The world's largest tech companies have multi-trillion valuations.
These are the main actors in the data economy, deriving their mega valuation from gathering, organizing, and exchanging user data.
Despite their power, they are the subject of bitterly contested lawsuits where aggrieved plaintiffs are demanding compensation, claiming surveillance and illegal data extraction.
At the core of this extraction is the inherent weakness in the current internet architecture. While the internet is a resource for the public good, it is also a data sink where trillions of terabytes have been tapped and used for user profiling.
Protecting Metadata
Of the many data types accumulated by tech giants, metadata are some of the most valuable. In their raw form, they are descriptive information that captures details about other data. That is, they are data describing other datasets. However, in their primary role, they are facilitators and a jig in the broader web of communication.
Considering how sensitive they are, protecting them is among the first lines of defense against privacy bombardment.
The HOPR Project
The HOPR Project is a layer-0 next-generation data privacy and protection platform that's flexible enough for developers to build complete blockchains and dApps.
With a $1 million investment from Binance, the HOPR project is the first incentivized public network for metadata privacy. It provides network-level security and metadata privacy.
The HOPR protocol provides tokenized incentives to all users and uses a Swiss Association model to support a new form of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), allowing community members to take charge.
One of the main value propositions of the HOPR project is its approach to metadata privacy. The descriptive nature of metadata can be the basis of further profiling since they, in essence, summarize necessary information about data, which can simplify tracking.
Through tracking, corporations and governments can find loopholes to distill and create profiles of internet users.
HOPR sends data via multiple nodes, where no single node knows the full route taken. Data is mixed at every hop, so no-one from within or outside the network can follow its progress. For this reason, the platform is called a mixnet. By patching this metadata weakness, the HOPR protocol hides what's being sent through encryption. It also conceals details about the receiver and the sender.
By providing private and secure data transfer, the HOPR project can be the foundation for high-performance dApps, IoT devices and other services. Also, users can be confident that globally distributed nodes are securing their metadata.
An Incentivizing Mixnet in the Age of DeFi
For quick onboarding, the HOPR development team has focused on accessibility. Users can either download and install their node software or cheaply purchase a hardware device and join the network.
The network token, HOPR, is used for the incentivization of node operators and governance. The HOPR project aims to protect metadata and, therefore, privacy while simultaneously incentivizing users using the HOPR token. This is an improvement on similar projects such as Tor, which are unable to reward users for running the nodes that power the network. Solving this problem is the breakthrough which brings HOPR to the next level.
The HOPR protocol should prove particularly useful in the age of decentralized finance (DeFi).
Provision of alternative payment systems via DeFi away from traditional setups or trading via decentralized rails--often in transparent networks that third-party agencies can synthesize minted data, is naturally making governments sign pacts with analysis platforms.
In turn, they will use metadata information to decrypt the faces behind the senders and receivers in DeFi because they already know the amount of funds sent.
However, the integration of the metadata protecting protocol and combining it with the pseudonymous nature of public blockchains will, in effect, be the basis of anonymous financial transactions.
A Community-Led DAO
Ahead of the HOPR Jungfrau release on Feb 24, the project already has support from the blockchain community. Their multilingual telegram groups have attracted over 11,000 participants.
In addition, the launch mechanism has been decided by the HOPR Genesis DAO, a decentralized organization of over 3,000 members, separate from the HOPR project team. This level of interest shows users are passionate about the project and eager to participate in its launch, pointing to the possibility of future rapid growth.
The HOPR project will eventually become a DAO itself, albeit one different from other governance systems employed by decentralized networks. The HOPR Association is modeled after DecenGov, a new approach to decentralization based in Swiss Association law. Accordingly, it is independent and run by network users.
The HOPR project will not receive any funds directly as a result of the Genesis DAO launch. Instead, the goal is to provide liquidity for users to access the HOPR token.
