Introducing HOPR: Your Next-Generation Data Privacy and Protection Platform
By: Dr. Sebastian Bürgel
Tags: Ethereum, Dapps, Web3, Data Privacy, Mixnet

Imagine a list of everything you’ve done online this week, and when. Everyone you messaged or video called. Every social media interaction, takeout order, doctors appointment, dating app match. Every website you visited (yes, all of them). Everywhere your phone has been. Every time you were and weren’t at home.

Would you be happy for your neighbours to see this list? Your boss? Your bank? Everyone on the internet? Now make it the past decade, not week. Now make it forever.

That’s the reality of using the internet today. While the data we send is usually encrypted, the metadata — the data about what you’re sending, when, and who to — is all available to be hacked and tracked.

It shouldn’t be this way. Users deserve privacy. Companies deserve tools to protect the privacy of their employees and customers. Enter HOPR: a solution for decentralized data exchange that provides the privacy and security we desperately need for the internet of today and the future.

What is HOPR?

HOPR is a decentralized and metadata-private point-to-point data exchange protocol based on an incentivized mixnet. HOPR will provide layer-0 security, allowing existing applications, services and novel decentralized applications (dApps) to communicate in complete privacy.

Which is… certainly a lot of words! If that’s cleared things up for you already, we’d love for you to check out the early work by our team of talented developers on GitHub or take a look at one of our job openings!

In plain English, HOPR is a way for people, companies and devices to exchange information online with complete privacy. People who communicate and transact using HOPR — or apps and services which run on top of the HOPR platform — can be completely confident that no-one can find out what data is being shared, who is sending or receiving it, or even how much data is being sent.

Best of all, HOPR is fully decentralized. This means there’s no centralized entity collecting fees and calling the shots, like in the ‘freemium’ approach which rules our current online interactions. That’s known as the Web 2.0 model, where huge companies like Facebook and Google offer “free” services in exchange for controlling your data and locking you into their platforms.

Absolutely anyone can help to maintain the HOPR network by acting as a relayer, and everyone who does so can earn HOPR tokens in exchange for their efforts. It’s completely transparent and trustless, which means you never have to rely on a third-party and you’re never locked into a service or have to give up control of your data.

HOPR, and the decentralized applications which can be built on top of it, marks a fundamental step in upgrading our current internet and moving towards a more private, open and accountable future. This is the Web3 model: shifting control back to users, where it belongs.

Why does metadata matter?

HOPR is designed to protect your metadata. But what is that and why is it important?

Although we all know to be careful about who we give our data to, it’s easy to assume that the process of actually sending that data is safe. After all, it arrives at its destination almost instantly, and nearly everything we do online nowadays is ostentatiously protected by different types of encryption, from our online banking to simple WhatsApp messages.

The issue is that this encryption only protects your data — the actual content that we’re sending. It does nothing to protect your metadata: all the information about the data you’re sending. This is stuff like:

who you are

who you’re communicating with

when you’re doing it

where you’re both located

how much data you’re sending.

Even without seeing the details about what you’re actually sending, this metadata is extremely revealing. Do you really want people to be able to tell when, where, and how often you’re communicating with your bank, your dating app, or your proctologist, even if they can’t see the full details of what’s being shared?

And this isn’t just an individual problem: metadata privacy is a nightmare for businesses, who are often legally required not to expose their customers’ personally identifying information. This problem has become acutely apparent during the pandemic, with many companies realizing there is no easy way to let employees work remotely while maintaining corporate privacy standards.

Unfortunately, metadata is extremely difficult to shield. The internet just wasn’t built with this in mind. Computers happily broadcast their location and requests about where to route data for anyone to see. So the current approach is to rather not bother and hope it’s not a problem. But that’s obviously not good enough. We need a whole new approach.

How does HOPR work?

You can head to our GitHub now to check out our code or head to our documentation portal to learn how to set up a test node), but here’s a basic overview of how HOPR will work.

HOPR has two layers:

the message layer and the payment layer.

The message layer is what ensures that data gets from A to B quickly, securely and privately. The payment layer is used to make sure the people who run the message layer are properly rewarded for their efforts.

And it’s crucial to understand that “message” here doesn’t just mean chat. Messaging in this context means literally any kind of data, from your dating app matches to your ride-hailing destination to your sensitive financial data and medical records. The metadata for all of these services are currently exposed and available to everyone from Google to your internet service provider.

