Welcome to 2019... where the data economy awaits!!
It’s time for an update with lots of exciting progress to share with you…
Hello Hutters!
It’s been super busy and a challenging period since our last update.
At the Hut34 Project are working extremely hard and remain focussed on building great products to drive our vision of an open, interconnected data and knowledge economy. The A.I., data and IoT markets continue to grow rapidly, as do the resultant opportunities; we intend to be there to ride this wave!
Across the cryptocurrency markets, sentiment remains extremely negative, with prices trading significantly off their highs. This environment is no fun, but we think some sort of “wash out” is, on balance, a good thing for long term ecosystem viability.
Below, is a summary of what we have built so far, where we see it fitting into our broader vision, and our technical and commercial aim for the rest of 2019.
the Hut34 data network…
With the launch of our Hut34 wallet and OnRamp’s “Dollars on the blockchain” product; two key planks of tokenised data commerce are now in place: (i) An easy to use crypto monetisation tool and interface and (ii) a regulated fiat to crypto bridge. Work concurrently continues on the remaining pieces of our ‘stack’; being (iii) the hutX protocol and (iv) the Hut34 data network of Relays and interconnected devices.
We have certainly faced many technical and resource challenges along the way, but as we build our vision remains clear, with progress incremental.
hutX
We’ve made numerous mentions of our data exchange protocol, “hutX”, over the course of the year. It is a foundational building block from which data exchange, monetisation, and the Hut34 network will be built. It forms the base unit for data trading and the suite of tools we are creating: Tools which we hope will drive its usage and adoption.
At its essence a hutX data object aims to cryptographically link data to valuecreating the capacity for trustless data trades to occur. To underline the point, we want hutX to allow data to be truslessly routed, exchanged, and ultimately if desired, monetised.
We envisage hutX to be an open, permissionless protocol allowing for the exchange and trading of data, information and knowledge, and where relevant utilising the Ethereum blockchain.
It will form the foundational layer that we hope will allow data exchanges (which we call Relays) in many shapes and forms to exist.
hutPortal & Relay
Once a data order, or request, is assigned a value and cryptographically signed — it can then be relayed to a counterparty for resolution. This is where the Hut34 network of Relayers (or exchanges) come into play;
Devices (like bots and IoT sensors!) and data services need to be able to easily connect to one another. Data orders need to be routed to services that can provide most appropriate responses and the request needs to matched with the “best’ response to be resolved. Once matched, value transfers from the requestor to the responder — monetising the data exchange.
In mid 2018 we made an important technical and design decision to initiate a rebuild of our hutPortal and hutRelay, utilising hutX. Private alpha testing continues, and we hope to move to public beta before end Q1–2019: We look forward to sharing more details as we get closer to this release.
the Hut34 wallet…
We remain excited about future applications of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, but as it stands accessing and using the technology, is too hard and time consuming. Only the highly motivated are willing to cross the pain threshold to enter the space!! This discourages consumers and corporates and is a real barrier to wider adoption.
Wallets are a critical piece of infrastructure, for both delivering a tokenised data economy, like the Hut34 network, and more generally for the broader crypto space.
We think there is a better way to provide users with secure wallets that are both user friendly and accessible across any platform, and meet the enterprise grade requirements. In fact, we think that a better wallet experience will spur the next step towards mainstream adoption.
This is why we built the Hut34 wallet — With a single click, users can access their Ethereum wallet and tokens via their Google credentials.
For consumers we’ve built a solution that removes many of the friction points people hit. We’ve made sign in super easy — leveraging the power of Google and “OAuth”; removing the need to understand the intricacies of cryptocurrency private key management to get up and running.
We are producing a series of videos explaining what we’ve done and for those wanting to get a little deeper, there are more technical sessions available too. Check them out on YouTube or Soundcloud.
Once consumers have an easy to setup and access wallet they can securely store their ethereum and crypto tokens and take advantage of the user friendly and simple token send functionality.
More excitingly, we have just launched our token conversion tool: Allowing users to easily convert Ethereum to other ERC-20 tokens and vice versa whilst still inside their wallet! Lot’s (& lot’s!) of hard work and innovative tech went into developing this feature via a blockchain protocol called 0x. The power of this tech cannot be underestimated as it removes the need exchange to happen via a third party, and potentially risky exchange. Crypto assets remain in your control until they are exchanged.
For the technically minded the wallet has a built in set of API endpoints, critical for enterprise adoption and for the delivery of our data marketplace and data Relayer network. These “endpoints” allow AI’s, bots and IoT services to interact seamlessly with the wallet and the cryptoverse — facilitating data trade and monetisation.
For corporates or businesses working on their own blockchain projects, our Hut34 Wallet-as-a-Service model (WaaS) will allow them to deploy their own custom-wallet. Under this model, wallet services can be white labelled and branded.Corporates maintain the consumer facing interface and the wallet features can be enabled at their specification. A growing area in the crypto space is the area of tokenised securities, and token collectibles. WaaS is well position to capitalise if this trend gathers momentum
Our first deployment of Hut34 wallet technology is with OnRamp.tech — creators of Australia’s first regulatory compliant fiat backed token or “stablecoin” called AUDR. We are also working on other WaaS implementations with exciting new commercial, community, and open science projects including Frankl, TrigID, Solara and the SevenMileinnovation lab. The great thing about these projects is they all bring new users to the Hut34 Project and Entropy (ENTRP) ecosystem!
Exciting times lay ahead for the Hut34 wallet as we push further towards increased enterprise and user adoption and incorporate features like increased API functionality, DEX connectivity, and even fiat borrowing capacity!
Checkout our previous writeup on the wallet here and try it out now
the year ahead…
At a higher level, activities for 2019 will aim to drive product users, data transaction volume, ENTRP liquidity and ecosystem growth. We are looking forward to another exciting and busy year.
What this means practically is we will be aggressively looking for ways to increase project awareness and pursuing commercial implementation (i.e sales!) opportunities for the Hut34 tech stack: hutX protocol, hutPortal, hutRelay, and the Hut34 wallet.
To that end we’re very excited to have the green light on three ‘real world’ blockchain data exchange pilot projects — facilitating the sharing of research, personal, and corporate data. These projects will both showcase and allow us to iterate on our toolset — further moving towards better product market fit.
In addition to the existing toolset, in the pipeline are our android data collection app and data encryption microservice.
The combination of the above technical tools, coupled with our ENTRP token creates a compelling product offering for range of Hut34 network participants — especially corporates where removing friction points, providing data security solutions, and economic incentives can amongst other things, drive cost savings, improve analytics and access additional revenue streams.
If you think these tools can help your business, or you know someone we can speak to, we would love to hear more!
As always we thank you for your support.
Onwards and hutwards!
Don’t forget to follow us on twitter or if you have any questions please join us on telegram to discuss further, or email the team with any questions.
