Today, we are excited to share that Hashed has led the $2.5M pre-seed investment in Notifi.Network.

Notifi is a user engagement platform that provides a universal communication layer for all web3 projects to engage with their users on digital and on-chain channels — from the most straightforward text messages to the urgent wallet to wallet communications.

Web3 communication infrastructure does not really exist today. Third-party applications like Discord and Twitter are not enough. With almost $200 billion total valued locked on Defi and $6+ billion transacted on NFTs, it’s outlandish that there are no real communication layers to support these ecosystems.

Crypto enthusiasts and powers users are left with constant nervousness and are pressured to check back on their LTV positions on defi protocols, governance proposals, and other on-chain activities. With the explosion of a new generation of blockchain projects and the eventual mass adoption by the public in the banking (Defi & Payments), NFTs, and the gaming industry, the users will need a new web3 ready notification experience to track and manage all their blockchain activity.

As the web3 user engagement layer, Notifi helps bridge projects in via channels like voice, text, chat, and email through Notifi APIs. Their aim is to provide meaningful interactions with end-users on the preferred channels and continue to build and foster engagement with the web3 applications they love.

The communication layer will revolutionize the web3 UX to another level.

1. Wallet to Wallet Messaging: Can we chat with other participants in protocols directly via on-chain reputation or transaction history, rather than figuring out their anon Twitter accounts to DM for attention?
2. DAO Engagement: Can we notify members on urgent discussion agenda via push, rather than chasing everyone on Discord to vote?
3. UX Gamification: Crypto enables an explicit incentive system to be integrated with consumer services and games. Can we bring out the actual utility of these tokens with gamification for better user experience, retention, and loyalty?
4. Actionable Alerts: Can we have peace of mind with our DeFi protocols via set Alerts for urgent attention? Or even automated action triggers like AWS Lambda functions for pre-set actions to remediate any financial damage?
5. Multichain Collaborations: Multichain future is currently mainly focused on cross-chain asset movements. Can we truly realize the integration of UX flow among applications that sit on different blockchains?

Opportunities are limitless and Notifi fuels the imagination of truly web3 native UX experiments.

I first met Paul, the founder of Notifi, as a personal mentor at Amazon Web Services in 2016 while working as a software engineer in the Internet of Things division. Paul is a well-respected product leader who has an incredible track record of shipping high-impact, international products. In a short period, Paul has navigated the web3 space and spearheaded the most important gap in the industry, put together the top tier team, and already begun onboarding partners to Notifi.

Before founding Notifi, CEO Paul held senior product roles at Circle, Amazon Web Services, Oracle, and Grab. CTO Nimesh Amin comes from search and cloud infrastructure at Oracle Cloud, where he was colleagues with Paul. Nimesh served as architect for the streaming, messaging, Email, and Inter-Service Connectors. Nimesh also served as a Principal Engineer at Microsoft.

Paul and Nimesh’s background in building practical and high-impact solutions makes them the strongest candidate to redefine the web3 User Experience.

Our Investment in Notifi — Twillio for Web3 was originally published in Hashed Team Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Empowering mass adoption of the decentralized future through ecosystem building and incubating the next generation of founders

We have structured Hashed as a platform to be the earliest and most hands-on partner to build together. The mission is realized by our portfolio founders with whom we were fortunate to grow together the past years.

When we say global, we don’t want to be the East and West cross-border fund. We go where our founders are.

Cultivating founders locally but scaling impact globally

Since 2017, we would walk over to Terra’s Seoul office every week to build out early iterations of the protocol. When we first met Axie Infinity in 2018, we flew to Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam to work together on token models and community building. In 2019, we invited the Sandbox team to Korea to build with us in our Seoul office.

Today, we are carefully scaling our impact in key markets. In addition to our Seoul and San Francisco offices, we are expanding our Singapore office with Joseph and Edward. We built a Bangalore, India office with Tak and Arvind with the help of local Hashed portfolio founders.

We are thankful to expand our limited partner network globally via the Hashed Venture Fund II. We pride ourselves that 90%+ of our limited partners are builders. They are corporations with active practices in web3 with many being the largest public companies in their sector operating multi-billion businesses across gaming, K-pop, fintech, consumer electronics, and social media.

