Witnet is about to integrate on Hoo Smart Chain. Why it’s so important (AMA)
Hoo Smart Chain is the next chain in Witnet’s chain integration pipeline. Currently we’re pursuing 2 new chain integrations a month. We’re so excited to partner with such a bright and vibrant blockchain that is Hoo Smart Chain.
We sat down on Twitter Spaces on June 16, 2022 with Denton from HSC, to discuss our partnership and to bridge the two communities. We were so excited to see the community engagement!
HSC was so generous to reward 10 lucky audience members with some native $HOO and another 10 users with $HOO for their thoughtful questions following the formal AMA.
For those that couldn’t make it to the AMA, here is a link to listen
Learn about Witnet, and Hoo Smart Chain
If you just want the “tl;dr” then join me in this transcript as we do a brief walk though of what was covered!
The AMA
What is Hoo Smart Chain?
Denton: “Hoo Smart Chain comes from the idea of providing an accessible and easily development environment for developers to realize their vision. We are an EVM compatible side chain. Running on our own validators and network at the moment. We launched our mainnet around 1 year ago, and have been making rapid progress in our ecosystem!
We want to give developers a low barrier to entry to blockchain development and the freedom to build decentralized applications using blockchain, distributed ledger technology. Ethereum’s smart contract implementation caused an explosion of innovation such as DeFi, Game-Fi , Social-Fi, NFTs and it’s social impact as well, like DAOs in the way we organize ourselves, just to name a few examples.”
What is the difference between your project, and the hundreds to thousands of others out there?
Denton: “We really want to set ourselves apart by doing a few things.
- Visual blockchain — we are really keen on tackling the UI/UX problem in crypto at the moment. It’s complicated, convoluted and the cost of making a mistake is really high. We Such as transferring the wrong token standard when going cross chain. Or when faced with an overwhelming amount of information when approaching any De-Fi Protocol. We want to use visualization and provide the tools for developers to do this.
- Positive Sum Community — We want create an environment that fosters this kind of cooperation across all segments or roles in our community. Be it developers, new users, veteran analysts we want to connect them together and grow.The value of such a community cannot be understated but at the same time hard to gauge ! It’s definitely not an easy thing to do, especially when put into practice, but it’s a goal that is more difficult and worth doing.
- Ease of Development — As mentioned earlier we are EVM compatible, with a very low gas fee. If you are dev, just message us for some HOO to use for gas fee! Our team is extremely helpful and will foster innovative projects who are looking for a chance to grow.”
What do you see as the most valuable part of your project?
Denton: “I think the most valuable part of Hoo Smart Chain is the environment that it creates for developers and users. The connection between users, developers, contributors, learners are all kind of intangible and very valuable aspects to the project.
We’d like our community to recognize Hoo Smart Chain as a place they grew and made real connections in the crypto space, and that it helped them grow financially, intellectually and become a place where they belong.”
How would you personally like to see developers building and using your protocol?
Denton: “One really good one [development] is wallet seed phrases. This is clunky, but safe mechanism, and is generally difficult to protect or keep track of. We want to improve this by using social recovery wallets, in a recent paper by Vitalik, Glen Weyl and Puja Ohlhaver, they touched upon how something like this can lead to fundamental changes in the way we interact using these mechanisms.
Another low hanging fruit is tackling the problem of showing Impermanent Loss, this one is a bit of a tricky concept that nearly everybody has to tackle sometime or another. But what if we could visualize this information to make it more intuitive to understand before we commit to becoming an LP (liquidity provider)?”
Overall we’d like to create some kind of design language, as well as APIs — a bit like material design by Google. We realize the best design will serve the purpose of what the dAPP is trying to do, so it will need to have a good amount of abstraction.
Web3 has a really great native tendency for this, that can allow interoperability between data, protocols, apps, and the users.”
How do you plan to support these developers, and how do you plan to do this to strengthen the idea of decentrality?
Denton: “We have a rewards program called the Cosmic Origin Project, basically this is like a retroactive funding program. Projects that reach certain milestones or metrics can be rewarded both in a one time reward, and also reap continued rewards. This is often more that a initial grant offered, and we want to encourage long term commitment and sustainability in our ecosystem.
Also in the spirit of positive sum mentality, we encourage cooperation between all of our on chain projects to grow together and achieve more.”
(Devs, this ones for you!)
“We plan on opening up validators to our users in the near future, and users can contribute to the security and operation of HSC in the future. We are still ironing out a few kinks so we will announce this when it’s ready.”
How do you see Witnet playing a role in strengthening your network?How is this integration going to play a role in developing both HSC and the Witnet network?
