Hedera Ecosystem Spotlight Series EP7 - HeadStarter, DOVU & HashPack

Listen into the Hedera Ecosystem Spotlight Series Episode 7 hosted by HeadStarter. In this episode, the founders of both DOVU and HashPack speak about the various things that projects have to keep in mind when developing on the blockchain.

Transcription

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍Well, thank everybody for joining. I'm glad everybody is here. Welcome to the seventh edition of our Hedera ecosystem Spotlight. Today, we are joined by Matt Smithy's, Nate Weston, and Tyler Cote. Please correct me if I'm pronouncing any of those wrong. And today, we're going to be discussing building on Hedera and how everybody is utilizing Hedera's infrastructure, native services, and intrinsic capabilities. What they've built today and what they're planning to in the future. I'm not joined by Turtle today, as usual, rather the space is hosted by Ben. Take it away.

HeadStarter - Ben
‍Thank you, Arthur, for the introduction and welcome everybody to this edition of the Spotlight series. I'm very excited, like I said earlier, to be here. Although I'm very aware of my position here, I need to do some big boots, quite literally, as you know, I'm the tallest member of the team. Yeah, big boots indeed. But I'll do my best to try. So, as you probably know, the Spotlight series is a bi-weekly that will be hosted on Twitter Space. As the master mentioned, we have this to actually give an opportunity for all community members to come and share the stories as they built on the hashgraph. It is an opportunity for us as well to get to know them, but also how the other community members partake in this extraordinary journey which is Hedera. If you haven't caught previous recordings of this AMA, we have them recorded on our YouTube channel. So, if something is of interest to you, please hop over there to check them out. Along with this Spotlight series, we also host another Twitter space which we call the Headstart Pulse. We invite listeners to engage with us and the team at large because we want to be as transparent as possible with our progress and also with our plans as to where we want to take our project further. As you know, we are the web 3 crowdfunding platform and accelerator of the Hedera Network. What we do here is we have early-stage project Founders and their teams connect with the Hedera community and help them navigate through this exciting journey. So, before we jump into the questions I think it is important to note that the content of this space is provided for information and purpose only. Let's go and get those questions. So, thank you guys, for joining us. It's great to have you here. And to start off, I would love to hear a bit more about, about yourself. So the listeners are more familiar with the voice behind the screen. Let's start with, Matt. If you don't mind, I'll let you introduce yourself.

Dovu – Matt Smithies - Founder
‍Yeah, hey, hey everyone, thank you for inviting me on. My name's Matt, I'm really glad to be here, like all of you know. I work with the Dovu team and I do various other things, but generally I basically love doing tons of different things. I'm very eclectic. I do like weightlifting. I dabble with card magic a bit, a weird little fact. I basically spent three to four years mastering one move in card magic. it's just mental. And I also am a freestyle skateboarder, some of you may have seen my videos if not, then I'm sure they'll be shared at some point, but yeah, I love to experiment. I'm very curious, and I love to learn, kind of learn with people. The journey I've been on with Hedera, working with the Hedera team, working on these various projects, has been amazing, and the community here has been incredible. Just generally, everyone's lovely and trying to do the best they can in their own way and learn from each other. So, thank you for having me.

‍HeadStarter - Ben
‍Brilliant. Thank you for all that, Matt, let's move to, Nate. If you want to, actually, Nate has joined us yet, but while we wait for him, let's hear more from Tyler.

HashPack Wallet – Tyler Coté – Founder & CTO
‍Oh, hey everybody. So yeah, as mentioned, I'm Tyler, also known as Pluto. I'm the CTO of HashPack, so I'm kind of responsible for coding all the UI and stuff that you guys have been using. I'm from a couple of hours outside of Toronto in Canada, just a small town. I've been a web developer for about 10 years, you know, working on everything from big corporate advertising to navigating the nightmare red tape of insurance companies, and yeah, just excited to be here.

HeadStarter - Ben
‍Fantastic. It's great to hear more about you guys who we have behind the profile pictures. Thank you both for the introductions. We were expecting Nate to be joining us, but I don't believe he is here under the username Upside Coop.

HashPack Wallet – Tyler Coté – Founder & CTO
‍He dropped me a message. He said, He had a conflict come up.

HeadStarter - Ben
‍Ah, okay. That is unfortunate, but no problem. The two of you will be perfect. There's no worries." No, it's fantastic to hear about you both. And now that we have that out of the way, we would love to jump into the questions that we have prepared for you. Of course, this is a community-oriented space. We invite anyone listening to request to jump in and ask some questions of their own. Yeah, we'll give you permission for that. Yeah, without further ado, let's get straight into it. So, could you provide us with an introduction to the projects you're working on? And how did you join the team and the cause? And we can start with Matt.

