One reason why the cryptocurrency industry started attracting people all those years ago, when Bitcoin first emerged, was the promise of anonymity and anonymous payments. Of course, decentralization was a big part of what made crypto attractive too, but a lot of people were increasingly concerned about the growing levels of surveillance, and anonymity was an attractive concept.
Since then, blockchain analyzers and KYC procedures have made anonymity pretty much non-existent in the crypto industry, unless you use privacy coins and crypto mixers, which are generally deemed non-compliant by regulators. However, the desire for anonymity in crypto never went away, and projects like HOPR aim to bring it back.
What is HOPR?HOPR is a project whose protocol promises to increase data transfer privacy, including for digital payments, as well as many other cases. Much like the crypto industry aims to give users total control of their funds, HOPR wants to give users greater control of their privacy.
It does this by allowing people to hide their metadata, and only reveal what they want to reveal — be that everything, something, or even nothing. The project aims to revolutionize how metadata privacy works and feels, and many believe that its efforts could be the next step in the evolution of data privacy.
The project claims that online privacy should not only involve hiding the data you send. This is already possible through various means, such as encryption. HOPR’s goal is to also hide metadata — who is sending data, and even whom they are sending it to. It is the first project to take online privacy to this level, which could ultimately become the norm for online privacy.
The Importance of HOPR’s MissionThe internet, as we know it, consists of data. Most of it is common knowledge, information, facts — data that people can share freely and benefit from without anyone coming to harm. But, unlike this ‘common knowledge’, personal information can be quite dangerous. Throughout the history of crypto, we’ve had countless opportunities to see hacks and theft which capitalize on exposed data.
But, bad actors do not stumble upon this information by accident. They can use various tools to track transactions and see where it goes, as well as where it comes from. This transparency puts people in danger of being targeted and eventually robbed of their funds.
This is particularly important now, with the emergent DeFi sector attracting massive amounts of money. DeFi has already proven that its coins are worth buying, but its users need to be able to protect themselves, starting with metadata. While this is an elementary part of every financial transaction, it is also a crucial one to protect.
In essence, data privacy is great, but it is not enough. HOPR aims to revolutionize data protection by starting from the positions that most people ignored by now, such as metadata. In a way, it is not unlike TOR, only it will also allow everyone to earn tokens by supporting the network. As it is financially interesting to run a HOPR node and contribute to the decentralized network, HOPR aims to grow faster & bigger.
So far, the project has shown that it has an excellent idea, as well as advanced technology. It also has a strong community, as well as strong partners, including Binance, which already invested in the project. Not to mention that HOPR has a very experienced team that has a lot of knowledge in how to build successful firms.
The project is still in its early days, and it plans to launch its tokens in around eight days. It is unique, and it brings a major change to the crypto industry that will eventually help it become as safe as it was always meant to be.
ConclusionThe crypto industry is transparent, which was a goal from a long time ago. With transparency, payments cannot be hidden, which helps eliminate corruption, theft, and misuse of the money. However, data privacy is still important, especially when it comes to regular users. Thus far, data privacy has been decent, but there is still room for improvement, as HOPR has clearly demonstrated by pointing out that metadata still remains unprotected.
This puts users in danger. HOPR’s protocol can help change that in a rather unique way by using its advanced technology.