Interoperability Platform on Hedera! Jesse Whiteside of Hashport / King Solomon (Part 2)

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
‍It's an interesting point too because if you look at the governing Council within Hedera network, it's kind of been the same iteration of different companies from different kind of sects of global finance or maybe legal or maybe there's a number of different things. I did want to kind of touch base on the decentralized public service. So, can you touch base on why there is no native token within Hashport? Because I know it's more of just a service for the ecosystem and for interoperability within other ecosystems as well.

Hashport – Jesse Whiteside - Director of Business Development
‍Yeah, again everything was borned out of this concept of best practices and principles first. And obviously, when you're a new interop solution, the most important thing I think is obviously security and integrity of the platform. Over the past year, I think it's something like 2.3 billion dollars have been compromised across interop solutions. It's the number one target of breaches. So, adding a token to the mix for us right out of the gate just didn't seem like something that was necessary from a security standpoint. We also do minting and burning of tokens, we don't have dual-sided liquidity. So, having a token, you know, there could be some novel use cases to it, don't get me wrong, it's just that it didn't add a great deal to what we were trying to do in terms of the service we're offering to the broader ecosystem.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍And then, I know you kind of ran through like the process from a technical standpoint. What's the process say, say I'm say I've launched a project on Ethereum or Polygon? What do I need to know about Hashport from wanting to kind of bridge over or interoperate with the Hedera network? You know, is there Metamask connectivity? Like, what does it look like for me as a project, like where do I start to potentially want to bridge out into Hedera?

Hashport – Jesse Whiteside - Director of Business Development
‍Sure, there's a lot of interesting things obviously on that front that Hedera's doing as well as the community as well as our platform itself looking to always make that an easier and easier process with respect to wallet integration. So, we do have Metamask integrated, we also have Blade wallet and HashPack, both Hedera-based wallets that are connected as well as Venly, which is sort of an intermediary step between doing fully decentralized and send me permission sort of wallets where you can recover via email, etc. So, yeah, if you're a prospective platform that's on another network, you know, they can always reach out to us on Twitter or via our support email or even to me directly through all of the different channels whether that's Telegram or the Discord, and connect and basically, we are able to integrate tokens from our supported networks fairly quickly for them. So, if they're looking to come into the ecosystem, it doesn't take very long for us to do that, and we collaborate with platforms all the time more and more so now we're seeing a lot of increased interest in Hedera as time's gone on. So, yeah, it's just you know, they obviously when users come from an external network such as Ethereum or Polygon, they would connect their Metamask with their tokens if the tokens supported on the Hashport, they right now is it stands will subsequently need to also connect, you know either Blade or HashPack for the for the porting process. As much in the same way, kind of like how the porting would work for like in the Solana ecosystem you obviously have to have like a wallet like Phantom or something like that to connect into the interops as well as like a Metamask. But going forward, one of the cool things that Hedera is working on is obviously you know evm equivalents and integrations like that. So once that happens, you know as soon as we're able to, I would love to be able to have it so that you know users that are on Metamask can simply stay on Metamask and just add the RPC. There's you know I mean there's inklings of that happening right now, don't know exactly when that'll be, but we'd love to, we'd you know, anytime we can make it our mandates to make it as painless as possible to move assets and to move between ecosystems. So that's you know what we'll try to do.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍What are the assets that you've seen have the most interest or be being used the most after you know kind of bridging out into or interoperating with Hedera? Would it be something yeah or wrapped Bitcoin or yeah.

Hashport – Jesse Whiteside - Director of Business Development
‍Yeah great great questions. I mean it's interestingly enough, if you were to take a look at a lot of the interops that are out there, it's invariably the larger assets that typically come across. So you're looking at your usdc, your usdt, dai, the wrapped Bitcoin wrapped Eth, and then it gradually progresses downward from there. But I think as time goes on and you know, you have anomalies like when we integrated dovu, you know they're headlong into building on Hedera and they're building out all their infrastructure and everything there and so bringing across you know both the circulating and non-circulating Supply is something that they're going to need to do. So back in April of last year, which was sort of the precursor to defi on Hedera, was one of the only like real impulses. We had because they were one of the first projects, obviously, to connect. And at the time, it wasn't, you know, Saucer Swap or Heli Swap, anything in the ecosystem at that point in time. So it really was about, you know, bringing, you know, they were bringing their Dove tokens across, but then they had their own native staking service set up there. And that's pretty much all that came across at the time. As we see more protocols and platforms being built on Hedera, much like on a lot of these other L1 L2 networks, you know, the same process is going to repeat. You're going to get a significant amount of volume that's going to be interested in interacting and trying out these new platforms and services.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍And I would imagine that we're certainly going to see an influx of things going the opposite way, where you really want to kind of have Hedera spread out in these other ecosystems as well, which I think is going to be super exciting to watch.

