A new day and new guests at Satoshi Club with an incredibly interesting history of development and their way to success. And today we would like to tell you about the AMA session with our friends from Hathor Network. The AMA took place on December 29th and our guests were Gabriel Aleixo?—?Business Developer and Researcher at Hathor Network, Yan Martins?—?one of the Core Developers and Co-Founders of Hathor Network.
The total reward pool was 600$ and has been splitted in 3 parts.
In this AMA Recap we will try to summarise the most interesting points for you.
Part 1?—?Introduction and questions from the Telegram
Mary | Satoshi Club:
Hello Satoshi Club! We are happy to announce our AMA session with Hathor Network! welcome to Satoshi Club
D. | Satoshi Club:
@jansegre @obiyankenobi @aleixooo hello guys! welcome!
Mary | Satoshi Club:
Welcome to Satoshi Club @jansegre
@obiyankenobi @aleixooo
Gabriel Aleixo: Hi Satoshi Club, my pleasure! Gabriel Aleixo here, Business Developer and Researcher at Hathor Network!
Yan Martins:
Hi everyone, happy to be here. I’m Yan, one of the core developers and co-founders
D. | Satoshi Club:
good to have you here!
D. | Satoshi Club:
how are you doing?
Mary | Satoshi Club:
How was your day guys?) Sure, you’re very busy now)
Gabriel Aleixo:
We’ve never been busier, I think. Which is very good for the project hahaha. Lots of things going on and good news to come in the next days, weeks and months, I would say
Yan Martins:
Great to be here and thanks for the invitation. Indeed, pretty busy these past couple of days making sure Hathor ends the year on a high note
Mary | Satoshi Club:
Ahaha, it’s the best thing you can do for your project! And let’s start with Hathor project introduction
D. | Satoshi Club:
after that we will start first part of our AMA
Mary | Satoshi Club:
Explain us more about it) and how did you get involved in Hathor Network)
Yan Martins: Sure
Yan Martins:
Hathor Network started as part of the PhD thesis of our founder, Marcelo. He proposed this new architecture for blockchains and did an amazing academic work.
After finishing his PhD, he decided to pursue this idea and started assembling a team. I had already worked with Marcelo and some of the other co-founders before, so it was a very cool opportunity to us
Yan Martins:
That was way back in 2018. If I’m not mistaken he presented his final paper on May or June and we first talked about it in July. A month later, in August, we started the first lines of code
Mary | Satoshi Club: Wow, two years!)
Gabriel Aleixo:
I’ve been involved with crypto for couple years, first as an academic researcher and then as a market researcher. Our CEO Marcelo Brogliato and I studied in the same university. As we got interested in research more about crypto, we were introduced by a friend who worked as a Tenure Professor there at the time.
I’ve been advising Hathor since it was started and I joined the team as a full time member 6 months ago, after things start to grow a lot and very quickly. I was recruited to take care of some use cases and understand how the current and future market trends would shape the future of Hathor.
Mary | Satoshi Club:
Which is the main concept of Hathor Network?)
Gabriel Aleixo:
I would say that from a high level perspective, Hathor Network core features are scalability and ease of use. From both the technical and the business standpoints, we understood that there was still a lot to be done in these fronts and by doing so we could be more steps closer to blockchain mass adoption by startups, end users and Enterprise businesses.
D. | Satoshi Club:
Yan Martins:
From a technical perspective, Hathor Network has a DAG of transactions with a blockchain intertwined. That was the architecture Marcelo came up when researching how to solve the problem of scalability of blockchains. We could spend some time here debating all the challenges this presents, how to guarantee consensus and prevent double spendings and conflicts given this new model. But the basic idea is that of the DAG + blockchain
D. | Satoshi Club: interesting idea
Gabriel Aleixo:
From a business perspective, dynamic fees are a problem, the cost of implementation is a problem and how to start small and grow your blockchain application is also a problem. These are some of the most important bottlenecks we’re trying to tackle with how we designed our network.
