HOPR 2020 Roundup

Happy New Year!

Now that the dev team has taken a well-earned rest for the holidays, we thought it was a good opportunity to recap an eventful year and give you a sneak peak of what 2021 has in store.

Ready for a New Testnet?

Anyone who was in Telegram at the end of last year will have received a special surprise: Mainz-alpha, a first glimpse at the latest version of HOPR, with some big changes. HOPR now runs from your browser, and we’ve turned on crucial new features like auto channel funding and automatic routing. We’ve also continued our tradition of running testnets on different chains, and have moved to Binance Smart Chain for this one.

Mainz-alpha was just a very small test to check our new signup procedures and earn some testnet tokens, so don’t worry if you missed it. The real testnet starts in earnest this month, and we’ll be announcing the details very soon.

Community News

HOPR would be nothing without its community. It’s been so wonderful engaging with you all this past year, and it’s been amazing to watch the active community grow from just a few dozen enthusiastic participants in Jose’s early HOPR Games sessions to hundreds of people running nodes and regularly participating in games and tasks.

Growth has been so strong that we’ve expanded to offer Telegram channel support across 10 languages now — English, Mandarin, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, and Indonesian.

None of this would have been possible without the tireless efforts of our ambassadors: Lead Ambassador Andrew (@jaguaras), along with Serkan, Bellamy Black, and Mr_vavilon, who are always there to help out. A huge thanks for all their hard work this year!

Nodey McNodeFace, anyone?

One of the great things about running our testnets is getting to interact with community members from all across the world. One of the most spectacular examples was a community member running a node via satellite connection from a boat somewhere in the waters of Southeast Asia. Thankfully, this node runner was more than happy to send us a photo of their node running and followed up with the similar picture from the recent Mainz-alpha signups! Incredible…

You’ll notice a very obvious change in the node interface between the two pics. This is just one of the many changes we’ve introduced with Mainz-alpha.

HOPR Year in Review

It’s sometimes hard to remember that HOPR didn’t even exist this time last year! Here’s just some of the great things HOPR has accomplished since being founded in March:

• We established the HOPR Association, a dramatic evolution of the outdated Foundation model which permeates legacy crypto, and which will let us build truly decentralized, community enabling governance.
• We developed a robust set of privacy-focused values and then engaged a leading branding firm, JungVonMatt, to build a cohesive brand to reinforce and communicate them.
• We closed a $1m seed funding round led by Binance.
• We launched the HOPR Hardware Node PC.
• We ran a series of innovative, gamified testnets, distributing more than half a million HOPR to our community.

Tech Milestones

On the tech side, the dev team have made huge strides in getting HOPR’s unique privacy protocol off the ground. Highlights include:

• Continuous integration and deployment of HOPRd, HOPR bootstrap nodes and general testing on local and cloud servers. Peter Braden pioneered the efforts to ensure our pipeline can release new versions on demand, while automatically funding these nodes and running test actions on them to ensure all releases satisfy our demands.
• The HOPR protocol was successfully deployed across multiple Ethereum-compatible chains such as xDAI, Matic and Binance Smart Chain. Our smart contract developer Steve Nionis deployed for the first time ERC1820 registries across these chains to support our ERC777, an extension of ERC20 that supports snapshots on token data.
• The HOPR team created hopr-connect, a libp2p transport module able to handle NAT traversal connections, while supporting reconnection over our relay nodes (i.e. bootstrap nodes). Robert Kiel isolated the network capabilities of the protocol into an open-source library able to be used by anyone in the libp2p ecosystem.
• HOPR was among the first blockchain projects that designed an out-of-the box solution for non-technical users. The HOPR PC, a hardware computer brings a HOPRd node into the home of any user with an internet connection, powering the decentralization movement. The team will continue to push HOPRd to ensure its ready for our incoming main-net release so HOPR PC uses can quickly be onboarded.
• Alongside the protocol, the team is showcasing the capabilities of the protocol by implementing a REST consumable API, showcasing its capabilities via chat bots in multiple platforms. Jose Aguinaga demonstrated some of the scalable capabilities of the ecosystem in our Community calls and online demos that relied on the HOPR protocol.

And what next?

2020 was busy, but 2021 is shaping up to be even busier!

The big event of course will be mainnet launch, when you’ll first be able to get your hands on the HOPR token and start earning and staking.

Before that, we’ll be running another testnet where you can earn HOPR and help us put the finishing touches to v1 of our privacy protocol.

Post mainnet, we’ll be working to evolve the HOPR protocol and the HOPR Association itself, with a huge focus on governance and transforming HOPR into a new breed of DAO, one which is both truly decentralized but also able to interact with other real-world entities

We have some very big announcements coming up in the next few weeks, so make sure you’re following this blog and our social media channels.

Finally, we want to thank everyone who supported us throughout 2020. It was a bizarre and challenging year for everyone, and we’re so grateful that you found the time to join us on our journey to make the world a more fair and private place.

Sincerely,
The HOPR Team