Dovu – Matt Smithies - Founder
‍Oh, my Lord. Okay, so I'm currently working on a number of different projects at the moment. My primary focus is Dovu. And that's the whole kind of offset in carbon, that this idea of working with the Guardian, creating the concept of like the audit trail. We can go into more of those details, and I'm happy to take it fine with anyone else, but with them specifically, I've known about that company since probably for the last five years, and I've worked with them in different roles since 2018. And effectively, like, what happened is we moved into Hedera probably in 2019, and at the time, it was very simple, just using consensus. Because I, because the thing is, at the time I was building out my own SDKs, trust enterprises. So, for anyone who's heard of it. And then I saw, I kind of felt I kind of got very excited about a certain technology, so I kind of dragged Dovu along for the ride, and it's been a bit mental ever since. And kind of since then, I've also kind of spun up a kind of NFT project called Inky's Art Club, which uses this other kind of tech I've built. And there, there are actually new, there are kind of NFT projects that are starting to use the tools that I've kind of filled out for the last couple of years, so that's kind of very exciting. So, yeah.

‍HeadStarter - Ben
‍That's amazing. It sounds like you've been very, very busy. It's great to have you here on Hedera, Matt. Pluto, how about yourself?

HashPack Wallet – Tyler Coté – Founder & CTO
‍Yeah, so kind of, I mean, I've pretty much only worked on HashPack. How that came about, I know Matt has kind of talked about it a bit, but back, maybe late 2020, early 2021, I started kind of looking into Hedera. I was looking for some communities. And other than like a Telegram, which I don't really use, there wasn't really much out there. So, I created a Discord community, and it kind of started ballooning. Eventually, builders started joining, and we kind of started all talking. And one thing led to another, and we started making a wallet. And yeah, from there it's just kind of snowballed into what is today HashPack.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍Wow, that's amazing! So it wasn't anything planned, they were just along for the ride and it just happened.

HashPack Wallet – Tyler Coté – Founder & CTO
‍Yeah, yeah, very very organic.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍And what's the name of the server? I'm sure everybody knows, but I'll ask just for a plug. What's the name of the server club?

HashPack Wallet – Tyler Coté – Founder & CTO
‍Club Hbar.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍Okay fantastic. Yeah, I'm sure everyone here is familiar with the server, and it's really nice to Ben, would you like to take the next one?

HeadStarter - Ben
‍Yeah, sure. So Matt, I think you've brushed slightly over that, but how long have you been developing on Hedera?

Dovu – Matt Smithies - Founder
‍Well, this is the interesting thing. Back in, I think it was early 2018, I joined this kind of blockchain consultancy agency. It was like a spin-off of this web agency called Simple Webblock, and part of my role there was to investigate new immersion technology and all this kind of stuff. And it turns out that I was actually working with the original SDK that the Hashgraph SDK that came out, and then I was messing around with that. So, I guess in some respects, I was messing around with the tech since before Hedera was even a thing, but yeah, like I said, ancient in crypto years. So, yeah, I mean properly going back to it, like making it by working on Hedera, I guess probably full-time since 2019/2020, you know. But yeah, it's always been a fascinating tech from my point of view, so I'm glad to be here.

HeadStarter - Ben
‍And what about you, Tyler? How have you been developing on Hedera?

HashPack Wallet – Tyler Coté – Founder & CTO
‍Probably since around the same time as HashPack started. Like that was really my kind of intro project to working on Hedera. As a JavaScript guy, I was always kind of looking for a nice entry into blockchain development stuff, but like none of the other chains, like, they're all smart contract stuff, and that doesn't really work for me. And so, like seeing the SDK, I just kind of started playing with it because it's super super simple to play with.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍So it sounds like you started on Hedera, or did you develop it all on any other DLTs?

HashPack Wallet – Tyler Coté – Founder & CTO
‍Mostly just investigating other ones, not really doing anything with them.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍Yeah, yeah, we're very lucky you chose to stay. Don't know what we'd be doing without that HashPack. And how about you, Matt? Had you been developing it all on any other DLTs?

Dovu – Matt Smithies - Founder
‍Yeah I mean the kind of Blockchains and things, so like more orange. I basically started on Ethereum. Unlike the first kind of blockchain company I kind of worked with, was this DAP called Block Mason. And their kind of vision at the time was, "Oh, the credit protocol on like the blockchain." And it was kind of fun. And then you kind of realize that it doesn't really work on Ethereum at all. But then I've also done, like I've also contributed to kind of other adapts on Stellar and Polygon, other little bits and bobs really. But yeah, I've, and then I kind of slowly migrated into kind of Hedera because it's a completely different way of working. Because as much as I enjoy kind of smart contract kind of development and work, you realize if you make a mistake you can't change it and you can lose people a lot of money very quickly. And that's something that I didn't really want to do, so I kind of guided myself against that by going to Hedera and focusing on Hedera for the last three years.