We offer predictable costs, easy to use tokenization and smart contracting features (the so-called Nano Contracts) and a higher throughput.
Mary | Satoshi Club:
Guys, once i was involved in one cryptoproject and i clearly understand that besides scalability and ease of use you need a lot of users and developers. Or your project will be just one of the Networks. Ethereum network with all its disadvantages is still number one. We have Polkadot, Tron, Cosmos etc. I want to see if you understand this)
Yan Martins:
No doubt about it. In order for any crypto project to gain adoption, having a community of developers and builders around is essential. In that sense, Ethereum is probably the most successful one. So we understand we’ll have to attract these types of users by offering easy to use dev tools and lots of tutorials and technical training. But that’s only from a technical standpoint. @aleixooo is better suited to talk about the business side, which is just as important
Mary | Satoshi Club:
That’s great, from my point of view, it’s one of the hardest sides of network development. I am glad that you understand this
Gabriel Aleixo:
A strong community of builders and enthusiasts, interoperability with other chains and understanding blockchain as a whole ecosystem instead of merely a single network are key elements to me.
This is why we are in touch with people from some other amazing projects, such as PolkaDot and Quant Network, to help us implement our Interoperability Working Group, starting on January 2021. It’s going to be conducted with a very hands-on approach, putting our developers and prominent community members to work together with some of the current leaders in the industry. We will provide more information about it in the coming weeks and everyone will be welcome!
I should also add the fact that I’m in touch with 2 interesting projects building bridges with Ethereum as well. We should expect a vibrant ecosystem of more complex applications being possible to be deployed in the next year!
D. | Satoshi Club:
nice! we can expect lots of big news from you soon
thank you! great intro guys! are you ready to begin our AMA session now?
Gabriel Aleixo:
Yeah!
Yan Martins:
Let’s go!
D. | Satoshi Club:
Q1 from Telegram user @nadynas
Your mainet is live on 3rd of January. That is cool. Tell us how did the testnet go and what problems have you found, if any. What were your main objectives for the development of the project since the foundation
Yan Martins:
So we started development on August 2018. A bit over 1 month later, we had our first prototype of a testnet. Of course that it was very basic and without a lot of the protections and features, but we had a network running. It’s sometimes nice to go back to GitHub and look on the old commits and see how much the code evolved
Mary | Satoshi Club:
Do you think it’s perfect now?)
Yan Martins:
It’s never finished
Mary | Satoshi Club:
So, you will start on 3d of January
?
D. | Satoshi Club:
i checked your Github and saw that you working at your code daily. this is awesome!
Mary | Satoshi Club:
Which problems did you have during testing?)
Yan Martins:
The testnet was super important to us considering we’re a network coded from scratch. We didn’t base ourselves on any other code. Of course there are ideas in common with a lot of other projects. We use the same hash as BTC and also the UTXO model, but having a DAG of transactions and a blockchain was the main challenge. In the end, we were putting together a PhD thesis. A theoretical work is very different from a finished, real world product
Yan Martins:
This January 3rd we celebrate 1 year of mainnet!
Gabriel Aleixo:
The network has been live, on mainnet, since January 3rd 2020.
Mary | Satoshi Club:
Oh
D. | Satoshi Club:
super! this is good to know
Yan Martins:
Main challenge in our case was dealing with the consensus algorithm, given the uniqueness of our architecture. There are a lot of edge cases that needed to be handled
Yan Martins:
The testnet also enabled us to test larger deployments of the network, testing it with 20, 50, 100 peers. That revealed not only bugs but also performance improvements that we could make
Mary | Satoshi Club:
Sure, now everything works good now
Mary | Satoshi Club:
Ready for the next question, guys?)
Gabriel Aleixo:
Yep!
D. | Satoshi Club:
let’s do this!
Yan Martins:
Yeah… definitely there’s still work ahead but the testnet running for 1,5 year before mainnet launch was essencial
Q2 from Telegram user @Tommyramble
It’s said in your documentation that new transactions confirm older ones. Isn’t this consensus mechanism prone to more risks of being compromised?