Hashport – Jesse Whiteside - Director of Business Development
‍Yeah, I think that too. You know, when you talk to platforms and services that are on Hedera, they're native based. It's invariably a question, is, you know, how do we get into other ecosystems to be able to attract users and also expand platforms? Because, you know, as we've talked about, the future of web3 is going to be not chain-specific, it's going to be multi-directional. It's going to have many different users and user bases. So I think, you know, being able to do that, the one thing that's nice about on Hashport, with building natively on Hedera with HTS tokens, is it's just right now, at least, a sort of a spoke wheel in the sense that from Hedera, you can get to any of the connected networks and plug in. So if you're a Hedera builder, you can connect to all of our supported L1 L2 networks quickly, and it is really clean. So you can mint your supply on Hedera and then from there, you can have any number of subset of tokens on these other networks that can at any time be burnt and unlocked for the native HTS version. It just makes it very clean in that sense.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Would you expect kind of that from an NFT standpoint? Is there, I don't know, do you guys have now kind of the cross? I always try to avoid the word blockchain when we're talking about Hedera, as much as possible, but is there cross-chain aspects within NFTs that are occurring right now? Or is that functionality?

Hashport – Jesse Whiteside - Director of Business Development
‍Yeah, so we've been working on the NFT functionality for quite some time. That's actually just like we're just about ready for it for most of that. And yeah, there are considerate design considerations with that, keeping the integrity of metadata structures between networks, especially when you know blockchain or EVM versus non-EVM or at the time we're not EVM so like we adhere to the you know NFTs that will ultimately be able to be migrated from Hedera to these other networks would need to be HIP-412 compatible or following that standard. But yeah, I mean I'm excited to see you know NFT projects be able to migrate their assets into a node of Hedera granted you know I think we're still in the early days with the NFT functionality in the sense that there's quite a few additional features and functions that would be needed for those things. I really think you know long-term NFT migrations between networks is something that's going to be kind of in the background and it's kind of going to be something that that a web 3 gaming user for instance is not even going to see. They're just going to want to know that they're you know metaverse assets in this game I'm now putting in this game and as a result it's got to get tracked and all sorts of stuff you know. And in order to do that, maybe you know it has to get moved in the background by API or something. That's obviously ways way out. We'd love to be working on all sorts of stuff like that. So you know anytime we can collaborate with community partners that you know would like to build things we're always listening.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍So I have to ask you last, you guys have accomplished so much since launching in November 2021. 2022 was a monster to get through but when I talk to real builders they're just focused on building anyways so it's really not that big of an issue. I guess my question to you would be what plans that Hashport has right now, I always try to like reach and get a little bit of like stuff. Yeah, what are you most excited about for Hashport in 2023?

Hashport – Jesse Whiteside - Director of Business Development
‍To be honest it's all been sort of one contiguous or just constant build from the get-go and it's just really one week after another adding features functionality services networks tokens you know as you know and doing it in a fundamental first principle of way in terms of what we think our best practices should be. In terms of information, my marketing team will kill me if I ruin all of their good work. I will say that there are networks that are imminent that will be that will be launching shortly and there will be many likely many more to come throughout the year if, if we ever say, and also you know much of the same of what we've been doing which is trying to get, we now have a full service API Suite with full documentation and everything. So, you know, you'll see that as well with Pangolin launching on Hedera and they have their Bridge Swap service, so they're one of the first platforms to integrate via our API. They'll be leveraging Hashport to be able to users if they go to Pitch Swap. We'll be able to move assets onto Hedera via Bridge Swap and do some interesting things too, right? That hasn't even been able to be done before. I believe, maybe I'm just quoting, but I believe I know my stuff here. I think you'll be able to move assets across and at the same time, they will do a swap for you. So, if your user is coming into Hedera and you don't have any hbar yet, you could bring some across and they will do a nominal swap as well at the same time, or you could just swap out of one asset into hbar and they will do it via their DEX and everything in the background, which is really cool. That hasn't been attempted before, but I think that will be many of the areas of focus that I have are on how do I make it as easy as possible to leverage Hashport and use it and have users use it without even knowing they're using it. So, more Integrations with aggregators, more Integrations on back ends of services where it's just the user is comfortable with the platform they're using and they can just get from point A to point B as quickly as possible with as little fanfare as possible.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Awesome, thank you. Hey, well it's been, I think this has been an amazing interview Jesse. I wanted to say thank you for taking the time out of your busy day today. We will definitely be publishing this and driving all the links so you can check out Hashport if you're not aware of the services right now. When we publish this and Jesse, it's been a pleasure and looking forward to doing this again in a few months whenever we can talk about some of the alpha that I was trying to do.

Hashport – Jesse Whiteside - Director of Business Development
‍Yeah, yeah, I know you know what, maybe maybe next time we'll we'll organize some Alpha drop just for you. King, oh, you're good and I'll go, I'll get the team on board ahead of time. I got chastised the last time I decided to drop some Alpha myself and they had been working on a bunch of stuff. So, yeah, I mean, you know, always happy to be on here. Thanks for having us and would love to be back anytime.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Alright, thanks Jesse, you too.