HeadStarter - Ben
‍So, what was then your favorite part when you started to develop on Hedera? Like, what got you to really see and uncover the specificities of Hedera that you liked?

Dovu – Matt Smithies - Founder
‍Yeah, I mean, for me, I guess I've always been a person who likes to create tools just to create tools out of nothing, which is kind of silly. But, because the consensus service did blow my mind and how simple it was to interact with to generate logs of things. And you could basically like create anything from the consensus service. And so back in 2019, I thought, "Wouldn't it be amazing to create tokens?" And then the token service came out, so that idea went out the window. And so, as they added more and more native services, it was just fun to plug and experiment and play. But yeah, I started with the consensus service, and just that in itself got me hooked.

HeadStarter - Ben
‍Nice! Pluto, you also mentioned that you were investigating and researching other blockchains before dipping your toes into Hedera. But then you decided that, "Hey, this was the one for you." What made you feel like that was a much better habit?

HashPack Wallet – Tyler Coté – Founder & CTO
‍I mean, I have to echo the "it's easy to mess up in a smart contract and lose people money" thing. Like, working with the Hedera SDK is like, it's very straightforward. And like, there's not that much that can go wrong from a logic point of view. And yeah, just the approachability of stuff. Like, you can start interacting with Hedera in like 20 lines of JavaScript to just like do basic things. Like, it's just super straightforward. And that that's something that's important to me.

HeadStarter - Ben
‍Yeah, wow! Okay. So, would you say that it would be easier for somebody who has absolutely no knowledge in coding to start in Hedera rather than.

Dovu – Matt Smithies - Founder
‍Yes, I would say that. The reason is, there is there's becoming a more, there's a, there are tools that are coming out that are creating more of a no-code contingent. So, this, this effectively means that if that sounds like nonsense, what water basically means is the ability for people to create tokens or create kind of decentralized logs or do all these sorts of things by just, you know, make writing type like creating a type form or creating like a no-code mobile app and all these sorts of things. And I have never come across another web3 tech that you can really do that with, like Solidity to a degree, yes, but like Hedera makes it so simple and accessible that anyone with an idea can come into it, create some tokens, make a proof of concept and just try to just mess around with attack and that ultimately makes it accessible, not just for developers, but just for a normal human.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍Yeah of course. And, you guys, when you guys joined, that was a while ago, so I'm sure things are a lot, a lot different now. What would you say your favorite part of developing on Hedera is now after all this time, Pluto?

HashPack Wallet – Tyler Coté – Founder & CTO
‍I mean, the community, well, not like a technical thing. The community is a great one, like everybody's super supportive and kind of involved in stuff and really good at kind of using the things that you put out and like, yeah, just using new features on the Chain. It, it's, yeah, the approachability I think is a big one, like you're saying with the no-code stuff, like the Hedera kind of SDK like and Native Services. It's really great, like building blocks with kind of defined inputs and outputs that you don't really get with like smart contracts, I don't think so. Yeah, that's probably my favorite thing is the native services.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍Nice. And, Matt, I believe you're already kind of answered this in your previous response. I don't know if there's anything you wanted to add before Ben moves on to the next.

Dovu – Matt Smithies - Founder
‍Not really, I mean with every DLT or like web3 kind of network, there's always going to be positives and negatives, but for those that kind of want to get started and kind of mess around and kind of try to make their ideas a reality, I don't really see a better opportunity than you know, the network Hedera at the moment.

HeadStarter - Ben
‍I was about to ask Matt, but so you mentioned that there are now more no-code and more tools actually being developed to facilitate more people to start their journey on Hedera. Would you have any piece of advice that you would throw to them if you've got like people who would like a basic knowledge of crypto and blockchain, but what would you tell them? To get them in love with Herrera.

Dovu – Matt Smithies - Founder
‍Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't even start there. I would basically say to someone, "Think of like a problem or think of something that's interesting to you. It could be something simple like a note-taking app. It could be something as simple as trying to send someone some tokens in a given context. Maybe you could pretend these tokens are like I don't know, like an 'Are you?' or 'You're always also' or whatever and just kind of play. You know, one of the tool sets I've created, like trust Enterprises, is very simple in terms of it walks you through how to create tokens, it walks you through how to do consensus messages, and all this kind of stuff. And as a result of that, there are kind of projects such as Hbar Vox, who have actually created their entire system. For those who don't know, HBAR Vox are kind of a Twitter bot that allows you to bid for messages, and that entire system is completely no code and it uses, and it's very fortunate to use trust Enterprises behind the scenes. And then when you send the messages, you get an NFT of that message. You know, to kind of do that all with no code is kind of insane with somebody who just doesn't program, so there's a lot of opportunities for people just to maybe even create a Typeform that sends, you know, a token to someone that's like an email or like you write a note, and it gets saved to the consensus topic. It's just trying to find a silly little thing that you want to kind of itch and try to build towards that in the content text of Hedera. Because if you don't do that, then it doesn't really become tangible. It doesn't really become like it's worthwhile. But then if it's more of a real something tangible, then and concrete, even then, it may just build up into a proper project, yeah. Sorry, that was a bit vague.

