Alles begann mit der Vision eines sicheren und einfachen Blockchain-Zugangs für vielfältige Unternehmensanwendungen. Heute zählt die Hydraledger Open-Source-Community über ca. 15.000 Follower weltweit und die von der Community entwickelte Technologie ist bereits im Einsatz und setzt weitere Meilensteine für das Identitätsmanagement der Zukunft.

Die Hydraledger Technologie bietet ein Self-Sovereign-Identity-Framework, das auf W3C-Standards basiert, um SSI-Lösungen bereitzustellen, Schemata, dezentrale IDs (DIDs), Schlüssel, Rechte und Zeitstempel zum Nachweis auf einem Ledger zur öffentlichen Verifizierung zu speichern und verifizierbare Ansprüche (VCs) off-ledger zu halten.

Die Produktlösung der IOP Global dient zur Steuerung digitaler Identifizierungsprozesse von Unternehmen, Personen und Maschine – und dazu, sich mit maximaler Sicherheit und Transparenz in der digitalen Welt auszuweisen, Identitäten nachzuweisen, diese zu verifizieren und zu kontrollieren –­ eben Self-Sovereign-Identity (SSI). Nutzer von DIDs bestimmen damit selbst, dass nur die persönlichen Attribute bei einem Authentifzierungsvorgang übermittelt werden, die zwingend notwendig sind. Damit ermöglicht die Cloud-Lösung die Rückeroberung der Datensouveränität für Entitäten  und schafft somit vertrauensvolle und sichere Interaktionen in digitalen Prozessen.

Die Nutzer brauchen kein tiefes technisches Verständnis, um mit der IOP Console nicht nur eigene digitale Identitäten, sogenannte DIDs (Decentralized Identifiers), zu erstellen und von anderen Stellen beglaubigen zu lassen. Auch dient die IOP Console dazu, ganze Identifizierungsprozesse zu automatisieren, zu steuern und zu überwachen. Abgelegt in einer Art elektronischen Brieftasche (ID-Wallet) lassen sich DIDs und Credentials dann wie Ausweise oder Zertifikate in der analogen Welt nutzen, um verifizierbare Daten sicher von einem zum anderen zu übertragen.

Host: JUN, CBO

Guest: Markus Maiwald

At 3th June, 15:00 (UTC+8), XT.COM did another live streaming !

JUN: Hi, everyone! Welcome to the XT AMA Channel. I’m Jun, CBO atXT.com. I am hosting today’s AMA with $HYD Hydraledger.io. Let me give a brief introduction to XT first.

XT.com is the world’s first real-time social trading platform with 0% leverage interest. The XT ecosystem has over 6 million global users with a daily transaction volume of close to $5 billion. The platform has real-time indicators and tools that bring the best trading atmosphere for all users. XT exchange’s innovative social model empowers the blockchain industry through newly developed social trading avenues, which were once not possible. XT has achieved this through a combined effort with our partners, like Btok.

Today, our guest is Markus Maiwald Let’s talk to him to learn about Hydraledger.io and the token $HYD.

JUN: Hello Markus, thank you for joining us for the XT and $HYD Hydraledger.io AMA!

Markus: Hi Jun, nice meeting you and thank you for having me here.

JUN: Can you give our audience a brief introduction to the Hydra Ledger?

Markus:: Sure, in one sentence:

Hydraledger is an SSI Framework-enabled DPoS Blockchain with the Hydra ($HYD) utility token.

In more detail:

If you look into our explorer and its transaction types (explorer.hydraledger.io), you will find that we have all the goodies of a second generation blockchain:
like timelock based transactions, atomic based smartbridges, you can create public or private sidechains, we have multi signatures, voting transactions, etc.

As a DPoS ledger, we have delegates that run the Proof of Stake network. If you want to stake, you choose the delegate you trust most, or who is most profitable to you (https://www.hydracalculator.online/) and then vote for him. He will in return share parts of their revenue stream with you. Cold staking is this feature called. To vote a delegate and receive staking returns you need to buy Hydra on an exchange like XT for example (https://www.xt.com/tradePro/hyd_usdt) and send some Hydras to the Hydraledger wallet (wallet.hydraledger.io). Those who want to offer a service to the community and want to earn block rewards directly can of course become a delegate in the hydra ledger network and build a delegate, you just need to get enough Hydras and/or Votes to get into the top 53 block forgers (https://hydraledger.io/get-involved/). Currently, a delegate can earn up to 396000 HYD per year, from which he pays his voters/stakers. In Hydra you have a higher APR than in many other cryptos, and you mostly profit from the compounding effect of the interest which goes into your cold wallet.

