Hathor Network with Yan Martins, Gabriel Aleixo, and Guto Martino
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Brief Information
Hathor Network is a Proof-of-Work based novel distributed ledger architecture using both DAG and blockchain data structures intertwined, with features such as easy tokenization, Nano Contracts, and predictable transaction costs.
Introduction AMA
Eric: Welcome @obiyankenobi and @aleixooo of @hathorofficial
Gabriel: Hi, Eric! Thanks for having us here!
Eric: been looking forward to this AMA as i have been a follower of Hathor’s development for a long time. So to begin, please introduce yourselves to the AMA room family and tell us how you discovered crypto. @obiyankenobi @aleixooo
Yan: Hi Eric! Happy to be here. I’m Yan Martins, CEO and one of the co-founders of Hathor Network. I’m a computer engineer by formation and have been into crypto since 2017 and with Hathor since 2018.
Gabriel: Haha that’s a funny one… I studied Economics and Business at university. So I got to know about cryptocurrencies as some sort of materialization of what Hayek wrote in his book Denationalization of Money, which I was studying in 2012. A friend of mine who was already using cryptocurrencies for remittances introduced me to the concept when he got to know about my interests and I found it amazing. I spent like 2 or 3 months researching how Bitcoin worked until I finally realized both the currency and the tech were revolutionary. I’ve been working full time with crypto/blockchain since then, first as an academic researcher and then as a market researcher.
I joined Hathor 6 months ago to work as full time business developer and researcher of how some market trends are going to shape the current and future use cases in our network.
Yan: I started in crypto initially just as an investor and interested in the economic incentives model. I then got involved full time after Marcelo finished his PhD thesis and decided to form a company to make it a reality. That was August 2018 and I’ve been with Hathor since then
Eric: so you bought bitcoin then, right?
Gabriel: I bought it early, but I sold most of it early too. What a shame hahaha LOL
Eric: Big brain project! love it. 🙂 So tell us, what is Hathor.network?
Yan: Hathor Network is a PoW-based novel distributed ledger architecture using both DAG and blockchain data structures intertwined, built with a completely new architecture, as we have coded it from scratch.
We have built a platform that anyone can use without being a blockchain expert. Our novel technology is flexible and different applications can be built on top of it.
We’ve been live on mainnet since January 2020, and recently we had the first halving event, which reduced inflation by half. Our first product is an easy-to-use tokenization service integrated with our wallet. We will add other features in the future, such as nano-contracts, oracles, and side-dags.
Eric: Interesting. can you explain what DAG is and how it is interetwined with DLT (distributed ledget tech) to form Hathor’s uniqueness? @obiyankenobi
Yan: Sure! DAG means direct acyclic graph and is a data structure well known in computer science .
In the crypto world, it became known when Sergio Lerner proposed this architecture for DagCoin (I believe that’s the name). It was a novel structure for blockchains and the most famous one to use it is IOTA.
In Hathor Network, we use a DAG of transactions only to gain the benefits of its scalability. However, we also have a chain of blocks securing the network, which solves some problems we’ve seen in other implementations. So the transactions are not contained inside the blocks as in traditional blockchains. Each block just points to transactions on the DAG to confirm it.
And also confirm the whole DAG of transactions before it.
Eric: Very novel and unique. so it gets the best of both worlds. faster and still as secure
Yan: Hope I could explain in not too technical terms 😁
Eric: So what other features does Hathor have @aleixooo ?
Gabriel: I guess Yan summarized it pretty well in technical terms. From a business standpoint, I just wanted to add that differently from some other projects, we have always use cases and their previous pain points in mind.
So in Hathor all the costs are predictable, so no dynamic and high fees. This makes it way easier for both startups and enterprise players to start running applications in our network. We are also capable of offering direct support in technical and business terms, kind of what a “consultancy group” does in traditional markets, right?
Hathor Labs is helping directly the builders in our network, not merely offering them tools but supporting them on how to use that, how to build friendly interfaces for their uses, etc. We are used to saying that we are obsessed with making the life of builders easier.
Eric: Do you have developer grants?
Gabriel: We will have it very very soon. We are just finishing the details and will happily share them with our whole ecosystem once it’s done.
Eric: nice. @obiyankenobi so what does the token HTHR do?