HeadStarter - Ben
‍No, no, absolutely. I can relate to that much, so basically, my role in in Headstarter is that we screen early-stage projects who want to build on Hedera and obviously need some kind of support, whether it be legal, marketing, funding, or technological. But the real beginning is this question, right? Is that project viable? Do they try to solve a real-world problem? And I think it all starts from there. So, if there's no fundamental reason why those projects need to exist, then it's no point, you know, to really go even further in that discussion. And that is something that we sometimes get very carried away because of the tech. So we, it's like this, we are just running after a new shiny stuff, but we can't lose sight on the fact that we have this tag which is amazing and we can use it to really solve real-world problems. And it can be a little problem, smaller ones, or it can be huge problems. But, I think this is a key question, but so yeah.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍Well, while you, while you find a new spot. Tyler, how about yourself? What's some, what's a tip you would give to someone that's just starting their building journey on Hedera?

HashPack Wallet – Tyler Coté – Founder & CTO
‍Yeah, so I would say the first thing you should do is kind of like go to the Hedera documentation and kind of like, religiously read that. Like, every single feature that Hedera has, like read about its capabilities because like, that I find kind of would really inspire people a lot to understand what you can do with Hedera and kind of maybe inform your ideas going forward. Like, there's nothing worse than getting halfway through building a project and then realizing it doesn't work the way you thought. You know, and like, you know, maybe you come across the crypto allowance feature and be like, "Oh, hey, I could use this in this way." And like, that's kind of a novel use of this, you know. So the documentation is a big one. I see lots of questions from developers, kind of like, "How do I do this thing?" And it's like, it's spelled out pretty clearly in the docs how you could do that, and so getting familiar.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍The docs are meant for reading. Tyler, it's just like the FAQ. Ben, how are you doing?

HeadStarter - Ben
‍Let me know if you can hear me now. Is it better?

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍I can, I can hear better and I apologize if that was just on my end, but yeah, I can hear you a lot better now.

HeadStarter - Ben
‍Okay, all right, cool. So let's move to the next question. So, Matt, what are new features that you are excited about that is coming through there?

Dovu – Matt Smithies - Founder
‍I well, if, if this was a week ago, or I think two weeks ago, and the council didn't deny it, I would have said, "Buyable tokens," but unfortunately the council said no to that. So that makes me quite sad. Yeah, it's funny like I am just as bad as Tyler says, like I don't actually read up on all of the brand new features. I am excited about contracts and getting to contracts more, but I think like anyone else, it is a tricky to kind of keep on top of every little thing that's like coming up, coming out. So apologies for that, but yeah, for me, I really like, I mean, I know this is an older feature now, I really like royalties in NFTs, and I firmly believe that there are tons of use cases where royalties haven't even been explored to their fullest potential. You know, the ability to send other agents in your network tokens through different transfers and things that probably had so much potential that no one can even grasp it probably for the next five years or so. I remember I was talking to someone a while back and they were saying, "Oh, you could use the royalty feature for offsetting carbon on the fly." So, if you had like a carbon token and it moved through like a supply chain, the royalty would be its offset that would pay into an account or something, you know, so it's kind of Bonkers ideas and that will just come from creative people sitting down and just like messing with the technology.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍Oh, that's very interesting, very creative way to use royalties in NFTs." Actually, I haven't thought about that. And speaking of NFTs, we at Head Starter, we also have our in-house dev team and build it ups, and they are coming up with some really, really interesting new features regarding NFTs, particularly with the randomization of NFTs at time of need. And that will be something that we will introduce with the first mid of earthlings on the Head Starter platform. So, shameless plug-in here, guys, sorry, but I thought that it was too good to be missed. Pluto what feature are you excited from a HashPack perspective?

HashPack Wallet – Tyler Coté – Founder & CTO
‍Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, you know, there's obviously the permission node stuff and the derec stuff, and that that's all really exciting. I think more than features on the network, I'm just excited to see people using the network for stuff, like I mean, as much as everybody loves like money and stuff, that I think just using the Hedera network for financial use cases is really selling it short. There's a whole bunch of non-financial use cases that just haven't been explored on blockchain in general. You know, like you could use the Hedera consensus service for all kinds of stuff and like all these other native services, there's so much you can do with it, and like having a kind of digital identity system. The sky's the limit with this kind of stuff. And on the subject of royalties, there's one kind of thing that I haven't seen anyone do. You can actually have two levels of royalties, so you could have an NFT with a royalty and then the token that is the royalty could have a royalty itself, which I haven't really seen anyone take advantage of. And as much as calculating royalties is the bane of my existence, I think there are some creative use cases that could be done there. But yeah, mostly it.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍It's very cool. I have no idea; it's like an inception of the royalties. "Matt, I see you have your hand up."

