HOPR Playground is Live

We’re delighted to present the HOPR Playground, a brand new way to interact with HOPR that gets you up and running in less than a minute without any installation. Just visit the Playground site, click the button, and you’ll be given access to a connected cluster of five HOPR nodes and our growing list of dApps to test, learn and play. Share links and PeerIDs with friends to give them access. When you’re done, we hope you’ll be inspired to build a dApp of your own and earn a juicy bounty!

HOPR Playground removes the long install and setup times that you may remember from our earlier testnets and Gitpod local setup for developers.

When you click LAUNCH CLUSTER, within seconds you’ll be given access to one of forty clusters of five nodes for twenty minutes. A countdown shows how much longer you have left with your cluster. If all clusters are in use, please wait and a new one should become available soon.

You’ll then see the HOPR dApp dock. Click an icon to see a short description of the dApp and five auto-generated links to access it, one for each node in the cluster.

The nodes are pre-warmed, so once you launch the cluster it should only take around ten seconds to be ready. You’ll know everything is good to go when the PeerIDs change from “Loading…” to a HOPR address.

Click a link to open a new browser tab and access a dApp. You can access all five nodes at once in different tabs.

You can also send links to friends to give them access to a node so you can exchange messages or play games together. Separate clusters are their own individual HOPR networks, so there’s no way for them to interact with each other.

When you’re done with a dApp select a new one and the links will automatically change for you. The cluster will be the same, so the nodes and their PeerIDs won’t change. This also means that you can run multiple dApps on the same cluster to see how they interact. For example, it can be interesting to run hoprd and see the messages sent by other dApps such as Boomerang.

Here’s the chess app and hoprd running simultaneously. You can see the moves arriving in the form of messages, which are interpreted by the dApp via the HOPR API.

We’re launching with six dApps, with several more in the pipeline to be added soon.

• Hoprd The classic admin interface for hoprd familiar to testnet users
• Hopr Cockpit See stats about your HOPR node in real time
• Hopr Visualizer Visualizes the entire HOPR network
• Chess Play chess with friends over HOPR
• Boomerang A proof of concept dApp which you can build yourself
• myne.chat Our flagship in-house private chat dApp

If you want to get deeper into HOPR, the most important dApp in the list is probably hoprd (the d stands for daemon). This will start up a version of the command line interface that will be familiar to anyone who participated in one of our testnets.

After clicking a link to access a node, you’ll see the hoprd admin interface. Initially it will be yellow and show a bunch of warnings. Playground nodes are automatically funded with test tokens, so you can just ignore these warnings and wait for startup to finalize. The interface will turn blue when this happens. This should take less than twenty seconds.

Once hoprd is ready, you can start inputting commands. Type help or visit our docs page for a list of possible things to try. When you’re familiar with using your node, you can use the other links to experiment with the other nodes in the cluster and how they interact.

Playground isn’t a replacement for running your own node, and developers should still use the Gitpod cluster deployment for building dApps, but it’s an amazing tool for showcasing dApps and getting people familiar with HOPR without complicated setup requirements. A huge thanks to our backend and frontend devs for their hard work in putting it together.

Another shoutout should go to the bounty hunters who built all the dApps as part of our bounty program. We’ll be showcasing their work individually on Twitter over the coming week. There are also many more dApps in the pipeline which will be added to Playground once they’re complete and tested.

If you’re inspired to build a HOPR dApp, check out our bounty contest. Apply with an idea, and if you’re approved you can start work immediately. Submitted dApps which comply with the HOPR dApp standard each receive $800 in HOPR tokens. There’s also an additional $2500 prize for our favourite dApp, chosen by the HOPR bounty admins next month.

Steven Noni,

HOPR Engineer and Bounty Master

Website: https://www.hoprnet.org
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hoprnet
Telegram: https://t.me/hoprnet
Discord: https://discord.gg/dEAWC4G

Forum: https://forum.hoprnet.org
Staking: https://stake.hoprnet.org
Bounties: https://bounties.hoprnet.org
Playground: https://playground.hoprnet.org