Interoperability Platform on Hedera! Jesse Whiteside of Hashport / King Solomon (Part 1)

This interview was originally published by Genfinity.

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King Solomon interviews hashport as part of the Hedera Corner in the LightHouse by Genfinity! Brought to you by LightHouse Report sponsor Hedera Hashgraph and in collaboration with our partner and Hedera wallet provider HashPack.

Transcription

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍What is up, everybody? Solomon here. I hope you guys are all having a fantastic day. As you guys know, in collaboration with HashPack and sponsored by Hedera Hashgraph, we are nailing out as many ecosystem interviews as possible in the Hedera space. Today, I am super excited to have Jesse Whiteside who is the Business Development Director at Hashport. Jesse, it's a pleasure to have you here. Maybe you could give us a little bit of an intro and background about yourself in crypto and web three?

Hashport – Jesse Whiteside - Director of Business Development
‍Yeah, sure. Thanks for having us on, Solomon. My background in crypto is kind of eclectic. Like many people, I initially saw Bitcoin probably back in 2012 or 2013 and, at the time, I thought it was interesting, but like many people, I went back to what I was doing after preliminarily giving it some thought. It wasn't until 2017 that I really looked at the space seriously, obviously with the run-up that it had. At that point in time, I came across Hedera, I came across the white paper, and ever since, I've been heavily involved in the ecosystem and wanting to be a part of its development as well as the broader web 3 space. My background is in finance but I decided to make a transition full-time, about almost two years now, and come into the community full-time to work on web three stuff.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍So awesome. Can you give us a little bit of an overview about Hashport? Or maybe not overview yet, but talk about the origins, like how Hashport really came about and started?

Hashport – Jesse Whiteside - Director of Business Development
‍Yeah, obviously, anytime you have an incredible L1 network like Hedera has, and it has all sorts of unique properties to it that are very unique to it in the web three space, you want to be able to become part of the tapestry and the fabric of web3. In order to do that, a lot of times, you do need an interoperability solution to connect out to other ecosystems. That was basically the genesis of Hashport. It was developed by BCW Group which is one of the nine validating members, in conjunction with Limechain, who is a well-known systems integrator within the web 3 space, and it was fostered by Hedera and the Hbar foundation initially. So, in a nutshell, Hashport is an enterprise-grade public utility that enables the frictionless movement of digital assets between distributed networks. We are leveraging Hedera's technology on Hashport, predominantly the Hedera consensus service. All of the transaction requests and report requests that come into the platform, what ends up happening is one of the nine validating members will take that transaction and sign it, turn around and submit it to the other eight members. We wait for a supermajority of signatures and then, once that happens, and enough validators have seen it, that transaction gets submitted to the Hedera consensus service. And you get a whole bunch of security and finality properties with that. So, Hedera's consensus service is basically 100% final when a transaction is submitted to it, finality is coming in anywhere from three to five seconds. There's fair ordering on the network, it's ABFT, all sorts of good stuff come from leveraging the Hedera consensus service. And then from there, once that's logged immutably, we send a message out to the smart contract endpoint on a destination network, wherever that may be, and then we basically mint a representative version of the token. We use a mint and burn functionality, we don't have dual side liquidity on Hashport. A lot of design considerations that went into the platform were based on security first and best practices, and seeing some of the other pitfalls that have happened in the interoperability space. There's no silver bullet for interoperability, lots of people are trying lots of different things. We just felt like, how do we create the most effective interoperability solution that will allow users to quickly migrate assets back and forth in a secure manner? And so, being able to rely on those first principles, I think is extremely important to our mission and being able to carry the same kind of extremely high standards that Hedera has for its ecosystem as well.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍So can you can you touch base on which other ecosystems, and networks does that interoperability kind of reach out and touch into right now between Hedera and those other networks plan to go this year potentially maybe, you know, I know you guys have talked about expanding out into more.

Hashport – Jesse Whiteside - Director of Business Development
‍Right now, we're connecting into some of the main L1 networks as well as L2, so we're connected to Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche and BNB chain. Moving forward, we will connect into several other EVM networks, popular EVM networks, and potentially in the future, connect into non-EVM networks as well. We want to focus on community and the ability for anyone on any one of these networks to basically experience or leverage the ecosystems of another, should they so choose. I think what we're starting to see now with a lot of projects, both NFT and non-NFT, is this interest in exploring other platforms and tech. Some of that is monetarily based. But I think you know, in this next cycle and wave, what we're going to really start to see is another version, but like just a re-emergence I guess of utility and functionality of these networks and what the initial promise of these networks truly held. And I think a lot of developers, especially ones that are still here in the space building, you know, while we're going through the market right now, I think that that's sort of becoming a central focus for them.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, one thing I was watching a presentation that you did in preparation for this discussion and it was really interesting. You said what we've noticed through Hashport is we have the ability to potentially breathe new life into projects that may have launched in other ecosystems to come over into Hedera and start using the Hedera services. And I think the example that you used in that was Dovu. Yeah, are you seeing that on a consistent basis because we've begun to kind of see, and nothing against like Solana or Ethereum or anything else, but we're seeing kind of this it's almost like the inception of kind of a migration into Hedera from certain platforms and projects. What's your envisionment of like what that's going to look like and maybe touch base on what you meant by breathing new life into?