To aid with our vision and to continue to collaborate effectively with our portfolio founders, the Hashed team is promoting Sean Hong and Baek Kim, two earliest members of Hashed, as General Partners. Sean Hong currently serves as the CFO at Hashed, having made crucial contributions overseeing finance and legal operations as well as investor relations. Baek Kim presently leads global investments at Hashed, having spearheaded investments in Metaverse and Web3. Baek has worked closely with portfolio companies such as Terra, Axie Infinity, Set Labs, dYdX, ZKSync, and others to consolidate Hashed’s ecosystem approach in investments.

We will continuously focus on our mission with key three areas:

Metaverse

We are radically optimistic about web3’s potential to restore trust and enable new kinds of governance where players collectively make critical decisions about how the metaverse should be defined.

Today, most games and ‘metaverses’ are like visiting Disneyland Park. Players pay the entrance fee, pay for amenities inside, play, leave with nothing. As more and more human activities migrate from the real world to the virtual world, hard problems will rise. By facilitating discussions around what behaviors are permitted, how economic benefits are distributed, and how contents can be made, we tackle these problems together with founders by iterating fast and learning by building.

Open Finance

Cryptocurrency is poised to transform all aspects of our lives. This is a new stack of financial infrastructure — disrupting investing, money markets, asset management, insurance, crowdfunding, and more. We believe in open access for financial opportunities to anyone globally. By doubling down in regions with a lack of access to economic mobility, stable reserve currencies, and domestic capital markets, we are combining efforts with founders to accelerate mass adoption of decentralized money along with founders from Terra, Coin98, Krystal, Republic, Set, dydx, OnJuno, Ledn, Acala, and more. We will continue to focus on opening the building blocks of finance to the potential of creative composability that makes open-source software so powerful.

Web3 Infrastructure

Despite the current momentum, we are still at the very early stages of what is possible. We are only scratching the surface of the yet-to-be-imagined applications that entrepreneurs could envisage.

There are endless technical and practical problems in Web3 across governance, privacy, scaling, identity management, data structures, messaging, and security. We will focus on solving problems that improve end-user experiences, designing more engaging metaverse games, and making web3 services safer for mass adoption. In just a decade of existence, Web3 has gone through several waves. Asset prices may fluctuate but innovation continues to increase through each wave. With each new wave, the adoption of web3 will expand to a greater number of demographics and more visionary entrepreneurs to enter the space.

We are BUILDERS by heart and will continue to BUIDL

When we say we are a hands-on investor, we mean it. With Edward Hong’s leadership as a head of platform, we are building products and services on top of our key portfolios to grow the ecosystem together. Hashed is a platform with endless possibilities to reimagine anything that could accelerate the mass adoption of the decentralized future.

Game Studio

Earlier this year, we acquired two game studios from AAA game publishers in Asia to further our influence in entertainment, culture, and social communities on our portfolio protocols. With a team of 40+ game designers, economists, and community builders UNOPND Studio is building several Play-to-Earn games, open metaverse, and creator economies.

Crypto Custody for Asia

We partnered with the largest bank in Korea KB Bank to build KODA. It’s the institutional digital asset custody solution for Asian enterprises and conglomerates to have compliant, safe and local access to digital assets. In addition to providing custody and access to OTC, KODA will perform anti money laundering procedures such as screening deposit and withdrawal addresses. KODA offerings will also include legal, accounting, tax advice, insurance, settlement, staking, fund management and lending. We will continue to drive and guide institutional adoption of the decentralized future.

$200M for Web3 Adoption

Today marks a new chapter for Hashed. There has never been a more exciting time to work in crypto, and we are grateful to our investors for their ongoing support and to the founders who’ve entrusted us to grow together.

HASHED Venture Fund II: $200M for Web3 Adoption was originally published in Hashed Team Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today, we are proud to announce the mainnet launch of the Oasis Network as an investor and a validator.

Two years ago, we met Professor Dawn Song at the UC Berkeley startup accelerator space — we were instantly awed by the cutting-edge cryptographic research the team was bringing to the blockchain industry. Since our investment in early 2018, Oasis Network has truly evolved to be the first scalable, privacy-enabled blockchain that can support private DeFi and Data Tokenization.

Until now, blockchains have lacked privacy — a prerequisite for truly managing and consuming sensitive data with decentralized technology. The explosion of personal information shared on the internet has made privacy one of the most critical concerns about the future of technology. And yet, due to the limitation of generalized development platforms with privacy-preserving features on a blockchain, we are limited to privacy coins today but no blossom of privacy-preserving applications in development.

This has changed today.

The Oasis Network offers a promising example of a privacy-preserving blockchain, that modularizes its architecture to enable a variety of use cases. By combining blockchain and secure computing, the Oasis Network enables dozens of new privacy-preserving features that can be natively built into applications.