Yan Martins:
As I mentioned, the consensus part was one of the most tested ones and that we had to work the hardest. Having the DAG of transactions, with new transactions confirming old ones, sure makes things a bit harder. But that was part of the innovation in the original PhD thesis. Also, this works together with the chain of blocks we also have, making sure transactions are confirmed in due time
Mary | Satoshi Club:
Is this mechanism new? Or it was already used by someone?
D. | Satoshi Club:
how fast transactions on Hathor Network?
Yan Martins:
It’s a new one. I mean, each of them separately have already been used before in other projects. The DAG model was first proposed by Sergio Lerner a while back and became famous with IOTA. Obviously the chain of blocks is the most famous one and that started all this revolution. But the novelty here was using both of them combined
Gabriel Aleixo:
Based on the feedback from multiple users on our Discord and Twitter, sometimes they are not even able to say to the other party that they sent the transaction, because it had already shown to them in their wallets hahaha. So, super fast
Mary | Satoshi Club:
that’s nice
Mary | Satoshi Club:
Wow
Mary | Satoshi Club:
Thanks for your answers! Ready to proceed?
Gabriel Aleixo:
Yes!
D. | Satoshi Club:
yeah, i know that DAG project are very fast, but i thought maybe your project even faster
Q3 from Telegram user @Highpee
One feature of Hathor’s network is the ability to create a DAG side chain by anyone based on their business necessities. Implementing Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) is one of the ways to tackle some major issues of blockchain network such as Scalability, low speed and high transaction. You said that these side chains will have their own algorithmic logic and data structures. Bearing in mind that various private or temporary DAGs can be created to suit various business model, how are coordinator or validator’s node used in the confirmation of transaction determined? Also, how will Hathor’s main DAG interact with these side-chains to ensure that it doesn’t record transaction activities from private DAG?
D. | Satoshi Club:
what a question. i think it’s from techie to techie
Yan Martins:
That’s a nice question. Just to clarify, side DAGs are still a feature under research. We have a nice concept for it and the question already explains it very well: it will allow businesses and interested parties to have business specific logic and data structures in it, without having to add this back on the main network
Mary | Satoshi Club:
So, let’s imagine, i am business) convince me to use Hathor Network side chain) tell me how easy this will be
Yan Martins:
As for validators, the idea is not using those. We actually plan on having special transactions on the main DAG that bridge to these side DAGs, but don’t necessarily have specific data on it. It would be like having some tombstones. This ensures the security of the main network, with all it’s mining power, will also secure the side DAGs. Since these special transactions live on both DAGs, to reverse anything on the side DAG would mean reversing it on the main network
Yan Martins:
(Sorry if it got a bit technical
)
Gabriel Aleixo:
I would like to add from a business standpoint that Side-DAGs will be amazing to bring Enterprise mass adoption of Hathor. We’ve been in touch with different players, specially in the Financial sector, already building applications based on our easy, secure and cost-efficient tokenization tools.
But for them to build more complex services, tools like Side-DAGs are essential, because they bring an hybrid approach. They can build on top of their own “network”, at the same time parts of the information are confirmed by our mainnet.
Usually, we start conversations with senior managers who already are crypto enthusiasts, got to know Hathor Network and liked our value proposition: a user-centric network with high levels of scalability and usability. But then it takes some time for them to reach the C-Level decision makers, because these ones are not that familiar with blockchain. At least not in the context of their business.
Gabriel Aleixo:
Side-DAGs will make it possible for them to build on top of something they are more familiar with, they have more control of, etc, so it will bring the “blockchain layer” to the background, in a good way.
Mary | Satoshi Club:
Guys, i would tell that as business i am interested) just will explore more tech details
Mary | Satoshi Club:
Thank you!
Mary | Satoshi Club:
Sure, you will find a lot of new users!
Mary | Satoshi Club:
Ready to start with 4th question?
Gabriel Aleixo:
Yes!
D. | Satoshi Club:
thank you for good answers!
