HOPR 2021 Year Review
As the year draws to a close, we want to take this opportunity to look back on everything that happened in HOPR since our February launch. It’s been an extraordinary year, and we couldn’t have done it without our amazing community. Join us for a quick retrospective of the major HOPR events of 2021. You can also see some of these in video format as part of our Community Update vlog. Read to the end for a few hints about the amazing things we have coming in early 2022!
Launch
The big news from the start of the year was of course the Jungfrau launch event, which saw the release of the HOPR token and the first version of the HOPR protocol.
Our Hop Around the World campaign brought together our wonderful local communities and attracted thousands of new people to HOPR.
Our truly fair launch raised almost 18 million DAI, 100% of which was transferred to a DAO-controlled liquidity pool. It was a lot of work to pull off, but this strong and fair launch to the HOPR token provided a firm foundation for everything we’re building.
You can read more about the launch here.
Protocol Development and Testnets
Since February, we’ve been all hands on deck to build the next version of the HOPR protocol: more robust, more scalable, more private, and with in-built staking incentives thanks to cover traffic. It’s a challenging problem and it’s been a long road, but we’ve made amazing progress which we’re excited to show off in the coming weeks.
Of course none of this would have been possible without our amazing testers, starting with our loyal HOPR ambassadors who help test all the internal versions which the public don’t see.
But biggest thanks go to the small army of community testers who have participated in all our testnets. The data we gather helps make the protocol more resilient and efficient with every iteration.
You can read about the Wildhorn testnets here and here.
DAO
HOPR’s ultimate goal is to provide much-needed privacy to the entire Internet. Such a fundamental part of digital infrastructure should be fully in control of its users, which is why it’s so important that HOPR becomes a DAO. But decentralized governance is complicated.
That’s why we’ve spent 2021 engaging in governance experiments to try and find the best way to reach decisions,
The HOPR system, based on Swiss semi-direct democracy, is designed to strike a balance between making everyone’s voice heard and giving weight to token ownership.
You can read about the first two experiments here and here. We’ll be publishing an in-depth report on how the results of the second experiment are being implemented in January, and we’ll be running a third experiment early in the new year.
Partnerships
HOPR is a proud advocate for web3 and its values: transparency, openness and a focus on decentralization and composability. None of this would be possible without forging partnerships across the cryptosphere and beyond. We’ve been pleased to expand our roster of partners to include Elrond, Polygon, Tidal, xDAI, Ceramic and more. Our ongoing partnership with Avado has seen 400 HOPR hardware nodes shipped to every corner of the globe.
HOPR Farm, Staking and NFTs
After launch, the HOPR Farm helped incentivize liquidity providers for our Uniswap pool. Once the liquidity moved to Uni v3 (as a result of the first DAO experiment) our staking program took over from the farm and played a huge role in the second half of 2021. Participants receive a base APY of 18.25%, but can boost that even further through NFTs earned by participating in our testnets, DAO experiments and more. We had a great response to the program, with almost 40m HOPR tokens staked and almost 10,000 NFTs earned! The current staking program ends on January 17th, but stay tuned for what comes next, and make sure your Boost NFT collection is topped up :)
Surveys and Analytics
It may not sound like the sexiest activity, but as we work to change data privacy for good it’s essential to gather solid data and properly analyze it to see what it means. This is crucial for developing the HOPR protocol of course, but also plays a vital role in every part of HOPR, from staking, to the DAO, to gathering feedback from the community to inform everything from marketing to tokenomics.
In 2021 we vastly expanded our analytics drive, and our data team works hard to gather and analyze data on every part of HOPR, always being careful to respect the privacy of the people who provide that data. In the spirit of openness that underpins all of HOPR, you can see all our data and analytics on HOPR’s Dune page, where we have many different dashboards and hundreds of custom queries.
Team Growth
Finally, the HOPR team itself has gone from strength to strength and expanded in every department, both in our wonderful Zürich office and our hard-working remote employees.
Although the pandemic has often hindered our ability to work in the same location, it was still amazing for much of the team to meet up in August and again in December. The August event was also marked by a visit from the grand prize winner of our HOPR Around the World contest, who won a trip to Switzerland and a chance to visit both Jungfrau and the HOPR office.
Although HOPR will always be about decentralization, it’s still important for our core team to come together regularly to work and bond. We’ll be continuing these events in 2022.
What Next?
Next year is all about growth: expanding our community, onboarding more partners and encouraging developers to build on top of our protocol. We’ve got an amazing program of events lined up to take HOPR to the next level and bring many more people on board with our mission to change data privacy for good.
We’ll have a lot more news for you next week (although the eagle-eyed amongst you might have spotted some hints from our GitHub, which is and will always be open for everyone to see).
Until then, from everyone at HOPR, we hope you had a wonderful holiday period and wish you an amazing New Year.
Rik Krieger,
HOPR Co-founder
Website: https://www.hoprnet.org
Testnet: https://network.hoprnet.org
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hoprnet
Telegram: https://t.me/hoprnet
Discord: https://discord.gg/dEAWC4G
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hoprnet
Forum: https://forum.hoprnet.org
Github: https://github.com/hoprnet