The future of data tokenization and decentralized finance is already being built, with industry-leading teams like Stanford Medical, Fortune 500 firms, Nebula Genomics, the CryptoSafe Alliance, and more. Oasis’s powerful abstractions, enabling better user-oriented privacy for everything we do on the blockchain will introduce numerous exciting services that don’t have to make compromises on privacy anymore.

Here are a few highlights of the launch

• The Oasis Network Mainnet had a fully decentralized launch with over 70 independent validators.
• It is the first scalable, privacy-enabled blockchain that can support private DeFi and Data Tokenization
• The Network has a rapidly growing ecosystem of DeFi partners such as Chainlink, Balancer, and Meter, with many more coming in future weeks.
• A Grants & DevAccelerator program enabling over 20+ Wallets, APIs, Block Explorers, and critical network tools.
• Global community engagement led by over 100 Ambassadors focused on growing communities in over a dozen countries including China, France, Brazil, Turkey, India, Russia, Korea, Vietnam, and more.
• The largest university program in blockchain with over 25 universities and clubs from 5 continents actively running nodes and building on the Oasis Network.

How does Oasis Network work?

The network has a unique architecture that separates consensus operations from computing into two main layers: the Consensus Layer and ParaTime Layer. This design allows the Network to support many different parallel compute environments (aka ParaTimes) that can be customized for a broad set of use cases.

One of the Oasis Network’s core features is its support for confidential computing — a process where data is kept encrypted and private even while being processed by a node on the network. This feature is available today in Oasis Labs’ ParaTime. Applications built with the ParaTime can leverage confidential computing to protect data, while also getting the benefits of immutability and traceability of a blockchain.

To more easily leverage these unique features, Oasis Labs has also built a TypeScript SDK called Parcel that allows developers to automatically implement data ownership and access policies, consume data in a privacy-preserving environment, and unlock data that was previously too regulated or risky to use.

DeFi is booming, Oasis Network will further unlock its true potential

Oasis Network has the power to not only better secure user data, but also revolutionize the DeFi space. DeFi today is limited by high fees, speculative traders, and a lack of a reputation system or identity. Using both confidential compute as well as a lightweight, scalable design, the Oasis Network can enable lower fees, prevent front-running, and allow for the creation of identities with user-controlled data.

More importantly, by providing a privacy-preserving environment, Oasis Network unlocks opportunities for under-collateralized loans and private automated market makers. Allowing individuals to upload sensitive financial information without the worry of sharing it to public blockchain or centralized credit providers. This will bring more capital efficiency and customization to financial product offerings.

With Oasis Network’s unique ParaTime architecture, a broad range of financial services can be powered by blockchain for the first time.

Shifting the power of data back to an individual

The Oasis Network’s combination of confidential computing and blockchain enables a new paradigm called Tokenized Data. It is the combination of encrypted data capsules whose access can be controlled and enforced by a blockchain like the Oasis Network. This powerful duo of data capsule + policies means data can be shared and exchanged freely and openly without concern that it could be misused or mishandled.

With Tokenized Data, The Oasis Network will open up a safe protocol economy for everyone to earn from their data. It can support a new breed of privacy-preserving applications that respect a user’s data preferences by design and ensure each individual is fairly compensated for their data. They can earn rewards by staking their data with apps that want to analyze it or control how their most sensitive information is consumed by the services they use.

We are incredibly excited and honored to continue to work with the Oasis Foundation, pushing boundaries of adoption globally by lowering the barrier of entry for truly privacy-preserving web3 infrastructure.

You can learn more about the launch: here

How to stake and delegate: here

Oasis validators: here

Token Economics: here

Oasis Blockchain Explorer: here

Our Investment in Oasis Network — Privacy-preserving blockchain for the new data economy was originally published in Hashed Team Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today, we are proud to announce the mainnet launch of the SKALE Network as an investor and a validator.

Since our investment in early 2019, SKALE has truly evolved to be the “decentralized AWS.” It is a highly configurable fully decentralized network with enterprise-grade technical support, creating seamless workflows for end-users and devs.

Our search for the “dAWS” began in Asia. Several of our portfolios on Ethereum were building up traction in onboarding consumers and started to seek a reliable infrastructure partner to launch new services and grow together. Several early comers in blockchain have claimed to be the decentralized and cheaper alternatives of AWS (ex. “We can be 30% cheaper than using S3 for 30 days”). However, what they have missed is that none of the serious AWS customers actually came to AWS because it was the cheapest solution out there.

