The Alt Kings Episode 52: Hashpack Wallet ft: CEO May Chan

The Alt Kings take a deep dive Q&A with the CEO of Hashpack, May Chan.

Transcription

Alt Kings – Tate – Host
‍Welcome to the Alt Kings podcast. I'm your host, Tate, with my co-host Corbin, and today we have a one-of-a-kind guest. Her name is May Chan and she is the CEO of HashPack Wallet. It is a true honor to host you today because everything that you've done with the Hedera ecosystem and just the development of HashPack Wallet itself has been very vital towards the development of Hedera's NFT ecosystem. I just want to say thank you once again for everything.

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, it's great to be here. It's been a really wild ride this year, so happy to be here to talk about that.

‍Alt Kings – Tate – Host
‍Great, absolutely. So let me start off with the first question and just very simple, very unique: what is your favorite NFT project on Hedera? You can name one, you can name two, just what are some of the ones that have been really eye-opening to you with what they're building?

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍Ah, I think I have to give it to Dead Pixels. They're ghosts are just very cute, and I managed to get a very simple one, but that I really liked. So, that's definitely one of my favorites. I have a lot of friends in the NFT space in Hedera, so it'd be bad for me to start listing off a whole bunch and then leaving some out, so I'll just stick with Dead Pixels for that.

‍Alt Kings – Tate – Host
‍Yeah, that's amazing. Love to hear it.

‍Alt Kings – Corbin – Co-host
‍Mm-hmm, absolutely. Now you guys came right after the, uh, you guys released right after the sort of dark winter, so to speak, in Hedera, after an Xact unfortunately had to ramp down. So, did you guys begin production of the wallet before or after that occurred?

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍We began it in like around May of last year, so in the summer. Um, and we basically, like, there's a team of four co-founders, and we worked in our spare time to build up this wallet. We actually didn't originally have an NFT gallery as one of our MVP items. Um, so when we launched in October, we just had Hbar, basically, and no NFTs, no tokens, anything like that. That didn't actually exist really on the Hedera network. It was Xact wallet that had NFTs. There was one marketplace, which I think was GoMint at the time. Um, and, and then there were just like a bunch of NFT projects that were just selling, like, on their website, but not really a natural active marketplace. So we launched in October, and if I'm honest, I was actually not super keen on going into NFTs right away. I wanted to do tokens, but our CTO, Pluto, um, he was like, "I'm just gonna whip up a gallery in like five minutes." So, over the weekend, he, like, launched a gallery, and that became the next feature in HashPack. Um, and then we went from there. It was crazy. Um, we went out with the NFT gallery and also Secure Trade, which let people trade peer-to-peer as an atomic trade, so you don't have to trust your buyer or seller. And then we also launched HashConnect, which is our, like, wallet connect kind of version on Hedera. Um, and so, like, in January, we had like one marketplace, or maybe two. I think HashAxis also existed back then. And then, by like two months later, in March, we had like four, so it was kind of crazy. And actually, the biggest marketplace on Hedera right now, Zuse Marketplace was really funny because they just appeared out of nowhere. One day they launched on Twitter and they said, "Hey, we're live, and we support HashPack." And it just worked. It was really crazy. Yeah, everything.

‍Alt Kings – Tate – Host
‍Yeah, that's great. So, cool doing my research, I've seen that you have 10 years of experience in electrical engineering. I'm just really curious about how that transition went from being an engineer to now the face of one of the biggest wallets on Hedera's network.

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, it's kind of crazy. It's a very different world that I'm in. I would say the difference between being an electrical engineer and being the CEO of a software company is that I don't actually have to make things. That's the job of my developers or that's the job of my designers or marketing. The thing that really transferred over was the client relationships. Because I was a consulting engineer, a lot of the things that I did were dealing with architects, dealing with developers, managing that personal relationship. So that's really where I fell into, and then it just kind of went over into the public sector too when I started talking on podcasts and stuff like that. I actually used to do a little bit of Twitch streaming back in the day. I played some League of Legends. So being on camera wasn't a little bit wasn't too much of a stretch, although I didn't have any sort of success in that at all. It was just for fun. But that was kind of why I think I went into this sort of role as the spokesperson and as the sort of business relationship part of the team.

‍Alt Kings – Corbin – Co-host
‍Nice. That's great. Yeah, I think I could definitely lend you some skills that could be transposed into what you're doing today. Most definitely.

