Another way to think about this is moving transactions out from a block and arranging them into a DAG, instead of thinking it as DAG first.

Johnny Pizza Party
You guys seem to have done so much already and it shows. You have a wallet in the apple app store and google store and you decided to focus on all that before going on an exchange which in my opinion says volumes about your intentions to build something amazing. You’ve laid a lot of ground work already, but is there a plan to release a roadmap with a timeline of expected completion for each goal?

Yan Martins [In reply to Johnny Pizza Party]
On the short term, this is our roadmap:
- scalable wallet service
- transaction mining service
- improve situation with orphan blocks
- The wallet service is to make sure users can load their wallets instantly, no matter how many txs. We know this is a problem right now for people with lots of transactions
- The tx mining service make sure people don’t get timeouts when sending transactions, since there’s a PoW to be done before sending. We, the Hathor team, are providing this service for now with our own miners, and the orphan block situation is already known for people mining, we want to make sure we address that. That’s short term (~1 month). For long term, we plan on working on new functionalities for the full network:
- DEX;
- Nano Contracts;
- Oracles;
- Side-DAGs/Side-Chains

Shadow
What kinds of industries are you trying to penetrate, what kinds of companies and partnerships are you aiming for?

Pedro Ferreira [In reply to Shadow]
Hi @shadow_crypto the platform was built to allow any use cases to use its protocol, so anyone could use Hathor to build anything, not only tokens. We decided to focus on tokens, as an example of the possibilities of the technology and because of the market need of a tokenization platform simple to use and scalable.

Johny Zcash
Are there any presale/ico or funding sales planned at this time?

Marcelo Salhab Brogliato [In reply to Johny Zcash]
Yes, we have plans for presale and listing, but unfortunately I can’t give more details right now. We will announce as soon as we can. 😉

Shadow
What kinds of industries are you trying to penetrate, what kinds of companies and partnerships are you aiming for?

Yan Martins [In reply to Shadow]
Right now our main focus is the tokenization market. Anywhere ERC-20 tokens are used can be replaced by Hathor. Also, we had been talking to companies in Brazil and had them lined up to use our tokenization platform for ticketing in several situations (events, transport, rewards). Sadly, they’ve been cancelled due to COVID. If you need a custom solution, a developer with minimal training is capable of doing it because it does not require an expert to customize it.

_RN03xx_
the tech looks fantastic and combines high scalability and security, so what are the main use cases you are aiming for, what type of industries do you envision using Hathor technology?

Marcelo Salhab Brogliato [In reply to _RN03xx_]
Financial services are the most obvious ones but most use cases faces a huge legal barrier and do no move forward. We have been working on use cases for education industry, retail industry, and governments. For these use cases, we are also focusing on usability, so anyone can just plug&play and it is ready to be used.

Yan Martins
We see that the stable coin market has been growing and that’s definitely a market we can serve with current features. Also, one other thing that’s interesting is using atomic swaps on Hathor.

Gabriel Lima
What about the unitary token. For these cases, in my opinion it is crucial that we are able to make it.

Marcelo Salhab Brogliato, [In reply to @gabriellemos3]
Good one. We already have it in our roadmap. We will add a customization to select the number of decimal digits for custom tokens. We still don’t have a date for it, but it shoudn’t take long.

Jan Segre[In reply to Gabriel Lima]
But to add to that, “unitary tokens” is already possible with UI customizations.

Gabriel Lima [In reply to Jan Segre]
Ok, but it should be general, done inside the blockchain, so as not to be up to the costumized wallet. Otherwise one token in a wallet can have a 0.01 value on another one

Yan Martins [In reply to Gabriel Lima]
Yeah, it will be migrated to the blockchain

Marcelo Salhab Brogliato [In reply to Gabriel Lima]
I agree. This kind of information is safer to be on-chain.

vito
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 Ferreira [In reply to vito]
What’s interesting about a token minted in our platform is that we already have support for atomic swaps built in, so it’s easy to create a DEX to trade tokens created in our platform with a simple transaction

Yan Martins [In reply to vito]
Of course not. As tokens are native in our platform, adding a new token after any has been listed is a matter of just adding a new configuration string. There’s no extra engineering effort

Marcelo Salhab Brogliato [In reply to vito]
If the exchange already lists HTR, the tech side is trivial and takes no time at all. It is just a matter of business to get your token listed there.

FauxFire🔥
I love the ease of use Hathor provides. The biggest barrier to crypto adoption in my opinion has been the difficulty level most blockchains exhibit..Hathor makes tokenization user-friendly better than any platform I have seen!

Marcelo Salhab Brogliato
Have any of you guys tried to create a token on Hathor? You can do it directly from our wallet. You can compare to creating a token on other platforms.

FauxFire🔥 [In reply to Marcelo Salhab Brogliato]
I would encourage everyone to download the wallet and take it for a test drive

Ghost of St. Miklos [In reply to Marcelo Salhab Brogliato]
Can confirm, making a token literally takes a few minutes

_RN03xx_
How does a nano contract compare to a smart contract? also, with oracles being built into your own architecture, that seems like a big advantage

Marcelo Salhab Brogliato [In reply to _RN03xx_]
Nano contracts are special opcodes that you configure to do specific tasks. So, you don’t have to develop/program a nano contract; you just have to configure it. The idea is that 80% of the use cases will be covered by just a few opcodes. This brings a lot of security to them since it is less error prone.

Yan Martins [In reply to _RN03xx_]
And being quite honest, Oracles is one of the features I’m most excited about. We have a simple proposal for it, far from the overly complex solutions other cryptos have given

Marcelo Salhab Brogliato
Our time is up, folks! Thanks for joining us in our first AMA, and I hope we answered all your questions. Please, subscribe to This Week in Hathor (https://week.hathor.network/) to get our latest news.
We should definitely set another AMA. Thanks for your questions. We will use them to build an FAQ that will help newcomers and the community in general.