Hito Selected to Famed Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator 2023
UC Berkeley sits between San Francisco and Silicon Valley, a perfect city for entrepreneurs and researchers. Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator is the newest lab at the Center for Entrepreneurship in the School of Engineering there. It was launched to leverage the fantastic groundswell of blockchain activity on UC Berkeley’s campus.
Hito is one of the latest companies to join the sixth UC Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator cohort, this one including 16 teams across 4 countries and with most or all focused on infrastructure, consumer and sustainability use cases for the blockchain industry.
Hito may look like a hardware wallet, but what it represents is freedom through technology. Hito is part of an ecosystem of #Web3 products and services that enable the freedom to financially transact peer-to-peer with anyone in the world, digitally, without an intermediary — without a a fee charging, funds freezing bank account, without a usurious remittance service like Western Union. The ability to do this — to not depend on or need a bank to live your financial life, to in fact *be your own bank* is one of the great advancements brought to humankind by the internet and cryptography.
Hito is designed with the average user in mind — not the crypto geek, not the experts, but your mother and your grandmother. One in five Americans have used crypto, but the vast majority have heard of it, and about half of those who have not used it say they expect to in the next year.
Analysts project that the crypto market will grow exponentially over the next few years, going mainstream, in part due to the shift toward contactless transactions amid the pandemic which has emphasized to many the value of digital currencies. And, events like EthDenver have seen an explosion of interest — attendance was up 50% this year to more than 30,000 attendee and 6,000 hackers competing for $1.1 million in awards and bounties. With the unprecedented growth, organizers are looking to take the event global and attract more developers and interested participants into the space.
Crypto hacks are growing too — crypto hackers stole a record $3.8 billion in 2022, mostly from exchanges, where most crypto is held despite this very risk. Why among 295 million crypto holders do only 5 million crypto holders self-custody their digital assets in a hardware wallet is the question; intuitive design, the kind that brought us the iPod and the iPhone — both products that transformed whole industries as well as lives — is the answer. Hito is the first hardware wallet that brings intuitive design front and center, making usability central to the experience while delivering next generation security features, all in a sleek device slim enough to tuck away with your credit cards. In the same way the computer is an advanced technology that became commonplace in the average person’s life, so too is the hardware wallet destined to become commonplace in the age of decentralized web services and payment protocols that is coming.
The Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator has a pure motive, to purely advance technology. Hito — which means ‘human’ — is motivated by the desire to bring advanced crypto security technology to all humans, a way to safely store digital assets and transact peer-to-peer with a familiar tap and scan simplicity.
Hito is excited to be chosen by the the premier university blockchain accelerator in the United States! Together we can accomplish the goal of crypto security mass adoption.