Rather, the focus is on the business. It is about building on top of the infrastructure that will continue to evolve and provide the support that their business can stay agile and responsive to the market changes. It is this “trust” that the solution provider will continue to thrive and provide needed support and new features as the customer’s company grows. The worst thing to happen for them is not being able to ship a new service before their competitor because their infrastructure doesn’t allow them for a quick change. Not the marginally bigger cost in their infrastructure.

With innovation happening at the frontline of founders, the crypto industry is arguably the fastest moving space to provide the right infrastructure at the right time. SKALE Labs is doing this in the most professional and structured form to make their customers successful.

SKALE Innovator Program invites the fifth cohort of high-quality developers and founders to build scalable applications on top of the SKALE Network today with a total of 50+ Dapp startups.

Its resemblance to a startup accelerator model is not a coincidence. The SKALE Labs team has been actively discovering and carefully selecting startup teams globally with a strong fit. The startup teams entering the fast-changing blockchain industry today need much more support than just a white paper and Reddit pages.

Over the past years, we were fortunate to have a chance to work with all members of the SKALE team from engineering to marketing, and sales. SKALE Labs is the team that demonstrates how the “trust” mentioned earlier can be built with the trustless decentralized networks as well. They were the first team we have found in the public blockchain space that had a dedicated solution engineering team for customer success.

Jack, CEO, is a veteran technology entrepreneur with a deep background in SaaS and blockchain. He also held an executive role at Good Technology which was acquired by Motorola for ~$500M and subsequently held executive positions in Motorola. With his past experience in building cross Asia and US enterprise software business, Jack has recruited an all-star team to build a cross-border Infrastructure for adoption.

Stan, CTO, brings 19 years of experience in cryptography and enterprise infrastructure technologies. He has founded several Silicon Valley venture-backed startups. Stan was a key early member of the Java Virtual Machine team and was on the founding team of Ingrian Networks with Dan Boneh (co-creator of BLS signatures). He has experience as a researcher at Stanford University and Los Alamos National Lab, where he was named Director’s Fellow. With a Ph.D. in Physics,

Experienced team of engineers at SKALE Labs work with each batch of fewer than 10 teams to successfully complete building businesses on the SKALE Network. 50 startups are in the innovator program with 100+ startups in the pipeline today. Among those, 16 startups are ready to deploy at the mainnet launch. (DeFi and Gaming are the top choices). Additionally, SKALE Network has been consistently one of the most used technologies in the biggest Ethereum hackathons globally.

This effective approach has also proven successful with onboarding 25 top validators and 10 integration partners (wallets, oracles, stablecoins, NFT, and more) in testnet. As one of the node operators from the genesis, we were constantly impressed by clear documentation, strong execution by the SKALE Labs team, and 24/7 technical support.

We asked startups why they are building on the SKALE Network. Here is the summary.

• Full compatibility across the Ethereum ecosystem’s major infrastructures (Solidity, Truffle, Web3.js, remix, etc)
• One-click deployment of highly configurable chains with pooled security: the number of nodes, the consensus algorithm, the state transition machine, the base layer chain security, and more…
• Over 2000TPS with sub-second transactions at zero gas fees
• Run decentralized on-chain file storage in an EVM to host text, image, HTML, and other file formats.
• Money Transfer through SKALE native bridge for ETH, Dai, ERC20, and ERC721.
• Cutting-edge technology research: ex. BLS-Rollup for shrinking an ETH transaction

Along with the mainnet launch, the SKALE labs team hopes to invite broader users to participate in its network this summer. The team has partnered with Consensys Codefi Activate to put their token into work and bootstrap new user engagements through “Proof of Use.”

We are incredibly excited and honored to continue to work with the SKALE Labs team — pushing boundaries of adoption globally by lowering the barrier of entry for truly decentralized web3 infrastructure.

Read more about the launch: here

Our Investment in SKALE Labs: Enterprise-grade Scalability for Adoption was originally published in Hashed Team Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Social graph.

The core element of cryptocurrencies that is often overlooked.

