About

HOPR is a company that is building a decentralized, incentivized mixnet to provide transport layer privacy for decentralized digital services, finance, and data transfer. Their solution obscures all metadata, including IP addresses, making it impossible to identify users or the data they are sending. HOPR's services have applications in fields such as medtech, crypto, and decentralized energy markets. They also offer a staking program that rewards users for participating in testing and events. HOPR is a member of the Leading Privacy Alliance.

History

While working as technical solution providers in the blockchain ecosystem since 2016, the HOPR founding team encountered the lack of a go-to solution for metadata private point-to-point data exchange solutions. The HOPR team aims to create a point-to-point messaging protocol that enables greater functionality than existing broadcasting solutions such as Ethereum's Whisper network.

Thus the HOPR team decided in 2018 to develop an incentivized mixnet infrastructure to improve on the privacy and economic incentives of existing of VPNs and privacy communication protocols like Tor. The first public demo of the network layer was presented at EthCC in early 2019 and subsequently followed with HOPR joining the Binance Fellowship program. Additionally, HOPR was initially funded using grants received from the Gitcoins second CLR round. In early 2020, HOPR was established as a Swiss-based association and closed a funding round led by Binance Labs.