Yan: HTR is a utility token and the native currency of Hathor Network. It will always be the gateway to the current and future services possible on the platform. Right now, the most notable use case is minting your own token, something anyone can easily do with our wallet and without a single line of code. Future services we have planned on the network, like Nano Contracts, side-DAGs and so on will also use HTR in a similar way. We’re still studying the best model to do it.
Eric: Hathor is unique in that it has been under the radar long after the mainnet debut. Can you tell us about this strategy and how did it help the project?
Yan: Also important to note that HTR is mined and created on the block rewards to incentivize miners to secure the network. (Sorry, was just missing this last part from the other question).
Yeah. We actually followed more the strategy of building first. So we had the white paper in 2018 and didn’t make a lot of noise about it. We started working and did so for 18 months before releasing the mainnet. So when mainnet was released we already had functioning wallet for Mac, Linux and Windows and even mobile apps for Android and iOS.
It definitely helped us as lot to focus on the work, since a lot of things change after the network is public.
Eric: must have been the smoothest wallet ive every used for a new project
Yan: Not only we have to keep an eye and make sure it’s running smoothly, but also support all users and community
Eric: Whats in store for Hathor in 2021?
Yan: Thanks!
Gabriel: So, lots of things :) Here we go:
I’m starting an Interoperability Working Group to research ways to develop bridges and connections between different chains. Very hands-on approach, with the help of some prominent community members and thought leaders of the Interoperability industry. We believe that having a strong community of builders and enthusiasts and being able to communicate with other chains is one of the key growth elements.
It will make possible for more complex use cases to take the “transactional” benefits of Hathor, I would say.
Yan: The main focus will be attracting use cases for the network. We mean to reach out to the market and enterprises, not only the ones already on the crypto space, but also traditional ones. And that’s a big challenge since most of them don’t have a good understanding about blockchains or how to integrate it to their business model.
But of course we also want to “attack” and integrate to the larger crypto ecosystem and @aleixooo has been leading this initiative
Gabriel: As Yan said very well, promoting adoption is a must Hathor 2021, not only in the Marketing side but in the growth side, with initiatives and use cases using our platform and the HTR.
To make that happen, we are coming up with the first grants to teams, projects, or developers who want to build their ideas using Hathor Network or as implementing solutions found on other chains.
Community AMA
Q: With the use of DAG interwoven with Blockchain in Hathor, can you tell what is more outstanding than PoS or dPoS of other Defi projects? How does it solve the problems of scanning, fees and TPS? With just over 200 TPS, do you think that’s enough for digital asset projects?
Yan: As for the number of TPS, it’s something that a lot of projects try to hype and make some unrealistic promises. There are a lot of more nuances to it, specially when you consider decentralization. I wrote about it a while back: https://medium.com/hathor-network/on-cryptocurrencies-scalability-and-decentralization-5530748301e6
So we reached 200tps in our initial tests and felt we didn’t need more at the moment. We already know several points where we can improve. So we shifted the focus more to the business side since, being very honest, few networks at this point need such high tps. Only after we get adoption and use cases this will become a bottleneck. Also, there are other ways to deal with this, like using side chains, which are called side-DAGs in our case
Q: Is the Hathor Network EVM compatible? It would be interesting to port existing DApps to this fee-less network. Perhaps, even cross-chain swaps can be conducted?
Yan: It’s not and that was by design. We don’t want to have this general purpose, Turing-complete machine. We understand the value of it, but we also see that it adds some limitations. We believe 80% of the use cases will use 20% of the features in the network. So our goal is to focus on these 20% and make it super easy for everyone to use. That’s our approach to tokenization and will be the same for Nano Contracts, our version of smart contracts
Q: Although each different token has a value with a 32-byte hash similar to a transaction hash, why are HTR tokens the only exception and why the token does not have a user ID?
Yan: That’s because it’s the native token for the network. Also, being the most used one (so far) it also helps by saving space on the transactions
Q: Hathor uses a consensus Proof-of-Work (PoW), sha256d + merged mining with Bitcoin for its utility token $HTR. What is the purpose of this merge mining with Bitcoin?
Yan: Merged mining makes it easier for new networks to grow it’s hashrate by sharing the hash power of other larger networks. And a high hashrate is super important for PoW projects, being a fundamental part of the security model.
We decided to use sha256d since it’s the most readily available mining algo in crypto and so we could get some of the hashpower from well-established projects. So we can not only tap the hashrate of BTC, but all other BTC-like coins. We currently share a lot of the hashrate of BCH and BSV.