But this is not all of it:

The main reason why we created the Hydra token is that we developed on top of the Hydra Ledger a Layer-2 blockchain agnostic protocol, that enables us to own SSI Wallets and create, send and verify DID transactions and to store VCs.

JUN: Please, enlighten us, what does SSI, DID and VC stand for?

Markus: To most people these are new terms and the concept can get quite complicated, but I will break it down and make it as simple as possible. DID means simply decentralized identity or decentralized identifier and you need these to enable in crypto the concept of Self-Sovereign Identities which is what SSI stands for. VCs are simply verifiable claims or Verifiable Credentials you store in your SSI Wallet.

JUN: Okey…, let’s get into this a bit later. First, let me ask you a bit about the project and the team.

Markus: Sure thing.

JUN: We hear that the Hydraledger team is highly experienced, can we get some examples?

Markus: For example just 3 developers in our team have a combined knowledge of 25 years in blockchain technology, which is massive. Our developers are all at above Master level and experienced in teaching programming and crypto (Attila) and thus it is easy for us to integrate even very young but extremely talented developers like David and push them to the max from brilliant stack developers like Sandor. We are not only building a blockchain or just copying tech — we invent stuff that you never heard about before but eventually might use at some point. We recently published some NodeJS libraries and a keyvault written from Attila in Rust published to the open source community. We are also working currently on a p2p decentralized DID communication protocol which will allow censorship resistance transactions. Istvan, the developer, worked in a research lab before at a Nokia company.

JUN: I have checked your project has got an impressive reputation among top crypto developers. How did you achieve this?

Markus: Well, I am constantly trying to find people that are smarter than me. I bought my first Bitcoin in 2011 and I have been involved in the blockchain industry since 2014. Mixing this with integrity makes the good people want to work with you or join the community. And with their help you can develop and invent new stuff and create things that inspire others.

JUN: Can you give our community a brief introduction behind the inspiration to build $HYD Hydraledger.io?

Markus: Maybe some of us remember the good old days in crypto, before the money craziness and all the institutions came in? At that time, we founded the IOP project out of idealistic reasons, which then created the Hydra Ledger.

“The Internet of People’’ as a community behind the Hydra Ledger is a very unique crypto project trying to steer technological progress for the greater good with the people in mind, maximizing freedom, raising poverty, protecting their data and enhancing security from corporations and states. IOP is putting the focus away from IoT back to the people — we, the people, are the center and in all future robots and agents must serve to enhance our living, but not to control and keep us in check.

For this we create decentralized digital identities as opposed to central issued identities that could be erased from bad corporations or rogue state actors anytime and erase whole lives. We secure with the help of cryptography tied to timestamped proofs on a blockchain, that nobody can be de-platformed, his wallets frozen or his identity eliminated. We foster decentralization over everything else, even profit.

JUN: You did mention before DIDs and VCs. In NFT, we are talking about non-fungibility and they have do have a unique ID — so how are they related to NFT’s, or where exactly is the difference?

Markus: Glad you asked, although it is a tough one. Hmmm… Let me try and break it down as simply as possible. NFTs and VCs are technically quite different, but mostly and especially from a conceptual standpoint they often get confused, so I have to think about how to make the difference clear. I start with explaining what NFTs are:

NFT stands for non-fungible tokens. That means, they are unique digital assets tucked on a blockchain and its ownership is tracked on this blockchain. They are useful for digital art, in-game items and upcoming social tokens. They are also usable for certain access and digital rights ownership, like tokenized real estate or music songs copyrights. The identifiable right to something tracked on the blockchain is its predominant use and here NFT might on the first glance overlap with the concept of VCs.

VC stands for Verifiable Credentials. Technically, they only share two traits with NFTs: They are based on cryptography and they use digital signatures. They are based on a DID, the signature, which is a decentralized identifier that is tied to the entity which actually shares or issues the credential and second, obviously the cryptography verifying to whom that specific DID really belongs to.