Enthusiasts and the curious alike interact on Reddit, Twitter, Telegram, KakaoTalk, etc. on how excited they are on various apps, protocols, trends, etc. Cryptocurrency, being a technically complex and fairly recent trend, has stirred up tons of confusion and controversy in the past decade. This core element was also what stormed the fanatic boom of ICOs and retail investments into cryptocurrencies in late 2017. KakaoTalk was at the center of this what was then called “Kimchi Premium”

Since then, this industry has made remarkable progress beyond just cryptocurrencies into the emergence of decentralized finance and web3 games — fast-forwarding us to a world where users control their own data and digital assets. Yet, many of these breakthroughs are fairly inaccessible to mainstream audiences and even crypto-natives.

What if we allow consumers to access cryptocurrencies and web3 services directly through their own social graphs?

People have been already doing this for years. Let’s make it native in chats. No new downloads or new logins.

Enter Klip.

No 0x-like hexadecimal address. Send crypto to friends through their kakaoTalk ID. No private key. Mobile app UX with ~1 second finality. No gas fee. 100% free to use.

The smart-contract wallet launched on KakaoTalk has the potential to revolutionize how people store and transfer funds and information. Kakao is the dominant mobile platform in Korea with 96+% market share, 50M+ MAU, and loyal users of ARPU at $40+ USD. We believe this launch is an important experiment towards mass adoption in the most attractive market in the crypto industry today.

Consumers have shown a strong appetite to explore digital assets and try decentralized services through Klip during this soft launch.

Within one day of the soft launch,

over 100k users signed up.

Here are some interesting stats we found:

1. 77% completed sign-up after visiting Klip page.
2. 52.2% are age under 35. Appealing to the MZ generation.
3. 2 Minutes and 18 Seconds spent on avg by each user. (reflects how features and apps are still limited).
4. 17% of those who signed-up sent crypto (KLAY) to their friends through KakaoTalk chat.
5. 75% of the users are still holding KLAY in their wallet waiting for new features to open up.

(For the soft launch — even BTC nor ETH are supported yet with limited curation of games and Dapps.)

It is easy to underestimate how profound this change will be initially. It may appear as a small modification to a centralized service or platform but as someone who first interacted with digital contents through the limited set of internet service providers (Korean versions of Compuserve), I recognized immediately this change is a paradigm shift. It’s opening the floodgate of decentralized services to mainstream users.

Just like how the Internet was limited, slow, and confusing to most users initially, web3 is immature. As web standards matured, and new interfaces (browsers) simplified and standardized user experience — content and usage exploded on the internet. We believe Klip is signaling this very first step in web3 in an accelerated manner through the social graphs of KakaoTalk users.
(Learn how THETA.tv is leveraging Klip networks to onboard more users on their esports streaming service: blog)

Many have asked for the “killer app” in blockchain in hopes that it will enable a flood of user adoption. We believe the lack of good UX and access to dApps, not lack of killer app, is the biggest bottleneck for mass adoption of dApps and solving that will cause the next boom in adoption.

This opening of floodgate will accelerate the build-up of the composable services in a way we have not seen before, which in its whole self becoming the “killer app.”

Klaytn will be launching its App2App API in the coming months to allow for exactly this. Opening up the composable layers for users to freely access the data they create as they interact with the underlying blockchains (Klaytn and more) means that users and developers can now compose solutions from multiple services. When a user is able to choose services from different providers, the unbundling of services increases the quality and the variety of the underlying components. Creating a competitive marketplace of decentralized services. It also makes the interface (Klip) to those services critically important.

While Klaytn is making blockchain invisible, Klip is welcoming a new stream of users to experience services that we have never seen before.

Klaytn Klip Wallet: The Floodgate Is Open was originally published in Hashed Team Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are excited to announce our investment in Matter Labs to bring scalability to decentralized finance with Zero-Knowledge Proofs alongside Placeholder, Dekrypt Capital, 1kx, and Dragonfly Capital Partners. We believe the on-chain data availability and privacy scaling computation the Matter Labs team is building will be the integral piece in accelerating the growth of the decentralized finance stack.

At Hashed, we seek founders who have the ability to build breakthrough technology that enables novel ways of engaging with the underlying infrastructure and power to attract strong mindshares in the community to grow together. In the nascent stage of the decentralized finance ecosystem, Matter Labs has emerged as a leader in both.

As the first smart contract platform, Ethereum has unlocked unbounded possibilities for experiments by developers to program their imaginations in a censorship-resistant, permissionless, and trust-minimizing architecture. It is natural that the decentralized finance ecosystem has formed on the platform with the biggest aggregate economy and developer activity, acting as a unique moat against the next generation protocols. However, contrary to the proposed capability, practical use cases have been confined due to gas costs, latency, throughput, and tech support limitations. This means that today, developers building on Ethereum are shuttling traffic on local roads.

