Swiss privacy project HOPR association is another party that has been appointed funding from Dusk Network’s grants program Helios. The $5M grants program was announced in April last year and allocated funding to various research projects focusing on zero-knowledge proof technology.
The allocation is part of a joint effort with other prominent Web3 projects such as Ankr and Harmony, who have already been strategic partners to Dusk Network.
Foundational Privacy
Privacy is an often overlooked component of Web3 and the crypto vision. Although everyone generally agrees that data privacy is important, it is frequently overlooked behind more popular crypto concepts such as decentralization.
HOPR and Dusk Network both argue that this is a false distinction. Without privacy — specifically, transport-level privacy that obscures metadata such as the user’s IP address and private keys — fundamental aspects of crypto cannot be safely operated.
“Privacy recently has increased in popularity in the blockchain space, but to meet our level of privacy and compliance requirements, parties understanding this need are quite limited. When we sat down with HOPR, immediately we felt a connection and both saw plenty of opportunities to bundle our knowledge and powers. Contributing to the HOPR protocol with our Helios Grants Program helps us to contribute to a more private Web3 and entire industry”.- said Pascal Putman, Commercial Director and Grants curator.
HOPR’s incentivized and scalable private mix network lets users earn its native token, HOPR, as an incentive for running nodes that anonymously and securely relay data to other network members using the project’s proof-of-relay system. This allows users to send data to other users without exposing vital metadata such as their IP addresses.
The urgent need for this technology is starkly highlighted by HOPR’s DERP tool — Dumb Ethereum RPC Provider — that shows how popular decentralized apps (DApps) such as Uniswap and MetaMask leak vast amounts of identifiable and exploitable metadata — even before making a transaction, and in some cases before fully opening the DApp. This is exactly what Dusk Network is focusing on too, so the grant investment is a great opportunity to explore how Dusk Network’s technology and the HOPR protocol could work together in the future, to offer total privacy and compliance to its users.
“Receiving the grant from Dusk Network for us acknowledges that what we are working on is one of the solutions that Web3 needs. We both have the same ambitions: to make privacy mainstream and a standardization instead of an exemption. The grant empowers us to explore privacy technology to its maximum potential.” said Rik Krieger, co-founder and CMO at HOPR.
Holistic investment
Much of the recent discourse on the viability of Web3 has focused on project funding, with many criticizing the amount of venture capital funding in the space. HOPR has already established its decentralized credentials through a fair launch that saw 100% of raised funds stay in control of the HOPR DAO. The team is doubling down on this approach by securing investment from like-minded Web3 projects.
The problem of metadata and IP privacy is prevalent in every layer of crypto, from users accessing DApps via their browsers to the way transactions are approved and grouped into blocks by miners and validators.
To this end, HOPR has announced it will be:
- Balancing data transparency with privacy for node runners for truly decentralized data-indexing and infrastructure provision with Ankr, The Graph and Pocket Network
- Adding essential transport-level privacy to the on-chain privacy of Dusk Network
- Providing essential privacy to stop layer–0 disruption and attacks on layer-1 blockchains with Gnosis, Polygon, Harmony and Near.
Interested developers can also participate in HOPR’s rapidly expanding bounty program.
About HOPR
HOPR is a layer-0 metadata privacy-protection protocol used to connect devices and the cloud and produce private transactions on the chain. HOPR has developed cutting-edge technologies for digital privacy, layer-0 data transmission and decentralized governance.
About Dusk Network
Dusk Network is an open source blockchain for financial applications. Data protection and privacy-preservation play a major role in Dusk Network, as well as its design for regulatory compliance. The blockchain is eco-friendly, thanks to its Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism; a novel and efficient method of reaching agreement on the current state of the global ledger. Notably, the blockchain supports privacy-friendly smart contracts. Companies use the Dusk Network to power financial applications, issue tokens, trade and collaborate on a global scale. Dusk Network is built by a team of experts from Amsterdam, the Netherlands.