Introducing the HOPR Founders: How HOPR Came to be
It was over an ice cold beer in the summer of 2019, that Sebastian first told me about HOPR. Needless to say, I was intrigued, but thought nothing more of it until we talked again in mid-December. By this point, HOPR was becoming more than an idea, as he recruited me to be a third co-founder, someone who would establish and conduct the Business Development side of the company. So I decided to fly into San Francisco and meet Sebastian in Pacifica for two reasons:
- Cultural Match: Did we still have the same targets in life (as we had worked together in the past, which I’ll go over later), is it still a cultural match between us?
- Project: And I wanted to know & understand the HOPR project in-depth, to bounce around some Business Development & strategic ideas
Sebastian, as one of the world’s leading blockchain architects, wanted to have a Bus-Dev guy, a strategic thinker — not a Tech expert — but somebody from the “real world” (as we always jokingly say), a position that seemed to be critically missing from almost all other Web3 projects that seem to have a hard time getting out of an unsustainable crypto bubble. At Sonect, I tried to found the company as solid and long-term oriented as possible, which included running a smooth daily business administration, HR in order to find the best for a successful team, finance, legal, compliance, brand & marketing as well as bus-dev and strategy, (the usual start-up orchestra in order to be able to run a business in a serious way).
After a week of in-depth discussions in Pacifica, with some awesome breaks & serious laughs in the local “Soul Grind Coffee Roasters”, we were both sure that we would be working together again.
I knew Dr. Sebastian Bürgel from our time founding Sonect, an award-winning Swiss fintech company, that is the world’s first virtual and also biggest ATM network in Switzerland. The company is about to expand across Europe, while at the same time bringing financial inclusion to Mexico. While far too humble to admit it himself, I know Sebastian as a brilliant mind, surrounded by a perpetual entrepreneurial spirit. He would go on to found Validity Labs, the first Swiss-based education and services company focused on blockchain and decentralized technologies, in 2016. It was this drive to be at the forefront of new technologies that curried favor with the Swiss government, where he taught an intro to blockchain course to the former President and also helped draft the Distributed Ledgers Technology (DLT) Law in Switzerland.
I’ve always been attracted to people who are constantly learning and building. In that week, we spent brainstorming, whiteboarding, and debating, Sebastian (even bought a whiteboard for us) and I started to develop ideas & possible strategies on how to introduce & grow the HOPR project.
Back in Zurich, I met with Robert Kiel to explore our cultural match and get to know him. Robert is our second co-founder and cryptographer with a background in Computer Science and wrote his Master Thesis on blockchain-based panel summers schemes — not entirely different from what we would later use for the HOPR Protocol. After his Master’s, he met Sebastian, and worked as a developer, implementing cryptographic building blocks.
As for myself, after almost 20 years working in business development for various companies, from corporate to start-ups, I knew HOPR would have transcendent potential, helping to usher in the Web3 ecosystem, where everyone has control of their privacy, data, and identity as they navigate online. With my experience from Sonect, which is listed under the FinTech50 in 2019 (next to N26, Monzo and Revolut) and has won numerous honors, including from LendIt Fintech, Banking Technology Awards, and Digital Economy Award as the “Next Global Hot Thing 2019”, I was able to bring that same disruptive mentality to HOPR.
You may ask, “why the name HOPR?”
The name HOPR (pronounced Hopper) came from the fact that metadata exchanged by users will, essentially, “hop” from node to node, ensuring complete privacy. The HOPR protocol introduces the first-ever open incentivized mixnet, where anyone can earn tokens for staking and running nodes. A slightly more technical answer would be that HOPR is a decentralized and metadata-private point-to-point data exchange protocol based on an incentivized mixnet. HOPR will provide layer-0 security, allowing existing applications, services, and novel decentralized applications (dApps) to communicate in complete privacy. Read more in our last blog post introducing the company and technology here.
As Sebastian made his way back from his stint in San Francisco, we knew that Switzerland was where we would start the company, as the country shares our values of quality, trustworthiness, and neutrality. Another unique aspect of HOPR is how it operates. HOPR combines the traditional association as a proven legal entity in Swiss jurisdiction with the tenets of a Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) which results in a Decentralized Community-Enabling Governance (DecenGov).
We have some other key announcements we’ll be making in the next couple of weeks, so please follow us on Telegram, Twitter, and engage in discussion on our just created Reddit, where we will be posting all things HOPR in the future.
I am absolutely thrilled to have two amazing co-founders, who share the same ideological values, as well as having the same business goals. We are ready to rumble! From all three of us, we are committed to making sure that your identity and privacy remain firmly entrenched in your own control. We’re excited to play a major role in a Web3 future, building the tools and framework to ensure its decentralized strength and livelihood.
If you’re in Zürich, let us know and maybe we can all have an ice cold beer together.
Cheers,
Rik Krieger, Co-Founder HOPR
