Hathor — bringing blockchain to the masses?
PS: This piece was written before I started working at Hathor Labs.
As the blockchain space and crypto markets mature, new projects entering the stage have an increasingly hard time making a lasting impact. Sure, new ERC tokens are added to Uniswap every week but with tradability being the only use case for most of these projects, they are quickly forgotten as impatient crypto traders move on to newer, shinier coins.
At the other end of that scale, there are a few projects that have proven their resilience over the years, consistently building and adding utility rather than focusing on price. These projects, with Ethereum being the most prominent one, have challenged what used to be a common misconception among blockchain enthusiasts back in the day. The notion was that any blockchain protocol and dapp would have a difficult time building a loyal user base. With your open-source code available to the world, what was to stop competition from forking your project and offer a slightly cheaper version of your business model, attracting your users to join them instead? We had seen it happen in the past with giants like Kodak, MySpace and Blockbuster. Failing to innovate, they became irrelevant overnight.
That prediction greatly underestimated the power of open-source blockchain projects. Up until now, the “build it and they will come” mantra hasn’t worked here and with Bitcoin still being king for the foreseeable future, there is nothing yet to indicate that the best tech always wins. While your code can be copied, your ecosystem cannot. Network effects, partnerships, as well as user, miner and developer communities can’t be forked and that makes these original blockchains extremely antifragile and gives them an advantage over all the hard forks and newer projects out there.
So how can you attract attention as a new project, not only from investors but from developers and businesses who want to build on your protocol and bring real-world use cases to your platform? Judging from market sentiment and personal experience, you need to take the opposite approach of most projects. That means getting your fundamentals in place before starting to pay any attention to price. This is exactly what the Brazil based project Hathor Network seems to be doing at the moment.
The result of more than seven years of academic research from its founding members, Hathor’s architecture is a novel one using both DAG and blockchain intertwined and is based on the Ph.D. thesis of founder Marcelo Brogliato. Its code was built from zero so it’s not a fork or built on top of another platform. Hathor’s testnet launched in May 2019 and their mainnet has been live since January 2020. Their active GitHub shows dedication to the project and the one thing that really stands out for me when comparing Hathor with other projects, is their relentless focus on platform and ecosystem development over token price.
Hathor has not run any public token sale. There was only a private seed investment from family and friends of the founders, and a private sale, and up until September 2020 when qTrade listed HTR (Hathor’s native token) on their own initiative, the only way to get a hold of tokens was to either mine them yourself or buy OTC from miners on their Discord. This approach of doing all the groundwork first could, knowingly or not, be a touch of genius from the team as it’s been getting them quite a bit of attention in the crypto space without having spent any resources on marketing. Ironically, this hard-to-get attitude, whether intended or not, comes across as attractive to many potential investors and adds credibility to the project.
Being easily available for anyone to trade is however a necessity for token value to appreciate in the long run, and the Hathor founders have confirmed that they are actively working on getting listed on one or more “tier 1” exchanges in the coming weeks. The team’s outlook and plans for the future of HTR can be found in their tokenomics document.
One good thing about being a new kid on the block is that you get the chance to adopt the best parts of other successful projects and improve on them. Hathor’s existing functionality and their extensive technical roadmap indicate to me that the team understands this.
Among the features already live are a highly scalable network with no central coordinator or any single point of failure. Transactions are feeless and instant. You have merged mining with Bitcoin and Litecoin, and proof of work rewards economically incentivizing the network forever (the first of three yearly halvings coming on January 3rd, 2021). Creating and minting your own layer one token on Hathor is literally done in seconds and requires zero technical knowledge. There are native wallets for iOS, Android, Windows, Mac and Linux. A proof of concept for nano contracts is already in place, adding smart contracting capabilities and enabling dapp development. Atomic swaps are there and the list goes on.
Another advantage new projects have is the opportunity to learn from others’ mistakes. Part of this includes not positioning yourself as another Ethereum killer. That narrative is simply flawed and outdated and shows poor form on your behalf. If you are a skilled and ambitious team you realize that the space is big enough for similar projects and business models to co-exist. Instead of talking down competition, you reach out to them and offer to collaborate. You aim for interoperability and enhancement of the space as a whole. With the initiative for a community-led working group, looking to research integration and extensibility with Polkadot, Quant and other networks, Hathor seems to be on the right path there.
Having a strong technical team and being a truly decentralized and open-source project, with a focus on user experience and simplification, Hathor might be laying the foundation for something big. The use cases are many and create themselves, although most are under NDAs currently — check out some of them in the team’s “This week in Hathor” posts.
The ease of use enables anyone to dip their toes into blockchain waters without having to invest a lot of time or resources. Perhaps you represent a global enterprise with unlimited technical resources wanting to tokenize their business model, or the local liquor shop on the corner that wants to offer a loyalty program to your customers. Hathor offers the level of complexity that is right for you, as well as help along the way, whether it’s on the business, architecture, or development side of things.
Any exchange or other third party is encouraged to integrate with Hathor, like qTrade did, or build their own applications on top of the network. Another blockchain project, THIRM, has built a cross chain DeFi bridge and implemented a wrapped version of HTR (tHTR) on Ethereum, enabling you to trade HTR on Uniswap. At the time of writing however, there isn’t much liquidity. The Hathor development team will offer their support and collaboration without necessarily endorsing a project or integration. This is the true nature of decentralization and a direction that more projects should pursue.
Right now the team is expanding their efforts in most areas and are welcoming everyone who wants to join the project. Whether you are interested in contributing on the business, development or community side of things, you can apply here.
Full disclosure: I have not received any forms of compensation from Hathor Network or other parties for this article. I do however own some HTR tokens. None of this is financial advice. Do your own research before investing in anything.