Q: What do you think is the future of digital collectibles and NFTs and how then does HATHOR NETWORK plan to be at the forefront of this innovation?
Gabriel: I’m fascinated by the NFTs market. Our Marketing Manager Guto Martino has been researching and interacting with this market closely in the last few months, so we already have some ways in mind on how to develop them within our ecosystem.
As of now, tokens on Hathor Network have all the capabilities as ERC-20 tokens (and a few extra ones), which is a huge market out there. By making it easy to create a token, our goal is to enable more people to experiment in the tokenization market and develop new use cases.
We are committed to improving our token capabilities continually, keeping them up-to-date with market demands. We plan to add new features following the ERC-721 standard to foment these exciting use cases for the near future. As with our original design, we’ll make all changes to deliver an easy-to-use experience for both token creators and users, with a predictable cost structure and in an efficient way.
So, even though NFTs features are not implemented yet on Hathor, we consider it such a relevant and potentially huge market as identified in our internal research that it should become technically viable in our network soon.
Q: What are nano contracts? What makes them different from normal smart contracts? What benefits do they bring to Hathor Network?
Gabriel: With Nano Contracts you’ll have at your disposal a set of pre-programmed contracts, implemented at the protocol level, which makes them safer and more available. Kinda like battle-tested solutions.
In other words, they are already ready and pre-tested contracts that can be implemented in an easier way compared to regular smart contracts in other networks.
We may have projects all over the world implementing bets, financial derivatives, other financial applications based on “if this, then that”, etc. I can envision some basic modalities of joint governance of funds and other decisions as well.
We can expect 80% of the real-world use cases for smart contracts to be based on 20% of the full possibilities they can offer. So Nano Contracts will be focused on bringing a bulletproof and radically accessible version of “that 20%”.
This can be very relevant for mass adoption, especially when paired with the scalable nature of Hathor’s architecture.
They’re not going to create the most complex dApps in the world in day one, let’s say… But 80% of their needs should be fulfilled without that much coding, etc.
For the remaining use cases that need very complex and specific logic, one of our goals is to provide interoperability between Hathor and other blockchains, as mentioned.
Q: ✅ Is Hathor a fork of an existing project, cause I remember there are few similar projects that allow users to create their own token; or did your core team prepared the infrastructure?
Gabriel: No, Hathor was built from scratch, it’s not a fork. We have an entirely new codebase.
Indeed, there are other projects doing tokenization in the market. We are just doing it in a very different way, straight from the wallets, in a few clicks, secure and scalable. There are no fees for transactions and we went for a “deposit” model where you need to lock 1 HTR token for each 100 units of the custom tokens you create.
Finally, a gentle reminder that even though we have focused in tokenization and we do believe that it’s still a strong market to be developed, Hathor Network is way more than that. We have Nano Contracts and Side-DAGs as core features to be deployed in the network starting this year and in the next, which will bring room for way more use cases and also more complex ones. Interoperability with other chains will help a lot in this sense too, and is definitely on the table.
Q: You offer users an opportunity to create their own digital tokens with customized specifications on the Hathor Network with only a single click. Will these custom tokens work under the same technical assumptions of high scalability and decentralized consensus of your $HTR tokens?
Gabriel: Yes, definitely. Custom tokens created on Hathor share the same features and “specs” of our native utility token HTR, other than the ones customized of course (supply, name, etc). So they share the same scalable nature, there are no fees for transacting them (except the deposit needed not to transact them, but to mint them at first) and you can use the same wallet for them. Our can even create a specific wallet for yourself using our white label solution for that: https://medium.com/hathor-network/create-a-mobile-app-for-your-own-token-bac98eac1726
Q: Where does the project name come from? What does it mean for you and why did you choose that name for your project?
Yan: This is a funny one 😁
Hathor is an Egyptian goddess, also associated with mining. Given that mining is an important part of the network, seemed like a good name
Closing Remarks
Eric: That's a wrap! @obiyankenobi @aleixooo please invite people where to follow Hathor
Yan: Thanks for hosting us @ERCSU !
Gabriel: Thank you very much and feel free to join us at @HathorOfficial
http://twitter.com/HathorNetwork
Thank you all for the support and for the very interesting questions!
Eric: Thanks everyone for tuning in!