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍I guess another thing too is that our whole team is full of professionals. And we all have like a decade of experience or more. And Pluto has worked in banks and enterprises, and our security guy does enterprise grade security. It's really crazy what kind of team we have here. And I would say that the engineering background that I have too also lends into our approach, which has always been very robust and scalable, and making sure we're doing things the right way. Because engineering is a lot about covering your liabilities and making sure that you're doing things responsibly. So I think that's given us a lot of good foundations to build a successful product that performs as it should and keeps people safe.

‍Alt Kings – Corbin – Co-host
‍So for sure, how big is the team now, by chance? I know at one point it was like only two, three people.

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍We had two people full time in February, and then the other two were part-time. So now we've got four people full time, and then one person part-time. So we actually hired a new director of operations in October and he does the marketing side, and also like our finances and accounting. So that's our team, five people, still pretty small, still pretty cozy.

‍Alt Kings – Corbin – Co-host
‍Do you think you need more people as part of the team?

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍We are probably slowly going to build out, but our dev side, we're really particular, so it's hard to find the talent that can meme and also code the company culture actually, it's pretty fun. We definitely get into the Twitter memes and all of the drama there. Well, we watch it. We try not to get our hands into it, but slowly I think the team will grow. We're going to do it in a hopefully methodical way, so we don't just grow too fast. Like, we want to make sure HashPack always remains very tightly focused and very easy to use. We don't want to have a bloated wallet that becomes really difficult to do what you want to do.

‍Alt Kings – Corbin – Co-host
‍Yeah, that makes sense. Sure. Yeah, it does make sense. Now, how difficult was the development of a software wallet using Hbar's protocol and just in general?

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍I would say that it was actually very easy. Well, I'm not a programmer. I've only messed around with Unity or Unreal Engine or whatever like that. I did some coding on the side, and before we even started HashPack, I did some little scripts that was basically a software wallet but on command line. As an amateur, I was able to do it myself. Right? It wasn't anything professional. It didn't really have the security features, but it was something that I managed to do. So I think that Hedera is a very easy platform to build on. I definitely tried to get into solidity and smart contract coding and stuff like that during my hobby time, and that was always a mess. I really couldn't wrap my head around it. So for someone like me, who isn't a professional, who just does things for fun, and was able to do something on Hashgraph just by fooling around, I think that really shows how easy it is. As for how hard it was to make the wallet, we have a superstar team at HashPack, so we were able to do a lot of things very fast. And I think it's purely on the skill of Pluto and Arth, who are our two developers. But also just what I've heard in the community, the fact that the SDK is in JavaScript makes it really easy to develop on the platform.

‍Alt Kings – Tate – Host
‍Without a doubt. It's definitely, yeah, JavaScript, one of the easiest scripts to use. Yeah, yep. Cool. One of my favorite things about the HashPack wallet is actually how, anytime you want to receive an NFT, you have to associate the token with it. That really stops a lot of these spam NFTs coming to your wallet. And I mean, whenever I was on Ethereum at one point all I just remember is creating my wallet and then getting sent like two random NFTs I don't even know how. Just because I connected it to a platform, that was it.

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, that's a it really is like a wild west out there. And having spam in your wallet just kind of feels a bit invasive. Yeah, but this is actually a future of Hedera where you actually do have to associate tokens and NFTs in order for them to appear in your wallet. I think that's a little bit of a blessing and also a curse because a lot of people coming into Hedera, like developers and stuff, get confused on how to manage the user experience. Because if you're just like a project that wants to airdrop somebody, you can't just get their address and then send it. They have to actually do something, they have to associate it. So there's like a security feature to that, but there's also just sort of a usability kind of friction point there. But I think overall, it's really good because we've already seen some scams come out on Hedera that have worried people. Most recently, there has been someone sending each bar to two people and they send like 0.002 Hbar, but it triggers the staking reward of that account. So it looks like you're getting like 100 H bar, something, whatever was pending in your staking thing. And then in the memo of that note, it says go to airdrop.com or whatever it is to collect your airdrop. And people are coming in and they're like, "Well, what the heck is this?" They're confused. Some people even go to that website and then they get redirected to a scam version of my Hbar wallet. And then that site prompts them to enter their private key and then they lose their Hbar. Fortunately, I think not a lot of people have been affected by that, but I guess the takeaway here is don't follow strange links that appear in your wallet, and don't enter your private key into a website. And so, hopefully now that we have the Android app out, and also the IOS app is in beta for HashPack, hopefully you'll just be able to get it from the store and keep yourself safe that way too. Yeah, it's always a sliding skill to handle scams.