Dovu – Matt Smithies - Founder
‍Yeah, I mean, I just wanted to add one more thing, one thing I'm kind of low-key always been excited about for the last couple of years now. It doesn't really have a name and everyone argues over what it is, but I like to call it this idea of dynamic NFTs. You can think of it as more like historical tokens that hold history. So, this idea of imagine an NFT project where every single mint is tied to its own unique topic ID, and then from that topic idea, you can basically add messages in a structured way. So, you could effectively have an entire collection nft collection where every single token has the same personalized history over time and so it's like imagine your car with every single repair it's had on it, every single check, you know anything you could imagine, any real-life entity, and tokenizing that with these kind of methods is something kind of fascinating to me. Whether or not whether or not I'll come to inspirational or not that’s another thing.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍Definitely, it's things like that that you think about and you just become super super bullish even in a market like this. Before we moved on, I saw a question that was posted in the comments for Tyler pure crypto.hbar is asking, "Where are the docs at?" Again, we'd like to do more of my own due diligence and researching for my own projects before asking the community.

HashPack Wallet – Tyler Coté – Founder & CTO
‍If you just Google "Hedera Documentation", it'll show up. Like, and I don't have the URL handy, but it's like Hedera docs.Hedera slash API. I'm not sure off the top of my head, but just Google it, you'll find it.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍There. You go, thank you for that Pluto. We also have Oliver who just joined us.

Community Member – Oliver Ryan
‍Hi guys, thanks for having me. Hey, I'm just bringing up a point there, talking about NFTs earlier with real-life function. Well, I just want to mention tune FM music NFTs what royalties attached just that you might bring it into the conversation, maybe master away because I think it's a fantastic reward function.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍Yeah Ben, did you want to take on the next question?

HeadStarter - Ben
‍Yeah, sure. So Matt, in terms of development experience, because you, I think this question is really really a good one for you because you spent quite a lot of amount of time developing on Hedera. What do you feel would really improve the experience for Dev currently working on?

Dovu – Matt Smithies - Founder
‍Well, I think it's not so much the experience. I think it's more education, because ultimately Hedera is its own technology, you know, and so everyone that comes to it for the first time, it is a new thing. One positive generally is that because it's a simpler system to use than smart contracts as an example, it is easier for people to get onboarded and kind of experiment and play. However, one big item that I've worked on it a bit, I obviously can't dedicate a lot of my time to it, is how do you support other developers who are working in completely different languages to work on Hedera. So like using a third-party, sorry, a developer talk API that you could just hit up through your own native language, if you're using something exotic or something like Haskell or closure or something along those lines. If that Gap can be bridged more, then I'm sure that more and more people. It's all about access, like how do you give someone an interface that they used to and allow them to bridge into a technology without them necessarily having to invest the money all the time. I do believe that we've made huge strides. So this isn't really a complaint by any means, but once we have tools and systems that are let's say... thanks, what's the word? Ah, never mind, once we have tools and systems in place that are completely stable that can solve these problems, then it's going to probably be more attractive to a whole range of developers outside of crypto completely. And that's really the target I believe that we should go after.

‍HeadStarter - Ben
‍Nice, yes, absolutely. I think the more we democratize the... they're making more accessible to come on, layman, more and more people will more easily revolve around Hedera and be attracted to start providing solutions onto it. Pluto, any thoughts that you want to share?

HashPack Wallet – Tyler Coté – Founder & CTO
‍Yeah, yeah. So I think the education one's a good point, and I mean, kind of adding on to my point about non-financial use cases. Like I guess the reality is that like crypto has a bit of an identity crisis outside of crypto circles. If you bring up crypto as a technology in a normal kind of dev community, like you get, you get ripped apart for saying like stuff about like Ponzi schemes and all this stuff. And like I think changing that kind of perception is really important to bringing dev's into the space. And you know, like the idea is that you could maybe like replace account systems with like Hedera, or like in-app payments, micro-transactions, like digital asset management. Like all that stuff is like, it's not about money, right? Like it's about systems. And like having more efficient kind of plug-and-play systems for these things. And I think changing that is probably one of the biggest ways you can get more interest into this stuff. It's not always about making money, right? Like it's about building quality systems.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍Definitely, that's beautifully said. I totally agree with that. Now I find it, there I'm sure many do, they're in general seems to be underappreciated, but what's one technical aspect that you really appreciate or you think is amazing that is also underappreciated? It doesn't get mentioned enough. Matt, did you want to go first?