Alejandro sends data to Zoë. It hops via Betty and Chāo. But no-one in the chain can see the data or the whole journey it takes.

When you send data via HOPR, it’s sent to its destination via a number of intermediate “hops”. At each hop, the data is mixed with other data being sent through the network in what’s known as a mixnet, so anyone observing from the outside can’t tell what is being sent or who the senders and recipients are. We use the Sphinx packet format to ensure that every piece of data sent via HOPR is indistinguishable from every other, even down to being the exact same size.

Users have full control of the route their data takes. It might seem strange to send your data via so many unknown parties, but as long as they aren’t all secretly colluding, the entire series of hops is provably secure and private. Unlike the standard centralized approaches we’re used to, with a mixnet there’s enormous strength in numbers. And like all the best decentralized systems, people are compelled to work together in spite of human self-interest: there’s no advantage to be gained by doing anything other than following the rules.

That incentivization part is key: the people who support these hops by mixing and relaying data to the next stage of its journey are directly rewarded for their services in HOPR tokens. This is handled by the payment layer, without placing any restrictions on who can join, and it’s this fact that makes HOPR the first of its kind: it was previously thought it was impossible to add incentives to a free and open mixnet like HOPR’s message layer without compromising the metadata privacy the mixnet establishes. HOPR’s proof-of-relay mechanism proves it can be done.

There’s a lot more to learn about how these individual parts of HOPR are implemented, but hopefully this overview has given you a good sense of the basics.

Of course, the best way to learn about HOPR is to try it for yourself. We’re still building many of HOPR’s components, but you can already try out the basics. Our documentation portal explains how to set up a node and communicate with other users via hops, and we’ll be running a small incentivized testnet in July. Visit our Telegram and Twitter for more announcements about when that will start, and join the movement to bring privacy to the internet of today and tomorrow.

But what is HOPR actually for?

Talking about messaging infrastructure is very abstract, and it can be hard to immediately see why this is so different and vital. Yes, HOPR lets people privately send familiar kinds of messages (think email, WhatsApp) and financial transactions (think PayPal, Bitcoin). That’s already a huge deal: we all deserve to be able to communicate and transact privately, and a decentralized model which treats these as a public good is much better for all existing internet users, as well as opening up the web to the hundreds of millions of people around the world who are locked out of our current system, which only cares about monetizing personal data.

But instead of just thinking about personal scale interactions, or even the platforms which support those personal scale interactions, it’s important to dream bigger: literally every industry needs a way to securely and safely transmit data, and daily reports of hacks and data breaches show how bad we are at achieving this with current methods. In 2018 in the US alone, there were over 1,000 recorded data breaches exposing more than 400 million personal records.

Don’t we already have that? Why do we need HOPR?

You may be thinking: “That certainly sounds useful, but don’t we already have all of that? Isn’t the problem just companies being greedy or lazy? Can’t we just make them change? Do we really need a whole new kind of internet?”

Yes, we do.

The economics of Web 2.0 only benefit the big platforms. Innovation is being stifled in favour of a data-centric model based on dubious ethics. And even the big platforms are increasingly finding the monster they created to be more trouble than it’s worth! When was the last time Mark Zuckerberg looked happy?

Increasingly strict privacy legislation is (rightly) increasing responsibility and liability around handling user data, particularly in medical and financial services, but there’s just no practical way to meet these responsibilities in the Web 2.0 model. It’s baked into the platform design to maximize data gathering and dump it all in centralized databases. We all need to work together to be smarter and more accountable. And that starts at the very foundations of the technology stack, with data exchange.

So it’s just the current internet, but more private?

Not by a long shot! Yes, HOPR lets companies provide familiar services from our modern digital lives with perfect privacy, but there’s also all kinds of possibilities on the horizon which can’t get off the ground without technology like HOPR.

For example, over the past decade, people in industry have become rightfully excited about the Internet of Things (IoT). All kinds of devices — medical equipment, watches, appliances, lights, sensors, even clothes — all generating, transmitting and receiving data to help improve our lives. These are generally low-powered devices that need to transmit their data somewhere else, perhaps for resource-intensive analysis or to initiate a purchase, then receive the results back to implement them. This is a privacy minefield, almost exclusively based around sensitive medical or financial metadata.

