HOPR, a Swiss-based Web3 data privacy-protecting protocol, and Binance, a leading blockchain infrastructure and cryptocurrency exchange provider, today announced that Binance Labs is leading the strategic $1 million investment round for HOPR ahead of the company’s token sale.
This is Binance Labs’ first investment of the year, who leads the investment round which includes Focus Labs, Spark Digital Capital, Caballeros Capital, and Synaitken. HOPR provides tools and frameworks for the Web3 ecosystem, a decentralized internet, ensuring everyone has control of their privacy, data, and identity as they navigate online.
“As Web 2.0 showed that companies and corporations are in control of a user’s information and data, the team at HOPR has shown us how their decentralized network achieves privacy guarantees on the metadata level and gives power back to the people,” said Gin Chao, Binance Strategy Officer. “We’re very excited to lead this investment round in HOPR, and support a talented and experienced team of developers, cryptographers, and scientists, led by Dr. Sebastian Bürgel, one of the leading decentralized application architects.”
The date of the HOPR token sale will be announced at a later date. The strategic seed investment round will allow the team to further recruit top team members while continuing to develop their new technology. The HOPR protocol provides network-level and metadata privacy for every kind of data exchange, while introducing the first-ever open incentivized mixnet, where anyone can earn tokens for running nodes. A mixnet protects vulnerable metadata by routing via multiple intermediate relays hops that mix traffic. HOPR’s incentivized mixnets is possible with the advent of blockchains with on-chain capabilities to run advanced layer-2 scaling solutions.
“The movement to decentralize finance, data and the web needs a new privacy foundation. With HOPR we’re building a layer-0 privacy infrastructure for Web3 that makes it safe and secure to transmit information,” said Dr. Sebastian Bürgel, Co-Founder of HOPR. “We’re honored to have such a tremendous group of investors, led by Binance Labs, who has been at the forefront of empowering and spreading decentralized technologies that challenge even the biggest global incumbents.”
The HOPR privacy network relies on a globally distributed network of mix nodes. To support and rapidly grow the community running this network, HOPR will release a plug-and-earn mix node on a mini PC. Open incentivization allows anyone to run a HOPR node, stake and get rewarded with HOPR tokens while providing privacy for Web3. To be added to the “Defenders of Privacy” node runners waitlist, find out more here: https://www.hoprnet.org/node