‍Alt Kings – Tate – Host
‍Yeah, even with the IOS app in beta, I had no problem setting up just the iOS like the website app basically with Apple, and that was very seamless and very easy to operate with. And it's just that being a possibility out there is just very helpful.

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, there's a PWA kind of version. We have a blog post that shows how to set up the HashPack wallet like in your Chrome browser. But as a link onto your phone so you can just tap it on your home screen, which is called a PWA app. I'm not actually sure what that stands for, but it looks like an app when you set it up that way on your phone, which is good. And one of the interesting things is that I know there are some projects that are building their app purely as a PWA so that they stay out of the Apple Store because Apple is being very restrictive in what it allows and doesn't allow with NFTs. And that is one of the reasons why our app is being delayed for iOS is because you can't link to a marketplace from within the app, and you can't do anything that's like sending an NFT because Apple wants a cut of the gas fees or something like that. It seems very strange the way that they've gone about it.

‍Alt Kings – Corbin – Co-host
‍Well, yes, that stemmed from Coinbase. They said to Coinbase, "Hey, we want 30% of the gas fees from each transaction, or else we're going to remove your app from the App Store, or else you can't just send NFTs" or something like that. That's right. Yeah, like, "Guys, stop. That's gross, disgusting."

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍And I mean, like, I think they get away with it for regular apps. Like if you have a game and you sell a little skin in the game, and then Apple takes a cut, I think that kind of makes sense. But if you're talking about wallets like HashPack wallet or Coinbase wallet or something, the wallets themselves aren't taking a cut of that. That's not how Web3 works. So you're trying to apply a Web2 paradigm to Web3, and it's just resulting in a lot of friction for users.

‍Alt Kings – Corbin – Co-host
‍Yeah, just making the overall user experience more difficult.

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍Some people are saying that Apple is going to really get hit by regulations and things like that because they're kind of overstepping their bounds here. So we'll see. We'll see how it goes. Maybe in a few months we'll be allowed to send NFTs and link to marketplaces and stuff like that. So we'll see.

‍Alt Kings – Tate – Host
‍That'd be crazy if Apple made their own NFT marketplace.

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍That'd be crazy, as long as they allow other NFT marketplaces to exist, you know? I mean, otherwise, we're just getting back to a centralized kind of scheme.

‍Alt Kings – Corbin – Co-host
‍Yeah, Apple's strategy with that is very different though. Because if you look at what they did with the AirTags they had, right before... well, I think it was a couple weeks before they released AirTags, they made the Find My application, which allows any Apple device to basically geoping any other device to be able to update it completely publicly available. They made that APK completely available to everybody. And then a week later or a couple weeks later, they released AirTags, which is their spin on it. So then they're getting all the market share that Tile and those other market makers had in the past. Oh, so it's kind of divisive in the way that they go about things because they'll have this good thing that they say, "Hey, here's this good thing we're doing for all the developers," and then they'll turn around and say, "Hey, there's this idea that somebody else has made long ago, we're going to go ahead and just right and then put it over here. So it's interesting.

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍It's very interesting. I think that all these big companies are trying to figure out what the heck they're going to do with NFTs and marketplaces. Like LG has their own marketplace now, you can load it up on your TV. So that's we're seeing the start of that, which is very interesting. And of course, all of it is very different than the decentralized NFT marketplaces that we're seeing in Web3 because these big companies are still stuck in a Web2 sort of methodology and mentality. Right.

‍Alt Kings – Tate – Host
‍Yeah, it's difficult. It's going to be a lot of trial and error for these big tech companies to adapt to Web3 capabilities. But with that just comes a strong team like HashPack has.