As a previous software engineer, this is something that I experience frequently first-hand. When I met Alex Gluchowski at the ETHDenver hackathon, he guided me through research and development efforts his team is taking around solving the exact problems above.

Matter Labs’ development efforts leverage ZK Rollup, which solves the “blockchain trilemma,” enabling an architecture that is secure, scalable and censorship-resistant. Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin has called his favorite Layer-2 scaling solution, and the team was later awarded a grant to continue this work by the Ethereum Foundation.

Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) has seen dramatic progress in the last couple of years. It’s a family of ingenious mathematical techniques, which, among other properties, provide proofs of computational integrity in a succinct and easily verifiable way. Being aware that the circuit-specific trusted setup remains a serious barrier for the adoption of SNARK-based scaling, Matter Labs team has been at the cutting edge of the cryptographic research and built the first product around the new Sonic SNARK construct. Sonic is a game-changer, as it is the first-ever cryptographic protocol with constant O(1) verification complexity and universal updatable trusted setup.

Since the hackathon, Alex and the team have continued to impress us with their technical execution power through multiple iterations in bridging the gap between cutting-edge academic research on Zero-Knowledge Proofs and their applications in usable products. A highly scalable payments system emphasizing security and usability is planned as their first such product. A prototype of Matter Labs’ payment platform, designed to offer decentralization with high throughput, low transaction cost, and high usability, is live on the Ethereum mainnet.

Matter Labs is not alone in this pioneering journey. The team is working with the industry-leading projects and thought leaders in decentralized finance and cryptography — already guiding many of our portfolios in utilizing Matter Labs’ approach.

We are thrilled to partner with Matter Labs on their journey in building the first highways for the decentralized finance for the benefit of all.

Our Investment in Matter Labs: Building Highways for DeFi was originally published in Hashed Team Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As the biggest validator of the Terra network, we are very excited to propose the Project Santa, a strong example of the decentralized community rallying together to defend the security of the network and ensure sufficient funding in the development of the Terra ecosystem.

Since our previous update on Terra, Do, Dan and the team have continued to execute on the original vision at an exceptional speed and quality. Terra is now a blockchain payment network backed by a $40B GMV Asian eCommerce alliance and Chai (Terra based payment app) is one of the most widely used blockchain apps with 240k+ purchasing users and is processing more than $1M USD every day (consumers buying coffee and baby wipes).

It takes an immense amount of patience, intellectual resources, and infrastructure costs from the community to support such growth. We have been consistently improving operational security working with several architects and auditors to prevent slashings and hacks for our delegators.

In June, we proposed on-chain changes to smooth and extend the Terra vesting schedule for the main investors. As Mike at Floodgate has put it, we also believe that the high liquidity can be more of a “bug” than a “feature” in the bootstrapping phase of networks. Thanks to all the supportive co-investors, the Terra team was able to implement the change in an effective manner and augment confidence and stability in the market.

Today, we propose The Project Santa to further cement Terra’s value-centric reward scheme and growth model. Terra focuses on allowing stakeholders to capture a part of the value delivered to the end-users of the network. The Project Santa will make their participation even more profitable. Project Santa is a bot that distributes donations to network stakeholders in order to subsidize block rewards. This results in an approximate 10% staking yield on the 216 million tokens currently staked. Like other block rewards, these tokens will be distributed pro-rata to the amount of Luna staked.

The Santa bot is alive starting today and will remain operational until such time that it is no longer needed by the Terra community.

Hashed is excited to continue to work together with the community of high-quality validators in re-building the money from the ground up.

Terra Santa — Motivation: https://github.com/terra-project/santa/blob/master/MOTIVATION.md August 9, 2019

Introducing Santa: Terra Validator Community Initiative was originally published in Hashed Team Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are proud to announce that Hashed has invested in Kakao’s public blockchain project Klaytn as a lead investor and an accelerator. Kakao (KRX: 035720) is the dominant mobile platform in Korea with 96+% market share, 50M+ MAU, and loyal users of ARPU at $40+ USD. We believe Klaytn is the most distinguished and meaningful experiment towards mass adoption in the most attractive market in the crypto industry today.