Q4 from Telegram user @Jonahapagu
Using Hathor Network users can create their own digital tokens with customized specifications using only a few clicks.. you even stated in one of your documents that this can be done using only one click… and it is so easy to use that even a 13-years-old kid can create their own token for fun. What customizable features does Gather offer to token creators in comparison to ERC standards and other token creating platforms and how do you assure users that there was no trade-off of important aspects in your token creation platform for simplicity..
Yan Martins:
Our approach for tokenization is supporting the most used features and making them super easy on our network. So for tokenization, the ERC-20 standard was what we based ourselves. We also implemented other features such as mint and melt capabilities, which are not part of the standard but used by almost everyone. That was the logic behind. With that approach, we believe we can foster to the majority of use cases in the tokenization space
Gabriel Aleixo:
Consider YouTube. There are millions of videos about every single topic on YouTube. What if anyone could create a token as easily as we upload videos to YouTube? What if any 13-year-old could create their own token? It would be possible to explore any use case, even the craziest ones. This is the way to bring about a million ideas, and let the best rise.
Creating a new token to explore a new use case must be just as trivial and mundane as taking a photo. You take 20 pictures and keep only the best. You create 20 different tokens and keep only the best one; you play around with new use case scenarios. The whole community can use Hathor in the search for the killer apps for blockchains, the most profitable ones, the most charitable ones, and so forth.
Yan Martins:
For businesses and use cases requiring a more specific and customizable token logic, having bridges with other networks that support such functionality will enable our network to also access them
Mary | Satoshi Club:
How many apps you already have?
D. | Satoshi Club:
what kinds of tokens i can create? can i create a privacy DAG token by using Hathor Network?
Yan Martins:
We also plan on adding new features to the tokenization side to support other standards, such as ERC-721 with non fungible tokens
D. | Satoshi Club:
it would be cool!
Mary | Satoshi Club:
https://esatoshi.club/wp-content/uploads/photo_2021-01-15_13-08-18-1024x594.jpg
Gabriel Aleixo:
Hundreds of custom tokens (last time I checked, more than 300) have been created on our network.
Mary | Satoshi Club:
If i need to creat token with 1000000 supply, i need to deposit 10k HTR, right? What is the price of HTR?
Yan Martins:
Yes, that’s the deposit a user has to make when creating a new token. Also, if you later mint new tokens, you also have to deposit HTR.
Mary | Satoshi Club:
What will be the total supply of HTR?)
Yan Martins:
That’s correct. The price is always fluctuating, it’s not up to us to decide. I’d actually have to check CMC for the current info
Yan Martins:
There’s no cap to the total supply, as new HTR tokens are created with every new block. We also have halvings and our last one will bring block rewards to 8 HTR/block
Gabriel Aleixo:
After January 2023, mining rewards will be constant at 8 HTR per block, the inflation rate will be below 1.1%, and this rate will decrease each year thereafter.
Mary | Satoshi Club:
So, i found HTR on Coingescko) if 13 years old wants to create a token with 1000000 supply he need to lock 1500$ worth of HTR
Mary | Satoshi Club:
It’s a bit expensive)
Mary | Satoshi Club:
Gotcha
Yan Martins:
Yeah, this is something we are considering. First of, you can start with a lower supply and mint more tokens as needed. Also, if you later decide the tokens are no longer need, you can melt them and get your HTR back
D. | Satoshi Club:
then 13-year-old should create a token with less supply than that
Mary | Satoshi Club:
Understand) thanks guys!
Mary | Satoshi Club
Ready to go to the next question?)
Yan Martins:
Yep
D. | Satoshi Club:
D. | Satoshi Club:
Q5 from Telegram user @natarajmarble
Let’s say I mint a token on the hathor network and I want to list that on an exchange that has hathor already listed. Would the exchange have to integrate a new wallet SDK or can they leverage existing integrations with hathor to also get my token listed with minor code additions?