Dovu – Matt Smithies - Founder
‍Now this is going to sound like crazy, I really like how quickly you can deploy smart contracts and test smart contracts and test that. Like you can literally write a smart contract and press a button, get it deployed, test it out, and have this constant feedback loop. And you can actually test your code against stage against testnet in real time, where if you are on like polygon or if you're on any other evm, you just can't do that because you'd have to use your own local system. So the ability to kind of do that is I find unbelievable. So like when I'm writing flight contracts in Hedera, I can like write something, I can click go, it will test it in real time against testnet, and then I make a change, deploy it, and if the tests fair, I can either change the tests or I can change the actual code itself. And that feedback loop is rapid and you just you just cannot do that on any other network. And that's something I'm buzzed about, and I've never really talked about it.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍Wow, this is very interesting. I had no idea, man. So I guess I appreciate that as well. Tyler, how about yourself?

HashPack Wallet – Tyler Coté – Founder & CTO
‍Yeah, so the best thing to me is the transparency of transactions of the Native Hedera services like, "I don't know if you like to go and buy an NFT on something in HashPack. We'll show you exactly what is happening in that transaction. You know, like you're sending this much and you're getting this and that's all that's happening. And like, there's no hidden stuff that's going to steal all your money in there. It's defined exactly. Versus, you know, opaque smart contracts that you kind of have to trust the person. Just being able to know exactly what's happening in a transaction, I think, is huge for normal people to understand what they are agreeing to sign.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍Definitely. This might seem like a silly question, but are you also able to see because you mentioned before the royalties? Are you able to see those kind of details as well?

HashPack Wallet – Tyler Coté – Founder & CTO
‍Yeah, yep. So it does take a bit more processing on our end to parse all the royalties and stuff, but it is all there.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍Wow. And how about the royalties of the royalties? Thank you. Amazing. We appreciate the work you guys put in. Thank you for that.

Dovu – Matt Smithies - Founder
‍I might have to talk to dementia Bluetooth and see how we can take it.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍Before we move on to the next question, I see HashBar has also joined. Grab the mic. Go ahead. Is there something you wanted to ask our guests? Maybe not, but I see Greg Skelly is also requesting the mic, so I'll try to grant him permission before we move on. Hey, Greg, you're up. I'm trying to give commission, but it's not working for some reason. Sorry about that, Greg. This is not on purpose. I'm not trying to stop you. Plug a Tunefm, I know that's what you want. Well, how about then? You move on to the next question, and I'll try to get Greg up here in the meantime.

HeadStarter - Ben
‍Yeah, sure. I can certainly do that. So, there have been many updates in the past. Yeah, so we moved with extraordinary speed, and that has really introduced new avenues in Hedera and, namely, DeFi. How did you say these changes from your perspective, both from developing and introducing them within Hedera, but also how do you think the community welcomed those new features?

Dovu – Matt Smithies - Founder
‍Yeah, so I would probably say the biggest feature set the service was obviously the Contract Service that came out last year. It was fascinating because you have this idea that you can combine native tokens with a smart contract service, which isn't, which in itself is absolutely fascinating because there are challenges, and I probably won't go too deep into the challenges of that. But this idea of you can own your tokens on your own account state, effectively, I mean you have this little bit of space, as Leemon says, and that's where you tip all your tokens. And at the same time, you can communicate with contracts, and the crazy benefit of that is because your tokens are effectively outside of the contract. If the contract gets hacked, you don't lose your tokens. Obviously, I'm sure there will be ways and methods and hacks and things that come out in the future, but this, but this kind of state of in the EVM world where all of your property, all of your tokens are actually embedded into the contract itself, you could potentially be at risk in case the contract gets upgraded. Now, admittedly, I'm going to the weeds a little bit, but the contract system coming out combined with how tokens move in and out of it has been fascinating to see. And obviously, the primary challenge has been, you can't take, for the most part, currently, you can't take code and do it into Hedera and expect DeFi to prosper immediately. There is there is an element of learning there while we gather more momentum, but it's a really interesting model to see.

HeadStarter - Ben
‍Oh, absolutely, I think we're all very much awaiting a big default explosion in Hedera, and I think HashPack is well placed to play an important role due to that happening. So, Tyler, would you work back to share with us some of the updates of this year that you've been working on?

HashPack Wallet – Tyler Coté – Founder & CTO
‍Yeah, so in terms of DeFi, I mean, HashPack isn't necessarily involved in being Defi. Like we provide kind of like the rails for these platforms to like interact with and for users to kind of understand. And so, it, I mean, the stuff has definitely been coming like hard and fast at us. And it has been quite a bit of work to keep up with it, like the updates to the SDKs, you know, like price feeds, token icons, just all kinds of miscellaneous stuff. And yeah, I mean, it's definitely grown very fast, and it's fun though, you know, it's exciting times definitely.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍I mean, even just as a part of the community, I feel there's so many projects coming out, there's so much happening, it's hard to keep up. I can't even imagine on the developer side with all the updates and all the progress that has been made. Having to continuously learn new things, that must be very overwhelming, I imagine. Yeah, oh, sorry, go ahead, Tyler.