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍You know, I've got ideas on how to make NFTs on Hedera more fun, more engaging, how to bring Web2 companies into the Web3 side without it just being a cash grab. There's a lot of things that I'd like to accomplish strategically, where there are companies that want to, like, bring in loyalty cards. And then, you know, if you buy something, you get points from that, and then you can use those or you can combine them with your friends and then buy other things. And they're trying to figure out how to get it to work with Web3. And like, these already exist in the Web2 space, where you have your Starbucks rewards card, and you can buy 10 and get one free. Right. It already exists in the real world. So the question is, how do you make it into Web3, and then how do you take advantage of the technological benefits of Web3 and not just port it over, and it's exactly the same thing. So very interesting things that we can build. I think most importantly, what we want to do is make the Web3 space accessible to people, make it really user-friendly, make it so that you don't even have to know what crypto is in order to buy an NFT. And I think a lot of people are trying to solve that problem now by hooking up your credit cards so you can buy an NFT directly with your credit card. Reddit is a great example of normalizing NFTs, where they don't even use the word NFT in their promo. They use digital collectible as the vocabulary. Right. So I think, and look how successful Reddit has been, even though up until that point, everybody on Reddit hated NFTs. They were just a completely divisive topic. But now, everybody loves Reddit collectibles just because they rebranded it as something else, and they also made it so that you didn't like the Collectibles themselves to get it wasn't like you had to pay a hundred eth or whatever to buy it. Right. Like so it really tied into the collectible aspect rather than the speculation aspect.

‍Alt Kings – Tate – Host
‍So, and then another 100 eth on top of that for gas fees.

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍Right. Exactly. That's where they got you.

‍Alt Kings – Corbin – Co-host
‍Never gonna happen on Hedera though, like goodness.

‍Alt Kings – Tate – Host
‍Yeah. So with the end of 2022 in sight, what were some of the biggest obstacles you faced with developing HashPack over this past year?

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍Biggest obstacles. I think one of the ones that is less relevant now, but still somewhat relevant, is the user base on Hedera. Back in June, we had about 30,000 monthly active users over the entire Hedera network. That was in the Misari report, which was a report on the current state of Hedera. And now, in HashPack alone, we're looking at 60,000 to 80,000 monthly active users. So we grew more than double, almost triple the amount of active users over the whole year. So the Hedera space is growing and it is really fun, which I think ties into the reason why it's growing. But I think one of the challenges is that nobody knew about Hedera and now we're trying to reach out, we're trying to go into spaces and podcasts that are hosted by people that are not just Hedera Maxis and just tell people about HashPack to raise awareness. A great one was NFT NYC, where Hedera bought out huge screens in Times Square and that was really amazing. They put all of the NFTs from the community projects, they just spammed them all over New York. That was really fun. And I think we saw a big uptick in traffic just because of that one play. So I think it's really good. As for other growing pains, I think up until September, we were really having trouble because we didn't have a full DeFi ecosystem. We had the NFT marketplaces, we had NFT launch pads, we had a bridge, which was HashPort, but Saucer Swap only launched in August or September, so we didn't have a DEX until the fall. And that also held us back a lot because people couldn't launch their own tokens and couldn't get them going. But now we have that. So I think we're really on a good track. I think now there are three or four DEXes on Hedera, and a few more on the way that are yet to be announced, but they also look really good. So it's kind of crazy where we are today versus where we were at the beginning of the year with only one NFT Marketplace, and now we've got a full, full DeFi ecosystem that is slowly building up. And yeah, it's really fun and I think that 2023 will still grow just as big as ever. Of course, that is just the retail space. We haven't heard much from the Enterprise side of things, but Hedera Stick has always been about Enterprise adoption. And I just like, I'm crossing my fingers, because all the people that I talk to that are into the Enterprise space are really excited too, because I think that those Enterprise use cases are going to come out. And for people who like Hedera and who like hbar, I think that that's a really great thing that is happening basically in parallel to what we're doing. It has nothing to do with us, there are basically two different flavors of Hedera, but we're both those trains are moving forward, and like if one takes off, I think the other will take off too. So I'm just crossing my fingers on that.

‍Alt Kings – Corbin – Co-host
‍Yeah, absolutely. And I can't help but wonder too, with the Enterprise side of things, if, well, in one of Dr. Lehman's speeches, he had talked about that the Hedera Foundation is essentially creating custom dapps for all of the council members, essentially, and that was one of their main things that they're doing. And I can't help but wonder if some of those dapps are going to trickle down to the rest of the Enterprise, and they're basically using that as a sort of breeding ground for ideas and stuff that they can eventually bring to market for other companies as well.