I don’t want to go too much into detail here, but if you look into NFTs, then you will find that they are in the end not so non-fungible as one might think. Remember, I said that they are good for ownership tracking on a specific blockchain. VCs are not necessarily tied to a specific blockchain. They can be used in any kind of ledger or old fashioned databases and allow a much broader use case. On top of that, VCs allow not only the tracking of ownership, but also the complete management of ownership — like granting access to a facility for only a period of time. Supply chain management is another topic for which I would use DIDs in favor of NFTs (thus most supply chain management projects based on blockchain and NFTs have failed so far). This is where NFTs fall short and don’t deliver. And here lies the strength of a decentralized identifier based SSI framework.

JUN: In the Crypto industry, what do you think of the current state? What do you think that needs to be improved?

Markus: At this moment we have a gigantic influx of new ideas and people, money and institutions, and they all jump on the hype trains like DeFi protocols and NFT. What most forget is the reason why we invented Blockchain and cryptography in the first place — to make the people more free and change the power structure of the ownership of my data.

But these theoretical concepts are almost nowhere present anymore, despite some privacy focussed projects that are at the moment just a niche.

So it doesn’t surprise me that most new people in the crypto space have no idea about groundbreaking new possibilities with cryptography that goes beyond blockchain and how this could change our societies and governance. In fact, if people don’t know about how technology could make us eventually free, then this particular space will not get enough funding. And this is what you see today: Almost nobody understands VCs projects like us are desperately trying to get funded while advancing rapidly along, and everybody runs after the billions of dollars in the overhyped segments that now all seem to get overfunded to create technology, that already before it hits mainstream I would consider to be inferior to what some projects are building to really change society and make this a more decentralized and better world.

JUN: What makes your project different from other SSI solutions?

Markus: First, I think our SSI stack is very robust, and we are conceptually very well designed. The reason is, because other projects may now want to adopt DIDs too, but they need to patch this into their stack somehow and make it work, while we from day one build the core SSI stack as a blockchain agnostic solution with its own protocol and SDK.

Second, we are more idealistic and have our principles. Our goal is to become the de facto standard project (and a free in the sense of open source) building a private DID and SSI technology framework which is censorship resistant and without gatekeepers controlling transactions. That means, you can’t stop people from prospering in our ecosystem.

Just as one example: There are now other DID concepts popping up on various platforms. As I said earlier, we are not tied to one specific platform.

Basically, there are just 3 different blockchain platforms: 
1. Permissionless (for example Bitcoin, or Hydra)
2. Permissioned (in any kind of form, through its gatekeepers like in Sovrin for example, or through a blockchain where the block validators are subject to rules of a jurisdiction)
3. Private

We fall under type 1. 
By design the Hydra Ledger gatekeepers cannot hinder you from submitting a DID to the blockchain. The block validators cannot censor a claim or reject a transaction. To my best knowledge we are the only 100% permissionless und not censorable SSI Stack and VC project. Let’s take Algorand for example: In Algorand you can choose upon token creation whether the creator should be able to block any accounts. This flag cannot be changed after the creation of the token, and they put it in for regulatory purposes. This doesn’t sound to me like a free and open decentralized world — it sounds more like the wet dream of every power grabbing politician and regulatory and governance body. So every DID solution out there, that you find, please look if the underlying platform is 100% permissionless. Everything else might be good for the government and public bodies, but not for us and the private sector. We oppose that. That is, next to technology, the second main difference between them and us. We think that trade, communication, property (the expression of any form of ownership like royalties, copyrights, etc) and especially your data (your claims, your VCs, your DIDs) belong to the people itself. Those who create and own the data, must control it, and not anybody else.

JUN: What will DIDs be used for?

Markus: Today in cryptography there are three hot topics: the payment part, the DeFi part and ownership (NFT). But as explained earlier, NFTs fall short in managing and moving data especially during changing circumstances. They are also not as borderless as one might think. They are stuck on one platform.

The technology for decentralized identities is the missing link in crypto between crypto payments, decentralized finance and NFT.

SSI is enabling the management of ownership with transparency and privacy features alike. You can make them public, or private, turn them on or off. Move them in and out. All these factors combined could help people create their own communities and DAOs that are completely economically independent from any central banking system and state issued documents.

In my vision I see the DAOs having a public interface to the bridge to institutions and state issued money and IDs, and then a private platform on which every person is governing its own different identities, that can freely interact with each other without any possible interference or censorship. If that sounds like science fiction, then I have a very simple example for you: Just imagine that everything that today has an ID — from a barcode to a passport number — will in the future have a DID.

DIDs will revolutionize the future of the global worldwide economy by enabling a more effective and sustainable production on demand. It will change how we develop and implement IoT, make supply chains more efficient, the way how we trade, create and deliver goods and offer services all around the globe to businesses or even to independent communities and free markets.

