Strategic Partnership Announcement between Citadel Wallet, HashPack, and HeadStarter (Part 2)

In part one of this Twitter Spaces, Citadel Wallet, HashPack and HeadStarter speak about their recently announced strategic partnership. Citadel Wallet will be the first Hedera Hashgraph native hardware wallet and it will be able to leverage all of the network's native services.

Transcription

Citadel Wallet – Andy - Founder
‍I'm a passionate follower of web3 and everything that's going on in web3, but how I can bring volume myself to web3 through my experiences that I already had, and it seemed like just the perfect match for me to build this Hardware wallet. I started doing a lot of research about one to two years back, looking into other Hardware wallets in the ecosystem Hall, what kind of electronic components they use, what kind of secure architectures they use, and quickly realize that the industry is really just beginning, and some of these companies don't even have a good understanding of what components can be used for a secure device like this. I started looking into since the security with IoT, rise of IoT, a lot of companies pay a lot of attention to security, and there is a new types of electronic devices that are starting to come out that are very security focused. And knowing that, I started looking into what are some of the most cutting-edge microprocessors and secure elements which can be used to bring that security standard even higher than what we've seen in a crypto industry just in general, and I'm really happy to say that right now we have an architecture that is going to be even more secure than Ledger, which is known as the most secure Hardware wallet in the industry. Right now, we're going to be even more secure than Ledger from the hardware standpoint. The components that we have selected are higher security and have even the microprocessor, which a lot of this Hardware wallets are using just generic microcontrollers. Even our microprocessor is a security-focused, and it has a lot of cryptographic features already built into the microprocessor, which is going to enhance the security of the overall wallet by magnitudes of order. So, and from the software side, software is really important as well to make sure that it has protections built in place against all kinds of different attacks. Internally, we have a document that we are working on to make sure that we know all the attack vectors for this kind of Hardware devices that have been conducted before, looking at different papers. Even, we found the paper I don't want to make this too until long. I just can't say that we are looking into all of the different types of attack vectors that have been conducted onto Hardware wallets, and we have a great architecture planned out. From the software team, Builder Labs, who have great expertise in this, and they have been doing a great job developing a software and firmware that is going to bring this Hardware wallet to a new level of security, and from the hardware side, we have an architecture that is not going to be nobody has ever seen anything like this in the industry. I'll stop here. You guys can, Tudor if you want to. Go ahead and comment on security.

HeadStarter – Tudor - Founder
‍I just wanted to highlight the importance of security and, as a HeadStarter, we always took security with utmost importance. We have a good working partnership with Haken, who is, uh, a tier one crypto auditing company, and, also advisors for the project are people who are have been well-versed for decades in the firmware, microcontroller industry, as well as some people who have been working on, let's say, some leading industry crypto industry firmware, projects as well. So, we're very happy to put together and to continue to build the Citadel wallet into a product that, us together as an ecosystem can get behind.

Citadel Wallet – Andy - Founder
‍NFTier you had your hand raised. If you have any comments, go ahead.

NFTier – Kantorcodes - Founder
‍I might have just missed this, multitasking a little bit here. For the hardware wallet, will there be like a published security audit?

Citadel Wallet – Andy - Founder
‍All right, yeah, definitely. So, right now we're working on finishing the software and firmware development for the hardware wallet, and once that's completed before going to market, we are going to work at least with two security auditing firms. Like Tudor mentioned, he already has a lot of connections, uh, through head starter doing the security audits on the smart contracts on HeadStarter through his connections, and I also know a couple of companies that have even developed applications for ledger, so they are very familiar with hardware wallets and how that, what they need to pay attention to in terms of security of the firmware. But we'll have the security audit completed and presented it to the community, so we also gain the trust of the community. It's not just using our wallet is secure, but we want third-party auditing companies to also publicly say that this is a secure wallet.