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, well, I think that if you look at the things that have been built kind of in the peripheries of the Hedera ecosystem, you see a lot of open source products, and I think that that's really where Hedera is trying to show what can be done and give people a foundation to build on. I think that's a lot of the projects. I don't really want to name specific ones, but that have been funded by Hedera or the Hbar Foundation have specifically built things so that Enterprise use cases are taken care of. And I think on one hand, it's kind of weird because other DeFi ecosystems don't do that necessarily, so I think it kind of skews the development of those dapps to be less relevant to retail because they have to be more relevant to Enterprise. So that has kind of skewed where the funds have gone because there are Enterprise needs. But on the other hand, we're still getting those applications and we still have those natural, organic projects that are building on Hedera, like HashPack and Saucer Swap, that take advantage of the technology that is being built by these projects. So I think we're going to see a lot more innovation in 2023 as well. For example, one of the things that doesn't exist on Hedera right now is full smart contract compatibility. Which is something that they really focused on this year, and there are a few more kinks to be worked out, but those are being fixed up so that ideally, if you're an Ethereum Dapp, you can just port over to Hedera, launch it on the Ethereum later on Hedera, and then it just works. And some of the projects like HashPort and Heli Swap are building things specifically and working with Hedera specifically to allow that to happen. And I think that's part of what we'll see, what we're seeing from that Enterprise perspective, because they absolutely need to have that kind of cross-compatibility.

‍Alt Kings – Corbin – Co-host
‍Yeah, and that cross-compatibility is already nice to have for just a token perspective. Natively in HashPack, you can just straight up wrap Ethereum or Quant or a lot of other ERC tokens. Does it support all ERC20 tokens or is it sort of...

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍It's a little bit tricky because you can make an ERC token on Hedera and link it up with HTS, which is the Hedera Token Service, and then it works in HashPack natively. However, you could also just straight up launch an ERC20 or ERC721 token, or there's another one that I can't remember off the top of my head, but there are these protocols that are pure Ethereum, and those just live on the Ethereum layer and don't touch HTS. And I believe the liquidity tokens on Heli Swap are like that. And when you use a pure ERC token on Hedera, currently I don't think there are any wallets that support those. You have to, if you're in Metamask or something, you have to import that token into your wallet, right, which basically means you have to query that smart contract and then let your wallet know that you've got a token in that smart contract, and the smart contract manages the token, as opposed to Hedera, where the platform itself manages the token. So this is one of the things that's on our list to do, but we're waiting to see if any products actually release an ERC20 token, because right now HTS has a lot of advantages, it's also cheaper and faster than launching purely on the Ethereum layer. So currently, the technical answer is if you're launching an ERC20 token or ERC721 token or something that isn't connected to HTS, it doesn't show up in the wallets on Hedera, but it could in the future if there was a project that really needed it. And then if that's the case, reach out to us because we're waiting for it basically.

‍Alt Kings – Tate – Host
‍That is for all Hedera projects out there.

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍There are just straight up benefits to using HTS that you don't really need to have an ERC token. And I think a lot of the projects that move over from Ethereum, Solana, or Avalanche, or whatever, rather than do the thing where they port the token, port the code over and don't do anything with it, they actually take the time to migrate over to HTS and see the advantage of that. I think, I'm not sure if we'll ever see pure ERC tokens on Hedera, but maybe one day. And honestly, I think that it doesn't really matter if it gets popular or not. We'll just support it and everybody, hopefully one day, you won't even have to know whether it is an ERC20 or HTS or even a Solana token. Maybe there's one day where you can just view all of your NFTs no matter what the chain is, you don't even know which chain it's on. That could also be a thing too, with a growing focus on cross-chain support, to the point that maybe you just don't care which chain it is on. And then I think if that's the case, everyone builds on Hedera because it's the cheapest.

‍Alt Kings – Tate – Host
‍Makes the most sense. Yeah, how do you think the best way will be for Ethereum projects and other altcoins, like Solana, to onboard to Hedera? What do you think the best ways of onboarding could be?