At Hashed Lounge meetup in Seoul during Fall of 2017, our first conversation with Jason Han about opportunities in blockchain began. It was during the initial formation of GroundX, a blockchain subsidiary of Kakao, and the timing could not have been more opportune for the most dominant mobile platform in Korea to seek its next leap forward in the blockchain industry. Korea accounted for the 30% of the global crypto trading, and several media sources claimed that about 40~50% of Korean white-collar workers had exposure to crypto assets. Moreover, supplementing the retail interest, tech startups in Korea such as Watcha (#1 movie-streaming service) and Spoqa (#1 mobile reward points service) were actively investing and exploring business opportunities in blockchain to either open up their ecosystem or augment existing business models.

Klaytn started at a critical time when there was simply no usable blockchain platform for these industry pioneers. Spoqa, for example, was processing payment data of $2 billion annual transactions but could not find a platform that could meet all of their technical requirements. Asia, seeing immediate adoption from consumers already familiar with digital assets, could not just wait on the project timelines of leading smart contract platforms in the market. Instead, Klaytn is off to a strong start with 30+ launch partners with a collective 600+ million user base in its network. (The crypto market has an estimated 30M-40M users today.)

What is interesting about Klaytn is that its impact is not only limited to accelerating the growth of the existing blockchain industry by providing user-friendly and enterprise-ready blockchain platform for businesses to build services that were previously impossible, but also bringing a whole new set of consumers and institutions to experience decentralized services.

As the blockchain industry matures, similar to how internet platforms have developed today, we believe that the blockchain platform landscape will be equally, if not more, determined by those who can provide unique contents and strongest user/dev retention on the platform. In this regard, the fact that the Kakao team has a proven track record of building and operating #1 messenger with 96+% of the market share, #1 mobile contents platform, #1 mobile game publisher with 550 million users, #1 music streaming service, #1 mobile payment with $18 billion yearly transaction volume, #1 character brand (emojis) and #1 taxi-hailing app with 97% market share in Korea attests to its tremendous potential. With genuine experience in scaling large companies, Jason Han and his team are bringing their A game to the blockchain industry, and we expect their historic efforts paying out in the near future for one of the most important initiatives made by Korean tech giants.

The team’s history alone, however, could not have been the sole indicator for its future success. With their in-depth understanding of the blockchain technology and its ability to transform the current landscape, the team openly embraces a unique philosophy in which it is daring to break down existing silos to create a new foundation for collaborative competition, and thereby increasing its global footprints. Such platforms with open network and data set allow a new generation of developers to build thousands of apps built on top of one another. This new foundation opens a possibility to design entirely new models for user interaction and self-expression based on shared data layer and identity among apps. While conflating the boundaries could create new types of UX problems, Klaytn is providing all the right tools to iterate fast on new standards and best practices. This is not just a hopeful imagination but already happening with Hashed backed teams The Sandbox, Axie Infinity, and Nodegames (Crypto Sword & Magic) building top quality games with provable scarcity and true digital ownership that Klaytn blockchain provides natively.

We at Hashed believe that economic growth and distribution through clear governance and incentive mechanism is of critical importance for such foundation to succeed. That’s why Hashed research team has been working hands-on with Klaytn team three to four times a week for 3 months on overall protocol design to implement Proof of Contribution to encourage and incentivize all participants to spontaneously engage in economic activities — building a ground for the healthy growth of co-opetition. Each participant will, of course, try to encourage users to use their particular service. But because the underlying infrastructure is open, participants and developers will be able to compete with one another while building on top of each other’s features and user behaviors. All kinds of new economic and user paradigm could emerge as services compete to help users interact with services and networks in ways that were never before possible.

Over 100 engineers, researchers, and operators at Klaytn and Kakao HQ have been collaborating and tirelessly supporting launch partners towards its main-net launch today. This is the most important and impactful experiment in the most attractive market in the crypto industry. We look forward to seeing all of the amazing ecosystems that will be built on Klaytn and the changes it will bring to the global landscape of mass adoption.

Written by Baek Kim and edited by Jin Kang at Hashed

[Hashed Community]

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Our Investment in Klaytn: The Path Towards Mass Adoption was originally published in Hashed Team Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Recap on the first year of Hashed team

Kicking off the year with all-time high prospects on crypto, 2018 was inarguably a wild ride for the whole community. For Hashed, it was a year of bootstrapping the crypto community in Asia and accelerating the growth of infrastructure and mass adoption projects. We moved fast and focused on the core values. We will continue to invest aggressively.

The opportune timing of establishing Hashed at an infant stage of the industry has allowed for tremendous growth and opportunities. All of the above, however, would not have been possible if it weren’t for the incredible team at Hashed. Because we were not afraid to challenge each other in achieving tangible results, we have not only inspired others but also ourselves. The following highlights some of our core philosophy that we have been able to cement as a result.