Denton: “Oracles play a crucial role in providing data for any smart contract to execute upon their logic. This sounds a bit big, but actually I don’t think many people in the space recognize what a profound or slightly crazy thing this is!
Basically a decentralized oracle is in the business of attesting to truth and validity a piece of data. This data can be anything from something on chain or off-chain. But what is really interesting is the off -chain information. When off-chain data is combined with on-chain logic programmed into the smart contracts that interacts with real value in digital assets, NFTs then it opens up the Pandora’s Box of innovation.
As mentioned earlier, Hoo Smart Chain does have a focus on tackling real life usage scenarios for crypto and blockchain technology. We don’t want to be just stuck on chain forever and in a little enclosed ecosystem.
I think the as HSC developers explore more real world applications, so will the usage of WitNet and grow along with the kind of data feed it provides and its services.”
How does utilization of a strong oracle network like Witnet help bolster cryptocurrency fundamentals like decentralization, distribution, scalability, etc?
Denton: “On a fundamental level, a decentralized strong oracle network helps bolster the real world applicability of any smart contract platform. With Witnet’s services, developers can build an ever more intricate, and useful applications by applying off-chain data to deterministic on chain execution.
I think the the WIT token is a great example of using economic incentives to drive a valuable service to the ecosystem by attestation and delivery of data. Using Witnesses and doing RAD work. Anyways we are very excited to have you guys on HSC to do an AMA and tell us all about the intricacies of it too , we should set a time for this haha. (we actually have this planned! June 29th, 2022)”
Can you walk us through your consensus mechanism?
Denton: “Currently HSC runs on POSA, which is a bit like POS and runs on 21 validators which we run internally. We are making good progress on opening up validators to a delegated POS system or DPoS. We will be announcing more details for this shortly, but we are very excited for it, as it will open up all HOO holders to be able to delegate and help secure the network. We designed very low barrier to entry for this to maximize the number of participants.
There will be guides, and tutorials to show users how to delegate, and how to run a validator or apply to be one.”
(make sure you keep up to date with HSC on Twitter, to know when this goes live!)
What are the crypto economic incentives of your network?
Denton: “We are developing a metaverse-like interface, in what we call a visual blockchain. The idea is that we adopt a ENS like system and build a UI on top that, so that users are able to customize their interface. At the moment it will function like a planet. This way to make sure of data visualization and UI design to 1) make crypto easier and more intuitive to use and 2) put the design to good use, as well designed planets can then be a mechanism for value accrue.
Although the design is still in its early stages, in line with our vision to make crypto easier to use through visualization and design, we want to design this kind of system as a mechanism to give back to on-chain users.
This is the direction we are headed, but it’s far down on the roadmap. Back in February we did an AMA to talk about this, if users are interested we can share it later, or check our Medium page for the article.”
What excites you most about the Hoo Smart Chain?
Denton: “I think in the short term is that we will be opening up validators to the public and also moving to DPoS. This a big step to move towards the decentralization side of the spectrum, and as we know by now, a core tenant of crypto is decentralization, it is something we always have to be actively addressing. So I’m quite excited to see that moving forwards, like in terms of the general principles that should be upholding in the space.
Secondly opening validators means it will open up more options in the DeFi space as it opens up possibilities for DeFi protocols to build on top of the staking mechanism. I think the staking economy is going to be a huge part of the crypto space, people are going to be securing networks that align with their values everywhere. Note that we are talking about staking tokens as a validator to secure a network, not staking in a CEX or DEX. I think we often use the same term to mean different things here.
In the Medium term, Im excited about the visualization we can do. It’s a bit abstract to be fair, I think this is a very good opportunity to address crypto’s UI/UX issue. How can we as a small chain in the space contribute and make changes to the current way we design it ? I was researching some design methodologies such as Material Design used by Google on the Android system, and I think that will be something we would like to learn from. As well as providing the technical tools like APIs or design principles for developers to improve their DAPPS as well.
In the Long Term, we want to create more useful decentralized applications, myself and our colleagues often talk about what things we can decentralize in our daily lives. For example like education certificates are a good example of this. The university is like the authority that issues your bachelors, masters or doctorate degree, and whilst there is a good amount of trust placed here because you have to go through the hard work in earning those degrees, and there is some mechanism to ensure the quality of it like writing a thesis or doing your viva like your PhD, we think there is room to design a system where your piers or colleagues can attest to the skills/knowledge and abilities that you have.”
Unfortunately, we ran out of questions to ask Denton.
But don’t worry, for there is another AMA on June 29th, 2022.
I really want to thank the Hoo Smart Chain team and especially Denton for taking the time to put this together for us and our community.
I really hope both communities learned a lot and left the AMA a little more passionate about HSC and Witnet.
