How HOPR Got People to Care About Privacy and Invest

HOPR is a little over two years’ old, and over that time we’ve used many different narratives to draw people’s attention to the huge privacy issues which plague Web 2.0 and Web3. Although everyone we engage with agrees with our mission to change privacy for good, getting people to actually take action has been a challenge. That all changed earlier this year when we adopted a new approach which not only got people to take crypto privacy more seriously — it directly led to significant investment from projects directly in the Web3 space.

Here’s how we managed to crack through some of the apathy and convince people to put their money where their mouth is on Web3 privacy.

There’s a surprising paradox when it comes to pitching data privacy narratives: virtually everyone is already convinced.

People may not know the specifics, but they know private data is important, and at risk online, and they feel that companies — particularly Web 2.0 monoliths like Facebook and Google — can’t be trusted with data.

Cisco’s regular consumer privacy surveys offer clear proof of this. In the 2021 survey, fully 86% of people agreed that data privacy is an issue they care about. 79% of people said they’re willing to act to protect their privacy. And that’s just regular digital consumers. In crypto you’d expect the figures to be even higher.

And yet in both Web 2.0 and Web3, users, companies and projects consistently don’t act on privacy.

Why? One important factor seems to be the fuzziness of the problem. The link between privacy issues and negative consequences are often vague. Yes, it’s creepy to see ads based on yesterday’s Google search in other contexts, but how does that happen, how can you stop it, and how much does it actually matter?

Even in very visible situations, such as data breaches, it’s often unclear how and when the stolen data is used and what the precise consequences are.

In crypto and Web3 the issue is often complacency. Many people believe that privacy issues are a relic of Web 2.0, and the very act of switching to crypto and Web3 means everything is golden now. But in fact Web3 has its own host of privacy issues, many of which will be more serious than in Web 2.0 without serious investment in solutions.

Everyone agrees that education is important, but as we’ve seen it’s not as simple as explaining to people about privacy. Everyone already knows and agrees data privacy is important, they just don’t understand what to do with that narrative.

So what’s a privacy project to do?

The answer is to make things less vague and clearly show the extent of the problem, in ways people can clearly see and interact with. That’s why we’ve focused on building tools which take a hidden issue and put it directly in your face. Let’s look at a few of them.

D.E.R.P.

Our D.E.R.P. (Dumb Ethereum R.P.C. Provider) tool shows exactly what happens when you connect your wallet to today’s crypto services. Instead of hiding all the requests and responses that are usually abstracted away by slick user interfaces, D.E.R.P. puts them all into a table in real time.

The results are alarming: in addition to your IP address, many DeFi services leak far more information than you’d expect, or they need to. Most surprising for many people: wallets often leak information about ALL your addresses, even if they’re not involved in the transaction.

This proved a real eye-opener, even for people who have been in the industry for years.

Try it out here.

Metadata Games

Data privacy is a global issue, but it doesn’t manifest in the same way everywhere. Our metadata games were slightly different, in that we didn’t build a new tool. But over a week we asked our different local language communities to directly engage with the problem of metadata privacy, with a focus on finding concrete examples of privacy issues, particularly ones specific to their region of the world. The result was a greater shared understanding of how metadata privacy affects different people in different ways.

Read more about the results here.

Non-Private NFT

NFTs were the hot crypto topic of the past year, but of course very little attention was given to privacy factors. Our non-private NFT is a dynamic image that changes depending on who is accessing it. Looking at the NFT reveals data like your location, device, browser choice and your IP address.

Like D.E.R.P., the non-private NFT exposes parts of the Web3 setup that are usually deliberately hidden from users in the name of smoother user experiences. But bringing these back to the surface shows just how far we have to go to build a private Web3 that matches the lofty ideals we have for the ecosystem.

Check it out here. We don’t store any of the information used to generate the image.

What Next?

Although these tools aren’t HOPR’s core product, building them has been invaluable in getting people on board with our mission to change privacy for good.

By focusing on details and not shying away from technical elements, it’s also meant our community were primed to understand our recent research into privacy issues which could affect the upcoming ETH2 Merge from proof of work to proof of stake, even though the specifics are quite complicated.

This approach has really revolutionized our interactions with other projects in the Web3 space, and spurred many notable projects to put their money where their mouth is and invest in making the ecosystem more private.

Far from resting on our laurels, we’re working on the next round of privacy tools. If that sounds like something you’d like to help us with, check out or jobs portal or our bounties page.

Sebastian Bürgel,
HOPR Founder

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