HOPR is a multifaceted project developing bleeding-edge technology for digital privacy, layer-zero data transfer, and decentralized governance.

This is an enormous scope, and everything is tied together by the HOPR token, an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain.

There’s a lot to talk about here, but this post will cover the basics of the HOPR token: what it does, how to earn it, and broader tokenomic information including overall token supply and our token release schedule.

Subsequent blogs will focus on individual aspects of the token, and more information can be found on Telegram, Discord, and in our Discourse forums.

Token Functions

The HOPR token has three main functions: pay, stake, and vote. …

The HOPR Säntis testnet wrapped on October 6th, with more than 500 people running nodes and claiming a HOPR token prize. Now, just two weeks later, we’re back with our next release. Continuing the theme of naming releases after mountains in Switzerland (HOPR’s home country), our newest testnet is called Basòdino.

In addition to greatly improved stability, Basòdino introduces multi-hop messaging and the first hands-on experience of the payment channels and reward tickets that power HOPR’s proof-of-relay system.

Like last time, anyone who participates in the testnet will be eligible for a share of a 200,000 HOPR prize fund.

HOPR Basòdino will be open for registration from 3pm CEST on Tuesday October 20th, with the scoring system going live 24hrs later. The testnet will then run for two full weeks, until 3pm CEST on Wednesday November 4th. …

It’s been a busy few months of testing and development since our public launch in July. Our first public versions of the HOPR network have all employed a slimmed-down version of our data transmission protocol, but now we’re ready to start turning the most important features back on, like multi-hop data transmission, probabilistic payments, and cover traffic. We need your help to test them all on our new incentivized testnet on the xDAI chain!

This is the very first chance to earn HOPR tokens! Anyone who participates in this testnest will be eligible for a share of our first bounty fund, worth 1.66 …

Decentralization brings with it a whole new way of working and making decisions. In the absence of traditional hierarchies and power structures, people still need a way to plan and reach decisions. The mechanics of decision-making are covered by governance, but at a higher level it is essential to have clear shared values. Strong and clear values let people decide whether they want to join or collaborate with a project and help guide participants towards effective and consistent decisions.

HOPR’s values closely align with those of the Web3 movement, in both its technological design and its broader outlook. In particular, HOPR is committed to creating technology and a broader ecosystem which is trustworthy, open to everyone, and privacy preserving. …

The pandemic has uncovered fatal weaknesses in the systems which permeate every aspect of our lives, from logistics to healthcare to the highest halls of government. These problems aren’t new — people from all industries and the full breadth of the political spectrum have been sounding alarms for decades — but previous crises were localized enough that we could always blame a particular company or industry.

But now there’s no hiding from the bare facts: our global fetishization of “efficiency” and centralization has left us dangerously exposed. We need to start optimizing for more than simply cost and speed. We need to be able to respond quickly to problems, disseminate accurate information, and reach consensus for action even when opinion is divided and time is short. Our systems need to integrate easily with the others we build, instead of everyone working in silos. …

Imagine a list of everything you’ve done online this week, and when. Everyone you messaged or video called. Every social media interaction, takeout order, doctors appointment, dating app match. Every website you visited (yes, all of them). Everywhere your phone has been. Every time you were and weren’t at home.

Would you be happy for your neighbours to see this list? Your boss? Your bank? Everyone on the internet? Now make it the past decade, not week. Now make it forever.

That’s the reality of using the internet today. While the data we send is usually encrypted, the metadata — the data about what you’re sending, when, and who to — is all available to be hacked and tracked. …

TLDR: When cancelling a transaction on Multis (by anyone, including the creator), transactions were removed from the UI but the `revokeConfirmation` method on the smart contract was not called. As a consequence, any transaction that had been submitted to an m-of-n multisig and which had been “cancelled” in the UI could have been confirmed with only m-1 additional signatures. This is particularly bad for the popular 2-of-3 multisigs as any additional signer could execute all previously “cancelled” transactions with just a single signature. …

Today we are at the onset of a new technological era — the era of decentralized technologies. Decentralization is not just a shift in underlying technologies; it presents a major power shift. Many proponents of decentralized technologies argue that they bring back power to the people. Power that first got captured by warfaring governments and then alarmingly shifted towards profit-maximizing corporations is now on the brink of coming back to the individual. This power shift has been in the making for decades, but it is now driving by open technologies and ultimately free money. …