Yan Martins:
Excellent question. Custom tokens are very similar from a technical perspective to our native HTR token. So after HTR (or any other token) is in the exchange, adding new ones is very easy. Only minor code additions
Yan Martins:
We also allow a transaction with up to 16 different tokens as inputs and outputs, so that can make things even more interesting when having these tokens on exchanges
Mary | Satoshi Club:
Do you have plans about new listings? Which exchanges is HTR currently listed on?
Yan Martins:
At the moment we’re listed on qTrade and Vitex and on the last steps with another awesome exchange
Yan Martins:
We definitely learned a lot this year with this exchange processes and will help us for 2021 when talking to new ones
Mary | Satoshi Club:
Did you have problems with exchange integration?)
Yan Martins:
So far, it’s been ok. Exchanges have been able to integrate pretty quickly and our team is always available to support them when needed
Mary | Satoshi Club:
Great
D. | Satoshi Club:
ready for the last question from part 1?
Gabriel Aleixo:
Yes!
D. | Satoshi Club:
let’s gooooo
Q6 from Telegram user @Arisabela
Hathor Nerwork has been sucessfully audited by a respected audit firm: SlowMist. Now your project can be cataloged as secure and strong. But what comes next? What kind of rewards can the bug hunters get from your Bug Bounty program?
Yan Martins:
It was nice collaborating with SlowMist for the audit report. But it doesn’t stop there. We still don’t have an official bug bounty program, which is in our plans for next year. That’s definitely something any public software company needs. At the moment, we can analyze on a case-by-case scenario if someone discloses a bug to us.
D. | Satoshi Club:
do you plan to do more audits in the next year?
Yan Martins:
That’s something we’ll probably do. Our code is always evolving, so having a periodic “check-up” is very important
Mary | Satoshi Club:
Yes, safety first
Yan Martins:
Part 2?—?live questions from the Telegram community
Q1 from Telegram user @KASG95
I understand that they say that Network Hathor is the “natural evolution of the Bitcoin blockchain”, does that mean that tokens developed in minutes will be part of the BTC chain? or really what is the symbolism since Hathor is not a fork of any project?
Yan Martins:
It’s the second case. We’re an independent network and our tokens won’t go to the BTC chain. What we meant by that was on the architecture side, considering the innovation of the DAG + blockchain design.
Q2 from Telegram user @cryptodotgmail
FGV is a Brazilian institution of higher education and think tank with the mission “to stimulate Brazilian socio-economic development”. Does that mean Hathor’s focus is only on Brazil? What about other countries such as parts of Asia, Europe and others.
Gabriel Aleixo:
Thanks for the research, you are right
FGV is the leading think-tank & Business School in Latin America, where I had the honor to study and meet our CEO & Founder Marcelo Brogliato.
For sure, with most of our team members being born in Brazil, it makes life easier when developing projects locally. The good aspect of it is that Brazil’s economy has continental proportions. So even the very first projects that are coming from the country could easily reach hundreds, thousands of users. We also have a strong network here, both in the private and the public sectors, and multiple parties are always positively impressed by the fact that a whole network was built by locals. This helps a lot in terms of business culture, technical and business supports, etc.
I should add, however, that we’ve a global team with members spread from Seattle to Brussels and many Marketing campaigns focused in Asia for the coming weeks. In terms of use cases, it also came to our knowledge that we have people in North America, Europe and Asia building solutions on top of Hathor! So, it’s a global thing
Q3 from Telegram user @Korryl
Decentralized oracle is a trend right now. How about Hathor? Would you create your own oracle solution or pick the oracle solutions that already exist?
Yan Martins:
We have a basic oracle solution already working, when we were debating our initial ideas for Nano Contracts. They are not decentralized and rely on public/private key signatures.
I think the best way to move forward is enabling the user to choose from different oracles. So he may prefer to use decentralized ones, which as you mention are very popular now, or centralized ones, like COINBASE price oracle, based on the Compound open oracle model.
Q4 from Telegram user @Cakelov
So it said on 2021 there will be start new development about Nano Contract.
Can you please explain more about nano contract? What is use for?