HashPack Wallet – Tyler Coté – Founder & CTO
‍I was just going to say, like, you even, like, going forward, like we have a lot more plans to kind of add stuff to for the DeFi space, you know, like token charts, like maybe profit and loss calculations, stuff like more like price feeds from like multiple kind of DEXes and stuff. The infrastructure for that kind of needs to be built out, but yeah, a lot, a lot of stuff going on, great.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍The great look forward to that, Tyler. I'm sure you guys would do a great job. Now speaking of this progression that's happened especially in the last year regarding DeFi, I mean, I imagine we'll continue like this for a long time. More do you think this might be crazy, but do you think that EVM-based smart contracts will eventually become obsolete, and the Hedera native services will be the only thing used? Do you think you could ever reach that point?

Dovu – Matt Smithies - Founder
‍No, no. When we consider the multi-chain world, all the different ecosystems (Ethereum, Polygon's, like everything we have), we have talent everywhere. You know, yeah, it doesn't take me a while. It doesn't take me that long to actually dig and find some incredible Ethereum developers creating like the next kinds of financial instruments, you know. And there are so many things that haven't not been created on contracts, and that in itself as basically, you know, Vitalik said about smart contracts or Ethereum is, you know, like macros. These contracts you create that have this logic that stays immutable over time, that itself will never go away, and it continues to grow. I think what's kind of special with Hedera is that when all the services mature, then we will attract the talent from the big networks to come over to actually migrate the contracts, the loans, all of that kind of interesting stuff, insurance. And then people who are serious who want more control can just use the need of services and be that the no coaches of the world or the big enterprises, all those kind of things. So, there's a place for everyone here, but to say that smart contracts are going to disappear, will never happen because you know this is where financial derivatives and other kind of primitives for the world will be created are through small contracts and foreign chains. That's extremely powerful, and if we don't have that, then we don't have a kind of divide between us and the others, and we don't want that. We want to bring people over the chasm, as it were.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍Yeah, definitely, that's a great point. Tyler, did you want to contradict this view?

HashPack Wallet – Tyler Coté – Founder & CTO
‍No, no. I think I don't think smart contracts will become obsolete or disappear. I just think that as kind of these services mature, like there will be less of kind of going to smart contracts first versus being able to do things natively. I mean, even I'm not a smart contract developer, but I believe it's kind of like a hybrid approach now. Even like smart contracts tie into these native services. So, I mean, it's kind of like a middle ground. But I mean, you're never gonna have predefined native services that can encompass every single thing you want to do with smart contracts, right? Like they'll be custom. So, the macro thing I think was a great point, like, being able to, like, maybe, like wrap stuff up into a single call, like multiple complex instructions, like, yeah.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍So, all right, thank you for that. Ben, did you want to go next?

HeadStarter - Ben
‍Yeah, sure. So, if you were to be building a new killer project on Hedera to leverage the tech and build value and that wouldn't be possible on other chains, in all my what, would your killer app look like?

Dovu – Matt Smithies - Founder
‍It would probably it would probably be a carbon offset in marketplace, it's utilized in the guardian. Oh, wait, I'm not doing that. I knew it.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍This is this kind of feels kind of like a redundant question because you guys are working on killer apps already.

‍Dovu – Matt Smithies - Founder
‍I know I mean, if you, if you've got the best here, unfortunately, Nate can make it so.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍I mean, if you've got the two best of the last three years, it's fine foreign, you've dreamed about apart from HashPack that you would want to make one day.

HashPack Wallet – Tyler Coté – Founder & CTO
‍Yeah so, I have a bit of a background in like indie game development and I would like to make a game that's kind of built on Hedera. I don't want to get too many details. I've been thinking about it quite heavily, but yeah, I think that would be a fun, fun project.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍Nice, tell us more.

HashPack Wallet – Tyler Coté – Founder & CTO
‍Imagine being Crossing mixed with like Fantasy Star online, that's kind of my, yeah.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍Amazing, amazing. Well, we can hope for one day maybe it'll be available straight from the HashPack app to where you guys are going. Alrighty, now before I move on to the last question we have here for you guys, I just wanted to again invite anybody listening to request the mic, ask our guests a question, anything, even if it's another plug for a project Oliver and Skelly, or if you're afraid to grab the mic and talk, you can drop us a message here in the comments or in one of our Discord servers, and we'll do our best to answer, but moving on now to the last question. Obviously, there are a lot of new projects being built on Hedera, and I'm sure even more that are in the infancy stage, they're just an idea. I'm sure a barrier for lots of people that have these ideas is finding a good development team, so what would you tell a Founder who was in search of a CTO or in quest to assemble a Dev team? What's some advice you would give?