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍I think that you just have to get involved in the community. We've got a really good community here on Hedera. Get involved in the spaces, talk to people. I think that Hedera people are so used to being really involved in the projects that when a project comes in and is kind of quiet, it seems strange, whereas on other chains, that's just normal. So Hedera people, I think, have a bit to learn in terms of worldliness and maintaining that welcoming quality, even if there are people from other chains coming in that are maybe a bit shy. But people coming in, I definitely encourage just becoming part of the community, talking to people, figuring out what's going on, reaching out to the projects. I think that the projects that are building on Hedera are very welcoming and very helpful, especially if you're going to launch on one of our launch pads with your NFT projects. Just get aligned directly with the dev team at Zuse or Hash Tool or Hash Axis or NFTier or whatever, like Turtle Moon tools. There are a lot of them out there now. If you're building a Dapp, then you want to get hooked up with the wallets here. Just reach out to HashPack. It's easy, and we make a really big point of trying to make it as easy as possible to move on to the network. Actually, I'll show our website here. We have a community site on HashPack.app/community that is a page that we built that highlights all of the big projects on Hedera, all the marketplaces, all the DEXes, all the NFT projects (well, not all of them, there are a lot of them, but we've added a bunch of them and we hope to add more). Basically, it's a one-glance look at the Hedera ecosystem that new people coming in can see exactly what's there, what kind of games are on the ecosystem, you know, what people are doing. So I hope that, like, yeah, that's probably my message if you're just coming in from a different chain: check that out.

‍Alt Kings – Tate – Host
‍Yeah, it's clever, and I mean, I don't think I've ever seen or heard of anything like that for any other chains out there. I really feel like, if you look at Solana or Ethereum, they're really just congested with so many projects being developed and stuff, and there's so much out there but it's also so much unknown out there that not a lot of people can really find unless they've truly dived deep into the whole entire ecosystem.

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, and that was one of the things that I was having trouble with is like I downloaded Phantom wallet and I was like, "Okay, now what? I don't know what to do." I looked on some marketplaces, I don't know which projects are good. It was very confusing. So like this community site that we built on HashPack, I think that that's one of the ways that we can help new users. We also have the dapp browser now, where you can go directly on the wall, you can connect to the marketplaces or you can connect to hashgraph.name and buy a domain name or something like that directly inside of the wallet, and it connects you with a click, and you're just there, interacting with the ecosystem. Uh, so hopefully we'll continue to build things out that will make it easy for users to get into Hedera, because I think that was one of my big confusing points with some of these ecosystems. You kind of download the wallet and then you look around and you're kind of lost.

‍Alt Kings – Tate – Host
‍Yeah, all you see is the top leaderboards of all the projects who've already sold out or just continue.

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, that was one of the things too, all you see is like, "Oh, it's sold out. Okay, I want to look at this one. Oh, it's like 8f or eth. I can't afford eight eth."

‍Alt Kings – Corbin – Co-host
‍You know, so it's no good. It's like selling a new baseline with Hedera. Instead of you paying eight thousand dollars for an NFT, you pay 50 bucks for the blue chips, like a couple hundred.

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍And then once you buy the mint, then the numbers jump up. There's this site, I'm going to shill them even though they're not live, called NFTier. They have an analytics page that they're building out. It's currently an alpha, I think, so it's closed, but maybe you can go check them out and give them a nudge. But they've got this thing where you can see all of the trades being done on Hedera, the volume, the number of buyers versus holders, and it looks like Hedera, like people are making money. There's profit in NFTs. People aren't just losing money in the marketplaces. And I think that's why people are excited about Hedera, because the NFT ecosystem is really vibrant right now, despite all the stuff that's been going on this year in other NFT ecosystems. Hedera has kind of risen from the ashes.

‍Alt Kings – Tate – Host
‍It comes down to supply and demand at that point. I mean, there's little supply out there, and a lot more demand that continues to increase, which means more people want to invest their money into Hedera and the NFT projects that are out there, and it'll just help the floor prices rise. And one thing I really like, like you mentioned about NFTier, is I really love how you're able to see just anything and everything to do with each individual project, with rarities and things of that sort. And I'm going to shill our own project. We'll be actually working with NFTier to release our own NFT project.

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, I heard that they're the te founder is a really great guy, works really hard, and the site looks really, really chill. So I'm really looking out for it.

‍Alt Kings – Corbin – Co-host
‍Love to hear it. We'll get you a crown to hear it. Cool. Yeah, their app works really good too. It can help see your total portfolio value, unless you know you're like me and half your wallet is not on a one token ID system, since it's all so old.

‍Alt Kings – Tate – Host
‍That's crazy. Yeah, Corbin's been here very long. I remember just when we used to work together, he'd always just come into work telling me all these new NFT projects he's invested in and stuff. But the way he's been trading these NFTs was through Discord.

