Gossip about Gossip: HashPack – The Journey to Becoming the Leading Wallet on Hedera with May Chan

In this episode of Gossip about Gossip, we hear from May Chan, the founder and CEO of HashPack Wallet. HashPack is a non-custodial wallet on Hedera Hashgraph, and is currently the number one wallet on the platform. May discusses how she first learned about Hedera and decided to build on top of it, as well as the origins of HashPack and its distributed team. She also touches on the importance of engaging with the community and getting feedback in order to build the tools that users need.

According to May, she first learned about Hedera after watching a talk by Leemon Baird, the co-founder of Swirlds and the chief scientist of Hedera. She was impressed by the technology and the direction of the platform, and began to explore it further by joining various online communities and tinkering with the software development kit (SDK). It was in one of these communities, Club Hbar, that May came up with the idea of forming a team to build a wallet for Hedera. She reached out to the community and 10 people expressed interest, eventually narrowing down to four people who became the founding team of HashPack.

The team decided to launch their wallet six months later, in October 2021, and worked hard in their spare time to make it a reality. The result was a successful launch, and HashPack quickly rose to become the number one wallet on Hedera. May attributes this success to the team's focus on building tools that the community needs and wants, and to their commitment to engaging with the community and getting feedback.

In the future, May sees decentralized applications like HashPack playing a key role in bringing trust back to the internet. She believes that by using distributed ledger technology, we can create a more decentralized and secure online environment where users have greater control over their data and their privacy. It's an exciting vision, and one that Hedera Hashgraph and the team at HashPack are working hard to make a reality.

Transcription

Gossip about Gossip Introduction
‍Welcome to Gossip about Gossip powered by Hedera Hashgraph. In each episode we’ll cut through the hype of blockchain promises, and explore real world examples of organizations creating the next generation of decentralized applications which will bring trust back to the Internet for us.

‍Swirlds Labs - Zenobia Godschalk – SVP Communications
‍Hello everyone and welcome to the latest episode of Gossip about Gossip. The podcast where we talk about real world applications of distributed Ledger technology. My name is Zenobia Godschalk and I am the SVP of Communications. Here at Swirlds Labs helping to drive adoption of the Hedera ecosystem. I am delighted today to be joined by May Chan who is the creator and head of HashPack. Hi May, how are you?

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍Hi I'm really really good!

‍Swirlds Labs - Zenobia Godschalk – SVP Communications
‍Good! So I know a lot of folks in the community know HashPack, use HashPack, love HashPack but for those very few who may still not, can you tell us what is HashPack?

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, absolutely! HashPack is a non-custodial wallet on Hedera. It is the number one wallet by a number of metrics right now, and we're very keen on building the things that the community needs in order to drive our ecosystem forward, drive activity on the network, make sure that the users are protected and able to do cool things. So, I'm the CEO of the company, but it is a company co-founded by three other people and we're all equally responsible for the success of HashPack so far. So, yeah, I'm really happy to talk about anything HashPack-related today.

‍Swirlds Labs - Zenobia Godschalk – SVP Communications
‍All right, and you know I think I will come back to this, but certainly the you know the community like us that loves HashPack. I think the way you all engage and get feedback is really interesting, so but let me pause on that for a second. How did you come to Hedera? How did you first learn about it and how did you decide that you wanted to build on top of it?

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍Well, I can't remember how I heard about Hedera, but the first thing I ever watched was Leemon's Harvard talk and that was a great talk. It really sold me on the tech of Hedera and on where the platform was going. I really liked it, and at the time, I was searching a number of blockchains to see which ones I liked, and they really struck me as a very solid project, so I joined a few discords, joined the official Hedera Discord as well, started digging through the SDK and doing some tinkering. I'm not a developer by any means, but I just do some coding on the side, so I started just playing around with it. The way that this turned out was in one of the communities that I'm in called Club Hbar, which is still around today. I asked the community, "I'm tinkering around by myself, but it would be really fun to make something with everyone else. Does anyone want to join me and make something together?" About 10 people raised their hands, and we got in a group and started brainstorming what we could make. After two weeks, there were four people remaining, and that formed the founding team of HashPack. We decided to make a wallet because right at that time we didn't really have any strong wallets in the Hedera ecosystem that we really wanted to use, so we decided to make our own. That was around March 2021, and then we decided to set a launch date for ourselves six months later, so on October, we worked really hard in our spare time and launched in October.

‍Swirlds Labs - Zenobia Godschalk – SVP Communications
‍Amazing! And where is the team? I know we talked about being a distributed network

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍We are all over. So, like I said, we met in an internet community and to this date. I've only met one of them in person, and that was like two weeks ago. I flew to Toronto, so I'm in Vancouver, Canada. Our CTO is in Toronto, Canada, and then our security officer is in Florida. Our designer is in Manchester, UK, and we recently hired a marketing/operations guy, and he is also in Vancouver with me. So, we're pretty distributed.