Gabriel Aleixo:
We envision smart contracts capabilities on top of Hathor to be as simple and easy-to-use as our current tokenization features. According to Pareto’s Principle, 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.
We want everyone to be able to create contracts with only a few lines of information. They’re not going to create the most complex dApps in the world, but 80% of their needs should be fulfilled in a few minutes. And having these contracts built-in at the protocol level will make it possible for a Nano Contract to serve multiple applications as well.
Q5 from Telegram user @KhaleesiTheCryptoLady
You mentioned that this January 3rd is the 1-yr celebration of Mainnet, what do we expect during this day? Will you give something special for your users and HATHOR network supporters?
Yan Martins:
Jan 3rd 2021 was the date the first halving was expected to take place. However, just like in Bitcoin, our mining is probabilistic, so even though it was scheduled for January 3rd, the date changed a bit and now will most likely happen on January 5th last I checked (yesterday). So we’ll have our first halving event!
Q6 from Telegram user @Emidm37
Miners are a key piece on Hathor’s environment: they help keeping the network secure by mining Hathor blocks. What mining software do we need to install if we want to mine Hathors (HTR)?
Yan Martins:
We use the same algo as BTC and actually support merged mining! So you can mine HTR with the same miners you’d mine BTC. If you want more details, you can check the resources section of our website or take a look on the mining-and-pools channel on our Discord
Q7 from Telegram user @atakansan
If a transaction fails or one side doesn’t send its tokens, what happens to the tokens the other side sends on an atomic swap?
Yan Martins:
Actually, when we say it’s an atomic swap, it’s because it happens inside the same transaction. So it’s not like each party has to send a tx and there’s some coordination needed to make them work together. In the same tx, you can have users exchange different tokens. So either this tx is confirmed and the swap happens or it’s not and there’s no risk for the users
Q8 from Telegram user @Pradaner
What kinds of industries are you trying to penetrate, what kinds of companies and partnerships are you aiming for? thanks bos
Gabriel Aleixo:
I would say that the financial sector is the most obvious one. We can see from the DeFi movement to the institutional approach to blockchain and crypto that financial applications are the low hanging fruits of our market.
So, in this sense, we’re 100% open to onboard and to directly support multiple use cases at once, from different industries. But as we’ve been approached mostly by people interested in building financial applications on top of our network, we’re aiming to establish specific partnerships and/or “bridges” that can help them bring their use cases to another level: fiat gateways, other networks for interoperability with complex DeFi dApps, integrations with CeFi, etc.
Q9 from Telegram user @ronaldo_super
I’ve seen a lot of defi projects lately but Hathor network is really something different. Do you think you can become a real Ethereum killer?
Yan Martins:
A lot of projects have been called that already and so far it’s a difficult task. We believe that there’s space for many different crypto projects out there and each has it’s benefits. For instance, we mentioned we support some kinds of token characteristics and, if the user requires something more customized, he can use a different network that will better suit his needs. We understand we cannot support all needs from all different users in the crypto space. Instead of trying to have that, we think interoperability with other networks is a better approach
Q10 from Telegram user @feranno
Communities are very important for the development and spread of projects. Will you build communities that add value to the Hathor Network? Are you open to different and creative ideas?
Gabriel Aleixo:
100% agreed, we’ve an amazing community and I would like to say thank you to all of you that has been supporting the development and the growth of our network!
Also, this is why our Marketing Manager Guto Martino is taking care of our Community Program. We want to incentivize content creators from our community, as well as hearing from them to have not only guidance, but build more together.
Some of the most interesting articles and use cases currently being built on Hathor came originally from community members, people that approached us interested in our architecture, our tools, etc. We want to reinforce this behaviour that only brought us good things so that if can become a permanent thing, and we will be doing so by continuously offering HTR grants and rewards for contributors.
Part 3?—?Quiz Results
In the final part we tested your knowledge in terms of Hathor Network. They’ve prepared 4 questions for this part. The total reward pool for quiz was 400$.
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