‍Alt Kings – Corbin – Co-host
‍Yeah, that's the way it used to be. Yeah, it's that whole family aspect that Hedera continues to just sort of hang on to, and it's really cool. We're one big community.

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, and I think that I really, when I talk on these spaces, I really want to stress to keep that community, because I think it makes us very unique among crypto, and very welcoming and fun to be with. You know, that's definitely one of the highlights of the Hedera ecosystem for me, is just how close everybody is, and all the collaborations and everything like that are great.

‍Alt Kings – Corbin – Co-host
‍Yeah, I agree. Yeah, and then like a new project drops, and then you hop in, and then like 20 of your other friends from the ecosystem just all suddenly hop in at the same time for some apparent reason, and you just have this giant party. It's I never see that with any other ecosystem. It's crazy. So maybe XRP a little bit, but it's still developing.

‍Alt Kings – Tate – Host
‍Yeah, lots of being developed, that's for sure.

‍Alt Kings – Corbin – Co-host
‍Yeah, speaking of development, I was kind of curious if you guys were going to be doing a system sort of like Zum, which is the main XRP software wallet, where they have a feature that has almost like a pro mode, so to speak. So essentially, you would pay a very small monthly fee, and that kind of helps with the development costs, because obviously software development's very expensive so essentially it would help the developers, and then you'd get extra features on the back end for other cool adaptations and stuff they might develop in the future. If you have any plans to do something like that.

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍We’ve talked about a "HashPack Pro" kind of thing. In general, our team is against it, and the reason is that we don't want to lock out users from functionality in the ecosystem. We want to make sure people can access it all equally. Also, we think that there are ways that we can generate revenue that are more inclusive than exclusive. One of the things, for example, is Secure Trade, which has been really great. It's just a service that people can use, or they don't have to use it. You can just send your NFT to someone, and then have them send back the Hbar for it if you want, or you can trade your NFT for Hbar and then we take a small commission on top of that. That way, you have the security of that trade. We're also going to release a version two of it as soon as we have some time to develop it. Then you'll be able to trade NFT for NFT, or NFT for tokens, or any combination of that. We'll figure out a way to put a small fee, like six Hbar or something, for NFT versus NFT trades where there is no Hbar value or something like that. Basically, we want to make it so that you can easily trade between two people without having to trust the other person and get exactly what you want. We have a mock-up of an in-game trading kind of thing, like if you're opening up trade in Diablo or something like that, so it looks cool. Hopefully we'll get that out soon. We also have other things that we think will be able to generate funds, like in-wallet swaps. People are now using it a lot, even though the market is down. People are actually really swapping tokens and trying to get involved in Hedera DeFi. That's also a small generator of fees. I think that's how MetaMask makes a lot of its money, through in-wallet swaps. We're also doing some NFT collaborations and things like that which haven't come out yet, but that will be a way of getting involved in the community and building on that community aspect of it. People can join in if they want, and then maybe get a HashPack or something like that. We're still working out the details. Rather than try to lock people into paying a subscription or something like that, which may happen in the future, but at the moment we're trying not to build that kind of thing just because we want to keep everybody involved. If they want to pay for something, they can pay for it, and if not, they can still use all of what's available on Hedera.

‍Alt Kings – Tate – Host
‍So, it makes sense. I really love what you said about being more inclusive than exclusive. That's really clever, and it fits the entire idea and vision of Hedera.

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍I think that's one of our strengths as well, that we don't have a lot of exclusive partnerships or things like that, where you can only use this wallet with this platform or this NFT on this website. Like, you can only sell your NFT on this marketplace and not that one. We've worked really hard to make it so that all the wallets have equal opportunity to interact with all these NFT marketplaces, and all the NFT marketplaces can see all the NFTs. There's a standard now that all NFTs follow, so if you want to start your own marketplace or launch your own launchpad, you can because it's all there, and you can just do it and then you're compatible. Right. So, I think that's really something that I want to stress going forward, and try to keep everybody happy and working together.

‍Alt Kings – Tate – Host
‍So, you said it best. Makes perfect sense. I mean, I have no other questions. Corbin, if you have some, by all means.

‍Alt Kings – Corbin – Co-host
‍Did we already ask about the high volume at times?

‍Alt Kings – Tate – Host
‍No, I don't believe we actually have.