Dovu – Matt Smithies - Founder
‍I would say don't tears are terrible, don't deal with them, and they're expensive as though I don't deal with them, no. Is I would, I would validate you, I would validate your idea. So, I would create content, blog posts, I would have a landing page, I would basically do all the things around product development that says this is what I'm trying to do, this is this is this is the service I'm trying to create, this is this is what will be offered, and just like really work with non-technical people like copywriters, like marketing people, to kind of get the copyright and then you would effectively have your kind of sign-up button like it like get an email or potentially a HashPack integration or whatever, and then at that point, you can validate ideas because the last thing you want to do or anyone wants to do is potentially bring someone in who could over-complicate your vision or cost you money with an idea that may or may not work. Now, of course, there'll be a time where you need a Dev team, but it's all validation, validation, validation, validation, and try and do as much as you possibly can without external help. Many of you, some Founders out there, will be lucky to have a developer friend, but one has to also realize that not every developer is equal. There are people that will be able to make it all the way to be a CTO and some people that can only make it part of the way, and that's completely okay. Everyone is in different parts of their career, but in short, like I said, it's just how can you prove what you're doing is like a real service that will kind of bring people value over just trying to build the thing.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍Definitely, one step at a time, I need to rush into anything. How about yourself, Tyler, what's some advice you would give?

HashPack Wallet – Tyler Coté – Founder & CTO
‍Yeah, I kind of echo the validate the idea stuff. If you get past that part and actually want to, like, hire some people, I would maybe reach out to existing projects and ask for references, like if they know anybody who is familiar with Hedera who's kind of like free. Because like, I think probably the one thing you don't want to do is just hire like a random team that has no experience with this stuff, because like, there are intricacies and like ways you should be kind of doing stuff. So, yeah, I would just say look for references.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍Yeah, I think that's great advice. Maybe even help until one of the Hedera servers and ask around. We actually just had another question come in from Kazo, asking what it's going to take for the term Hashgraph to be on the mainstream media, just like the term blockchain is?

Dovu – Matt Smithies - Founder
‍You could go halfway and call it the "graph train."

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍You know, I don't think that's gonna catch on. I don't know about that one, man. There we are, Tyler.

HashPack Wallet – Tyler Coté – Founder & CTO
‍I think part of us changing that identity that crypto has to people, like the first thing is kind of making these mainstream outlets stop writing about a million dollar NFT that's worth 20 bucks now, you know?

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍Like, yeah, good luck. Yeah, no definitely. It's just like you mentioned before, changing the way people view the space, one step at a time. I'm sure we'll get there, where Hashgraph will be known just as well as blockchain. Well, there's all the questions we had gathered for you too. You have been fantastic, thank you for the insight. For Lancers, Ben, I don't know if you had thought up any more questions in the meantime. If there's anything you wanted to ask?

HeadStarter - Ben
‍No, like you said, I think we've covered everything here that we had in store. What I was to guest and I would like really to thank Matt and Tyler for joining us today. Very insightful, highly educated. I think we've learned so much from them and it's quite rare, I think. But I'm not talking for me as a personal review. We have devs on our amas, I think we should do that a bit more often. But I would also actually thank everybody who's joined us today. And if you like what you heard, you can check out our last episode where we were joined by Hedera's popular names that you're very familiar with, such as Hashbar to the moon, going men, and Ash Barbarian, and Hederate. They were all present and they were all sharing their own stories about their journey in Hedera. So you can find our previous episodes on our YouTube channel and Twitter. Please do give Matt and Tyler some love on their socials. They are, I'm always gonna say, the building blocks of Hedera, but yeah, they really are doing a fantastic job here together! We've got great applications being built for us, the community, to enjoy. We will see all of you next week for our head-starter Pals, which is our bi-weekly Community AMA. Until then, and take care.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍Yeah, we look forward to it. We super appreciate your time, Matt and Tyler. It's been fantastic having you on. Are there any closer remarks you have before we end the space?

Dovu – Matt Smithies - Founder
‍I just want to say thank you for inviting me on. It's been a pleasure and it's always fun doing these kind of spaces with everyone. I just want to say if there's anyone out there who wants to get in touch with me, whether it's regarding the project someone or if you're interested in kind of doing a project yourself, I'm more than happy to kind of help guide you and kind of show you the way to a degree. Just hit me up either on Twitter or on Discord and I'm more than happy to do so. And so yeah, thank you again.

Dovu – Matt Smithies - Founder
‍It's beautiful yeah.

HashPack Wallet – Tyler Coté – Founder & CTO
‍I just want to say thanks as well. If anybody's kind of building on Hedera and interested in integrating with HashPack, just reach out on Discord and we can help you out.

HeadStarter - Arthur
‍There you go everybody, reach out, ask your questions, and if anyone you know has an idea, you know where to direct them to. It's been great having everybody. Thank you for everybody that joined, and take care. Bye guys!