‍Swirlds Labs - Zenobia Godschalk – SVP Communications
‍Fantastic, so growing the empire one person at a time. And, you know, if you think back to when you first launched, what did you expect? What did you hope for this wallet?

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍Ah, we just wanted to make something fun. We wanted to make something that people could trust. I believe our first tagline that we ever had was, 'simple, secure, and stylish.' So, the first thing we did was put together a user experience that we thought was going to be able to be used by anyone, even their grandmother. And that really is one of our driving principles today, to make something that anyone can use. And, I think we're not quite there yet, but we're trying really hard. And, I'm told that our HashPack is a really great user experience, even compared to what some other chains offer. So, hopefully we're hitting those notes really well, and we'll continue to improve that experience.

‍Swirlds Labs - Zenobia Godschalk – SVP Communications
‍Yeah, and I think that is what we hear from the community. You know, you added the ability to store and share NFTs. How's that going?

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍That's been going fantastic, actually. Funny story, is that when we first launched, I was really into getting token support, so like for decentralized exchanges and stuff. And I didn't think that NFTs were that big on Hedera at the time. Like, there was a small community, there was one or two marketplaces. It wasn't that big. And then, over the weekend, our CTO Tyler just built out an NFT gallery in the wallet, and launched it after getting the team to be like, 'Yeah, this is pretty cool.' And that was probably December 2021, and then, the NFT space just started kicking off like crazy. So, like two months later, by February, we had four NFT marketplaces in Hedera, and everyone was building like nuts. There was so much hype around Hedera NFTs. We went and made the standard HIP 412, which standardized the NFT metadata on Hedera, which makes it compatible with Open Sea, which is the main NFT metadata on other networks. But, we basically consolidated all of the NFT projects so that they followed this one standard, so that all the marketplaces could view the NFTs properly, and all the wallets would handle the other keys properly. And I think that really set the foundation for a crazy summer. Hedera, you guys ran the what was it called? The Hedera Heat Wave, which kicked off a number of things happening over the summer. The NFT NYC conference where you guys had tons of huge screens all across Times Square, that was crazy. And I think the NFT community on Hedera is still crazy today. For example, Creamies, which is one of the bigger projects, I was told is one of the top five. They had a mint last week, and they sold out in 20 seconds. And that's like, not just all the drama that's been happening in the greater ecosystem, like the crypto ecosystem, but also, in terms of technology, selling out in 20 seconds is crazy, like that is hundreds and hundreds of people clicking frantically at the same time, and we're not the part where there was big enough to have bots that are going to be like scalping all of these NFTS right on the second. So these are like actually people who are enthusiastic about NFTs and who just wanted that NFT, and they just sold out like crazy. HashPack performed really well, and I think that the launch pad that they used was Zuse marketplace, and I heard that that worked really well. So there are a number of launch pads in the NFT community that are working really well. I have to shout out to Turtle Moon tools as well, because they are a beast when it comes to an NFT launches. So can't talk about that without mentioning their name as well, they're really good.

‍Swirlds Labs - Zenobia Godschalk – SVP Communications
‍Well, and I think it's you know, it is amazing and heartening to me to see how different parts of the ecosystem really are not just playing nice, but are working well together and are supporting one another and you know, have these kinds of discussions and help each other grow because you know, we're still so early in this market that it does require that interoperability and that collaboration.

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, and I think that when we talk about collaboration and cooperation between projects, I think that Hedera is a really great community, a really great ecosystem to come into, where we've heard this from multiple projects that are you know, they started in Solana, they started in Algorand, and XRP and then they tried out Hedera and they joined our community and they found that it was really fun to build in here. I know that if I ask any number of the top NFT artists or creators in this space today who is the number one then the number one person that they would say is a project called Metavision, and Metavision is not because they sell out the most or they have the biggest mints, they don't, but they have so many friends in the space and they engage the community so well and they're super active on social media where they just make a really welcoming community. So like this is sort of the blood that flows through every project in Hedera. So far, where we all know we're in this together, we're all here to support each other, to welcome new projects, and I think that that's really fantastic. We we've seen the benefit of working together with this HIP metadata thing, and now all the marketplaces can cooperate with each other, even while they're building out the functionality that they think is going to beat their competitors, but it's all on a base of we're all here to make this ecosystem stronger and better. So it's really fun.

‍Swirlds Labs - Zenobia Godschalk – SVP Communications
‍We recently recorded a podcast with the Hedera team talking about the HIP process and sort of what that is like, but having gone through it yourself, what would you say, you know what was your experience there?