Peculiar team

“Are we a Startup or a Fund?” Since the beginning, we have actively debated this question to align our interest in creating the kind of future we envision for the industry. The founding team consisted of engineers, serial entrepreneurs and blockchain evangelists who share a mission of establishing Korea as a leader within the global crypto community. To achieve this end, we have focused our efforts on impact investment and community engagement for thought leadership and research-based growth.

Today, we have a better understanding of ourselves: Hashed is a network building networks.

Kickstarting a sustainable network takes a tremendous amount of energy and coordination among experts from various fields. Throughout this year, we were fortunate enough to onboard superstars from media, engineering, government, private equity, and legal practices to support our network founders. At a very early stage of networks where we typically join the journey, networks’ utility value is near zero. Here, the role of investors’ is critical to the bootstrapping process of the network. in addition to adding value like traditional investors with capital and company building expertise, we consider ourselves a crypto-native fund, which means we can participate in networks by running nodes, clarifying governance, and evangelizing.

Direct network participation is a novel privilege that wasn’t available to an investor before crypto.

Investors can now play various roles as a service provider, a validator, a governor, a liquidity provider and more — a precious opportunity to understand the network first hand and continuously discover ways to both contribute and incentive align with the project.

This thesis has held strong throughout a dynamic year in crypto. Our team has experienced a zero-turnover rate to this day.

Research focused

Regardless of the diverse backgrounds of our team, research is the core role of every member at Hashed. Crypto is a fast space with innovation and breakthroughs happening at the founders level. Yesterday’s success does not lead to tomorrow’s. Unlike in more mature industries where early-stage startups are laser-focused on building a product, founders in crypto relentlessly question each other and debate to define the whole ecosystem. This research-oriented culture directly impacts how we work with our founders.

We grow with our founders. Although we provide support for projects in all steps of the process of becoming a competitive global participant from the very beginning, many of the challenges our founders encounter are also our first time. As we aid in governance modeling, token model design, and market monitoring, we are learning with them.

At the core of this firm-wide focus, we have our researchers. For the past few months, Kenny, Daniel, and Kevin have been deep-diving in all aspects of project design with tech leads and management at Klaytn — a blockchain initiative by Kakao to reach its full potential at a global stage. We are excited to be part of its journey to deliver an enterprise-friendly blockchain that can accelerate mass adoption by welcoming institutional service providers and onboarding Kakao’s existing 100M+ users.

Emphasis on community

The definition of ‘community building’ has been evolving over the year for us. In the beginning, by introducing the Hashed Lounge meetup and Hashed Post to the Korean community, we focused on education and bringing industry thought leaders to Seoul. Korea is an inarguably strategic market for many crypto networks seeking to build serious mass adoption. The penetration rate and the familiarity of digital assets in Korea are incomparable to other regions, still driving much of the trading volume in today’s bear market. Our next goal is to position Korea and Asia as a technical hub optimal to run crypto experiments on very challenging problems such as governance, token economics, and UX to push the boundaries in the crypto industry. Edward and the community team have already made a bold step through organizing Korea Blockchain Week, presenting the potential of Korean market to the global community.

Sharing memories with our friends…

Hashed Family

Given the uncertainties and volatility, founders of crypto startups are often under an intolerable amount of stress. Emotional support is often forgotten but one of the biggest part of a crypto investor’s role in helping founders’ long-term value creation. With highly liquid assets, founders are directly exposed to market judgments while solving countless technical problems in their project. The best thing you can do in an unpredictable adventure is having a group of close friends to pioneer together. This is the same for us investors as well. Our attempt is through building Hashed Family of our founders. We are constantly humbled to learn from our strong founders who are pushing boundaries in each of their fields. Having this close community fosters true network effects of networks — a collaboration between protocols like Terra providing Stability as a Service to Dapps, tackling common technical challenges in infrastructure, and building a developer community.

Can protocol-based networks build culture? As the internet fulfilled much of Tim Berners Lee’s vision of “a collaborative medium, a place where we can all meet and read and write,” we are eager to find out in crypto. We will continue to be idealists in the space and build out the culture of decentralized community-driven collaboration and innovation.

Please keep an eye on our updated hashed.com for the future steps.

#HappyHolidays from Hashed Family

Hey, you guys still investing? was originally published in Hashed Team Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.