‍Alt Kings – Corbin – Co-host
‍Okay, so another, I think this is probably going to end up being the last question, but I know a lot of people complained when HashPack unfortunately does go down during these large, especially like, for instance, like Hangry BarBoons that misses ridiculously huge, and everybody's like, "Why is HashPack down?" I'm like, "Guys, it's like a five-man team kill, but what can be done as time goes on to sort of increase the amount of influx that the HashPack infrastructure can withstand?"

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍Well, on the one hand, it's already been done, but basically the way that it, the, is it was a complicated thing where, let's rewind back to early summer when we're really starting to see a lot of volume start picking up, and a lot of these big launches came out on TurtleMoon tools. I think there was the Dead Pixel launch that actually shut down the HashPack service for the first time. That was crazy. There were so many people logging in, it was higher than we'd ever seen it before and instantaneous. So, basically, we got DDoSed by the community, and that was crazy. And so, rather, I think that mint took eight minutes to sell out, and part of that was just HashPack getting unresponsive and stuff, but I would say that it wasn't just us because some of it was the mirror node also not functioning properly because of the loads, and some of it was on TurtleMoon tools as well, where they had to fix some bugs, and some of it was on us as well, where we were doing a bunch of queries to the mirror node and getting all the NFTs one by one or all the fungible token information, which was a lot of load onto the mirror nodes. So, one of the things we did was streamline our calls to the mirror nodes and also buff up our servers. And actually, we did buff up our service for the Dead Pixels launch, and it went over what we expected, and we crashed, which was the first time. Even before that, there were bigger and bigger mints, and we never crashed, we just lagged, but on the Dead Pixels ones, we crashed. And then we knew that only a few weeks after the Dead Pixels launched, there was a Hangry launch, and that was going to be three or four times the size, and that was going to be crazy. So, we contracted someone from the community who is an amazing developer and also elite at one of the big development companies (which I won't name) to set up the scaling solution on our servers. We also talked with LedgerWorks, who is our mirror node solution and they also bolstered their systems, and like each time they had to bump it up. I think Hangry Baboons ended up being 10 times the amount of traffic as Dead Pixels. Yeah, it was nuts. It was crazy. It is nuts. But I think that, and correct me if I'm wrong, did Hangry have issues because I think we solved a lot of them for the Hangry launch.

‍Alt Kings – Tate – Host
‍Yeah, yeah, just the TurtleMoon tools.

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍And I think that after that, we actually solved a lot of those things, and also TurtleMoon tools fixed a bunch of stuff. So, I think the service has been getting better and better. And right now, our servers should be able to handle all of that. We really put in a lot of effort into scaling it up. So, I'm going to say it right now that I think we're good, at least on HashPack side, for future launches, even if they're huge. So, we'll see. And feel free to make me eat my words if that happens, but we did put a lot of effort into making this an enterprise-grade, scalable solution. Hopefully, in the future, when we have bigger and bigger mints, it will just be easy. This will be a thing of the past, where we don't even remember how it was. That was just the old days, you know? And going forward, everything just works like a charm. So, we're working really hard to improve our systems and make things good. But I think people don't realize the scale of how big Dead Pixels was, and then how big Hangry was after that. It was crazy. So, like, it really, I think that's another thing that people should understand too, is as the ecosystem scales, the platforms are built to withstand the traffic that goes through them. So, if we see gigantic, huge mints and a lot of hype around something we've never seen before on the ecosystem, then probably things are going to struggle because you don't build out an aircraft carrier if you're normally just running a tugboat kind of thing, you know. As the ecosystem grows, as projects get bigger and hype goes up on Hedera, all the projects will just rise up and get better and better. If they can't, then they will sink. The good ones will stay up, and everybody's user experience will get better going forward. So, yeah, I think it's been a fun ride as we learn to scale and as the ecosystem scales, and I hope that we do even more going into 2023.

‍Alt Kings – Tate – Host
‍It's sink or swim with NFT projects these days, and I think that was a great note to end on. Thank you once again, May, for everything you've provided towards the Hedera community, and for everything you've provided with the HashPack wallet and your team. We look forward to everything you guys have to build out for the end of 2022 and the years to come.

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, thanks very much.

‍Alt Kings – Tate – Host
‍With that being said, ladies and gentlemen, this has been the Alt Kings podcast, and we'll see you next episode. Peace. That was amazing.