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍I would say that Hedera has improved so much this year. I would say like last year 2021 to get some HIPs through the process you had to kind of make good contacts in the Hedera discord, and and like really know a few people, start to make introductions to the evangelists on the Hedera team, and then pitch your idea and stuff like that, but now, Hedera’s far more open the devs are really involved. I'm seeing that there's a lot more room for collaboration and like the community because it's strengthened so much over this year too. There's people who want to just like start up a HIP and then the community bands together, and we work together. I know that there's one HIP that's out right now that they're trying to put in dynamic NFTs on Hedera, and that's just a community led, and it's going through the process. There's one with fungible token metadata that was started by Calaxy, and now I've kind of it's been handed to me, so I'm taking that over, but Hedera has been super collaborative with that, and I know that you know, whenever there's something that is not like, there's some functionality that a project needs on the network and it might be serviced by a HIP, I know that the Hedera team is always like start a HIP and let's get this going and get the discussion going. So I think that the decentralized process of like making changes to the network is improving month over month, and it's never been better.

‍Swirlds Labs - Zenobia Godschalk – SVP Communications
‍Good, that's great to hear, and you know, as you look forward, you know, if we have this call again in 12 months, what would you like to be sharing with the community and with folks about where is HashPack? You know, what have you, you know, what are you going to be developing in the next 12 months, where you hope to be a year from now?

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, that is a big question because we have so much that we can do to it, yeah, and well, just that there's so much opportunity in this space and it moves so fast. We have our iOS app that is coming out and hopefully really soon. I don't want to give a timeline, but it's in the process, and we've been working on that for a bit. We have some other features like SecureTrade V2, which is our peer-to-peer like atomic swap kind of functionality where we're adding in the ability to swap NFT for NFT or fungible tokens for NFT or any combination of that, so that's going to be a really great hit for being able to just trade with your friends or swap between your accounts, I think, but that's going to be really great for users. I have a few things that I wanna do in terms of like bringing people into the ecosystem and making it easy because one of the things that I'm hearing from companies that are coming into blockchain and to Hedera is their users, if they're a web two company, their users don't know what a seed phrase is, and they can't be bothered to learn about those things, so I think for 2023, my focus here is really going to be on making it as easy as possible for people, even if they're not tech literate, to come into the Hedera space and be able to interact with the applications and you know, make it as easy as possible, while keeping them safe, while making us so that they, if they forget their password or whatever, they don't lose their account completely. There's a lot of usability improvements that we can definitely do, and then on the other side, I think that there's a lot of friction that we can remove from the developer side of things and the company side of things, where web two companies don't know exactly how they're going to get into web tree, but they want you, they're excited, and building those rails as well, I think will really, really help drive adoption in Hedera and adoption of crypto in general. Like, I see that I see Hedera being a leader in the space in a in a year or two, and I want to be there to help drive that forward and finally just like trying to make more connections with real world companies. I think is the a big thing that everyone in Hedera is excited about, not just catering to NFT's and DeFi, but actually being able to pay for things with crypto, being able to use an app by like, for example, Starbucks with their loyalty card is now an NFT, you can get loyalty points, which I think might be fungible tokens, and seeing that come to fruition in the greater like Internet economy that would be really fun to be at the forefront of too.

‍Swirlds Labs - Zenobia Godschalk – SVP Communications
‍Yes, lots going on and lots still to be done, so you know, in terms of your team, are you hiring, are you looking to expand, or are you looking for additional community participants?

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, we are always open to helping people in this space. We have a like our marketing guy that we just hired, he was working with us just like on the side because he was really enthusiastic. It was kind of like a call that we had way in the beginning where he had investors that he represented, and we were just talking about what was happening with Hedera, and then that relationship turned into an opportunity for him later in the year. And in terms of developers like we are always on the lookout, even if we're maybe not hiring specifically, I think that this space has a ton of opportunity for people, just like if you get involved in the community and you build something cool and you get it off there, like people love to see it, and then companies are gobbling up developers like nothing, like I'm always asked if there's somebody in the space that you know is familiar with Hedera and you know they want to hire them and every single time that I've found someone that's good and I just kind of raise the awareness within the few people that I know they've been hired up like real fast, so I think that for people who are interested in Hedera, and they're interested in building or getting involved on a more professional level, I think just like join the community, join Twitter, join some discords, join that main Hedera discord, which is developer focused, and just started building something. I mean like look at HashPack where like the perfect example where we just built something that we wanted to build and then we found success with it, and I think that with the community out there today it's easier than ever to get involved and to get the resources that you need and the help that you need to succeed.

‍Swirlds Labs - Zenobia Godschalk – SVP Communications
‍Absolutely. Well, May, thank you for joining us today. Before we wrap up, anything else you'd like to share with our audience?

‍HashPack Wallet – May Chan – Founder & CEO
‍I would, which is for people who are just coming into Hedera. If you're listening to this, we released a community site. It's at our website hashpack.app/community, and there we've listed like 30 different projects that are building on Hedera that you can just like get a quick peek at exactly like what's going on in the community, and we're also working on a V2 version of the site where the community projects themselves are going to be issuing content, educational material, and all of that, so we hope that it will make it easier than ever to come into Hedera and learn what's going on there, so yeah, check it out.

‍Swirlds Labs - Zenobia Godschalk – SVP Communications
‍Fantastic. Well, May, thank you so much for joining us. We hope to have you back on to hear about your continued progress, and we appreciate your time.