Hashport – Jesse Whiteside - Director of Business Development
‍Yeah, absolutely. I think it's just the broader narrative, like I was just alluding to in terms of really looking at functionality and utility what a network can provide. And so you know, while I don't know exactly when a massive influx of platforms or users will come to the network, what I do know is you know, invariably when you talk to developers or platforms specifically about singling Hedera here and just in terms of the key functionality, security properties, and things of that nature, when you talk to them, they walk away blown away. And you know ultimately you're going to end up getting more and more platforms I think coming across, both coming across from an existing web three platform, whether it's Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, it doesn't really matter. And then vice versa, other networks have other properties as well that are really great in their own right. What I think people are really going to start focusing on is these key aspects that don't really get talked about a whole lot, like you hear about the trilemma. And you hear about certain things, but one thing that never actually gets really spoken to is fair order of transactions. It's really actually a fourth, I would say a fourth tenet of the distributed ledger problem and Hedera is actually one of the only networks, I think potentially the only network, that's actually solved for fair ordering of transactions. Invariably, on other networks you don't get that fair ordering. The other thing is, if you're looking to build large-scale global use cases that potentially house significant value, you want the network to be as robust security-wise as possible. Hedera is, I believe, again one of the only networks out there based on the Hashgraph protocol that is asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerant. So, you know most other networks, if you really dig deep, there a lot of times they might not even be Byzantine faults over it. And so when you're really looking into that, and like I mean lastly, Hedera, obviously with real-world applications and use cases in mind, they've made it super simple to, as a business owner or web3 developer, to understand what they're working with in terms of the fee structure. So the fee structures pegged to USD, so it doesn't, you can come in and you can know exactly if you're trying to budget as a web3 operator or even a web2 looking to come into web3 exactly what your cost footprint is and you're going to know with certainty what you're going to be able to do and not do on the platform. And I think when you wrap all of those things together, it's just an extremely compelling argument as to why platforms and services are starting to look at Hedera.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍You touched base briefly on the validator swarm, can you maybe give a heads up on which companies those represent?

Hashport – Jesse Whiteside - Director of Business Development
‍Yeah, absolutely. So, you know we've again with sort of security and decentralization in mind for the platform and sort of best practices, we've sort of taken another page out of Hedera's book in the sense that Hedera's got this massive governing council with leading global entities. We've sort of created our own version of that, granted a smaller subset, and it's comprised of leading web3 companies. So, you know, top to bottom we've got the Hbar Foundation, obviously, which is Hedera's independent funding arm of the network. Polygon is actually a validator as well, the network itself is a validator. Calaxy, which is Spencer Dinwiddy's decentralized social media platform that they're coming to market with. I mentioned BCW group earlier to you in private, but BCW group is a multi-faceted digital asset consulting firm and basically has brought Hashgraph to life in conjunction with several other players in the space. Hex Trust is one of Asia's largest digital asset custodians, and we love having them on board. World Pay from FIS is a Hedera governing council member and actually one of the first and only I believe Fortune 250 companies to take on a validator role in this kind of capacity for an interop solution. So it's really exciting for us to have them on, Stable Node, which is a sister company of Maker Dao and the DAI stablecoin. Animoca Brands probably needs no introduction to many people in the space, but if you do, it's basically the most well-known largest web3 gaming company there is in the market today. And then rounding out the group is Lime Chain, which is also another very well-known systems integrator within the web3 space and has helped us go to market with the platform. So, between those nine members, you know, they're again, when we started this, it was how do we create a decentralized group of validators, how do we get leading orgs in the space, which I think we've been able to do, and also how do we make sure they're decentralized across sector so they're not all the same type of platform or service. Many of them don't even potentially have a product, but they're heavily entrenched within the web3 community and as such they care greatly about interoperability. As we move forward, just to touch on the validators form, you know we'll likely look to expand it and increase the security of the validation that's happening as we move forward. I mean the Hedera network is so cost-effective that adding additional validators to the Swarm to do that is a must, like why wouldn't you do something like that? Right. So, I think as we move forward, we're really excited with what we see in the space.