But the issue is also economic. These devices will all be generating hundreds of data events a minute, transmitting them across different political and legal jurisdictions, supported and accounted for by paying tiny microtransactions each time. It’s a beguiling dream, and one which industry has invested trillions of dollars in preparation for. But it simply isn’t possible in a centralized system. Any bottleneck or increased costs multiplied across all those tiny transactions and suddenly the whole endeavour is too expensive to get off the ground. A lot of industry effort has been focused on the end products, but little progress has been made on the decentralized infrastructure needed to make them viable.

Why is HOPR unique?

HOPR employs tried and tested techniques, such as an onion encryption mixnet and a modified version of the Sphinx packet format, to ensure that all data sent via HOPR is completely indistinguishable for anyone looking from the outside, and that it’s impossible to link senders with recipients. This is great, but it’s not exactly new. Versions of these technologies have been in use for many years.

What makes HOPR special is that people are rewarded for helping to relay data: when your node acts as a “hop” on the route data takes through the network, you’re rewarded via the HOPR token.

This is important, because until now it was assumed that you can’t have incentives and full privacy at the same time: privacy requires anonymity, but with anonymity comes a lot of opportunity to try and cheat the system. HOPR’s payment layer solves this problem with what we call proof of relay.

Alejandro sends encrypted payment to Betty along with her data for Zoë. Once Betty sends the data to Chāo, she receives the key to unlock her payment. When Betty relays Alejandro’s data, she sends an encrypted payment to Chāo. Once Alejandro’s data reaches Zoë, Zoë sends Chāo the key to unlock his payment.

Every hop can generate a payment. Crucially, though, relayers only receive half the information they need to try and claim a reward when they receive data. They get the other half when they’ve sent the data to the next hop on its journey. The two halves of each payment key are useless on their own. There are no loopholes: the only way to get rewarded is to properly forward data to the next hop. This means no-one can claim a reward without fulfilling their relay responsibility, and failures elsewhere in the network don’t impact on your own reward. There’s literally nothing to be gained from trying to cheat the system. The self-interested way to behave is to cooperate.

Who is HOPR for?

HOPR is for you, for me, for everyone. We all deserve a free, open and private internet, where data is owned by the people who create it.

Whether it’s wearable medical devices transmitting crucial patient records, dating apps connecting two people for the first time, sensitive financial data pinging around the globe or just your fridge at home ordering more milk because you ran out, whenever a person or device exchanges data, metadata privacy adds essential value.

More specifically, different people are going to be interested in different parts of HOPR. But we want to hear from all of you!

HOPR for Techies

If you’re already building something in the Web3 space, it may be that HOPR can provide an important piece of your puzzle. We’d love to hear from you.

HOPR for Entrepreneurs

If you have a product or service that involves frequently transmitting customer data, then HOPR may be the most effective way to meet your privacy responsibilities and minimize liability. Get in touch and we can explain more about how HOPR can help your business.

HOPR for Miners and Stakers

If you’re into earning tokens, why not become a relayer? Running a HOPR mix node isn’t like mining Bitcoin or Ethereum. It’s not as computationally intensive, and doesn’t require special hardware. Our mainnet isn’t due to launch for several months, but we’re going to be running several incentivized testnets to stress-test our system, hunt for bugs and generally gather feedback. We’d love your help and you can earn bounties for doing so.

HOPR for Privacy Lovers

If you’re just generally interested in privacy, distributed technology, decentralized values and governance and the whole Web3 scene, we’re going to be sharing a lot of content about our quest to run HOPR via what we’re calling decentralized, community-enabled governance (DecenGov), a more practical version of the DAO.

HOPR for Cryptographers

If you’ve got serious cryptographic chops, then we’d love to hear from you: test our our code, try and hack our protocols, earn development bounties and maybe even apply for a permanent job.

Whatever your interest, we’d love for you to join our movement to build the world’s first open and incentivized platform providing network-level privacy. Keep following this blog, visit our website, follow our Twitter, join our Telegram group. Together, we can lay the foundations for the free and private internet of today and tomorrow.

Dr Sebastian Bürgel, HOPR Founder

Website: https://www.hoprnet.org

Telegram: https://t.me/hoprnet

Twitter: https://twitter.com/hoprnet

Github: https://github.com/hoprnet