Combining DID and the other crypto inventions will make us freer and give us more possibilities to thrive than ever in the history of human mankind.

Whether crypto enters a long bear market or not, it doesn’t matter. Because, the future of crypto needs our DID technology. And we will develop this no matter what. Other projects will fork us, copy us, or they must develop their own — but they will not get around DIDs.

JUN: How does the $HYD Hydraledger.io team plan to tackle these issues to reach mass adoption?

Markus: First, we now have some partners that understand the advantages of VC and that are committed to use our SSI stack already and in the future.

Second, by going public, getting listed on bigger exchanges like XT and offering the same or even better blockchain solutions than other projects, the people will get aware of our main product — the SSI stack with DIDs and VCs and by this will get educated about cryptography solutions that don’t necessarily inherit all the shortcomings of the current blockchain models.

Third, we are going to prove that by bringing DIDs to other Blockchains.

JUN: When is your SSI Stack production ready and who are your Partners?

Markus: The SSI Stack is production ready, in fact, a Germany based Company is already using it, look on www.iop-global.com. They offer an API to integrate with the Hydra main chain where a DID costs just a fraction of cents, instead of Dollars. They have built a red carpet API service for customers to create VC and DIDs without the need to buy HYD crypto on an exchange, but just by paying with a credit card.

Then there might be Alloy https://alloy.co partnering up, a company who will do KYC for Vendible.org (our partner and gateway payment service) and those DIDs will be accepted by US Banks as valid.

Then there is also the free University of Nayarit, in Mexico, which is committed to implement our technology for future verification of courses and diplomas. I think this is awesome and a perfect example of an institution that could directly make use of our technology right now. Please do not forget that we are NOT for profit, we are an open source project and not here to create ID Governmental accepted Frameworks. Of course we favor those. We are permissionless and stay so. Rather our partners, and companies like Vendible, Alloy, IOP Global will build a Layer-3 on top of our stack (probably like somebody is doing so with Sovrin and Algorand) which connects to legal ID Frameworks. Here I would aim for eIDAS for example, to be EU compliant. But this is up to the industry. If there is a partner who wants to do this, we would under certain conditions of course team up and help with providing open source connectors and bridges etc.

But again, we want to make people freer and change who has the power over our data and how things work, especially in the ID realm.

We aim with our Stack to create a PRIVATE Identity Framework, a Web of Trust, that free Universities (like our Partner University of Nayarit for example), companies (credentials and access level management) and private industries (supply chain management for example) love and accept.

If a clever corporation from the private sector wants to build a Layer-3 connection to the public sector, like the EU’s eIDAS and others, they are welcome to do so.

JUN: What is your timeline, and what can we look forward to from $HYD Hydraledger.io?

Markus: Well, the next big step is our Smartbridge that brings VCs to other blockchains, like Ethereum. As I said, we are a Layer-2 solution and our DIDs can run basically on any blockchain.

JUN: You mean HYD will be available on Uniswap and other DeFi markets?

Markus: Exactly. We hope by this move to finally bring DID/VC awareness to the masses. You asked about the timeline. Our Smartbridge is already in testing operation. We are very excited about the fact that we can in just a couple of weeks bring DIDs to Ethereum. We will use all the possibilities that DeFi gives us to offer the people not only wrapped HYD on Uniswap but they can create and invest into Liquidity Pools and stake. And move freely wHYD from Ethereum to HYD on Hydra Ledger. For the first implementation on Uniswap we are planning to give 75 Mio Hydra tokens into the DeFi Uniswap system. Unlike many other projects we are not burning the tokens we own, but we will in total give most of them back to the community, in total 150 Mio tokens for those creating LPs or staking in the DeFi space to bootstrap the DID ecosystem.

JUN: Is there anything else that you like to share with us?

Markus: Yes.

1. The future will not be centralized.
2. Because we are working on that.

You find much more details about our project on our website www.hydraledger.io and if you want a nice overview then look into our Hydra overview doc here http://bit.ly/hydraledger_details

Ahh… and one more thing: it would be cool to see Hydra being able to stake on XT exchange 🙂

JUN: Thank you, Markus Maiwald, for taking the time to do this AMA with us today. It has been great to learn from you more about $HYD Hydraledger.io and the philosophy behind it.

Source: https://medium.com/@XT_com/xt-com-ama-q-a-with-hyd-hydraledger-io-ccee3d912ff2