HashPack Wallet – Marc Ugas – Director of Operations
‍Additionally to that, I mean, within HashPack, I mean, Nick, he's an absolute rock star at security. I mean, he has, you know, all of the credentials to be well. I mean, he, you know, his day job is basically at a cybersecurity auditing firm. So, you know, from our side, what we're planning to do is obviously I mean, we already do this on a weekly basis, audit the entire codebase. And, you know, when the Citadel wallet comes to a goes-to-market and all that, you can rest assured that like everything will have been tested, through all of the different methods that I'm not even familiar with, but that's something that is a paramount for any wallet, being software or hardware. So, so yeah, so you can rest assured that on top of all of this, the audits that, you know, Andy was talking about that from our side in terms of the connection and all that, that that will be constantly updated and making sure that there's no, points of attack because at the end of the day, like you said, the security is paramount, and that's not only for hardware but also for software. And since we'll be linking both HashPack and Citadel, that's something that we'll add into our weekly auditing exercise, and it's going to be super important.

Citadel Wallet – Andy - Founder
‍Yeah, definitely. I'm also looking forward to getting your guys' input since you're building a software wallet, and it's a really secure software wallet already. I have been using it right from day one when you guys launched it, and for a software wallet, it's already extremely secure. And I know you guys been putting a lot of effort into making it even more secure. You have features like creating an account through email, which makes sure that the private keys are stored even in a more secure way, but at the same time bringing that web-two-very-easy-to-use experience to users. I'm really looking forward to working with the HashPack team as well to get them look at the code and make sure everything is as secure as possible. With a hardware wallet product like this, you can never get enough feedback. Anybody who is experienced we can get in touch with and have a conversation with, look at the code and analyze it, it's all welcome.

HashPack Wallet – Marc Ugas – Director of Operations
‍And I mean, you mentioned you know you have experience with like military and all of that, and you know, I don't have a ton of experience on that, but I understand like the whole, you know, double and triple redundancies for aircrafts and that stuff like that. So I mean, having that in mind with any product is always super super important. And the fact that you know we're already kind of thinking two or three steps ahead with all of that is super important. Yeah, again, I mean, super excited for this to come to market, been waiting to get all my degen NFTs into a hardware wallet, and yeah, the time's almost here, so yeah.

Citadel Wallet – Andy - Founder
‍Really excited, really excited. I also wanted to talk about the ease of use aspect of this kind of devices or wallets or dapps. Web3 is known for being kind of clunky and not very user-friendly because blockchain networks are kind of very slow and expensive, and people get frustrated using those networks. Marc, can you, since I can't say confidently that HashPack has been just amazed, just total web-to experience for me, whenever I use HashPack, I don't feel like I'm using a web 3 product, and that's how seamless the experience has been with HashPack. Can you talk a little bit about the ease of use, the user-friendliness, the seamlessness of these kinds of products and what goes into making a product that is so inviting and easy to use?

HashPack Wallet – Marc Ugas – Director of Operations
‍Yeah, so first of all, thank you, thank you so much. I'm obviously biased, but I tend to have the same kind of experience. So I guess, in terms of each view, what we have right now with the email onboarding, that was kind of a pivotal move for us because, like you said earlier, at the end of the day, if I'm a web two user having to, you know, get a seed phrase and all that, that's kind of, that's a big friction point. It's something that, you know, we're very used to as web3 native people, but for people coming from web 2, it's very complicated. So, in terms of how we kind of think and approach this type of stuff, we kind of approach it in terms of we basically engage with the people that seem from web two, you know, Boomers, and all of that, to make sure that they understand. And, don't get me wrong, it's still a work in progress. We're, we're working a way to even make it more seamless because, at the end of the day, like I said, like, if we want to reach that inflection point of mass adoption, web3 has to look and feel a lot like what two, but with all the great stuff that web3 comes with, right? So you know, I mean, I can't take pretty much any credit of that, but like Jacob's a massive rock star in terms of user experience and all of that. And, yeah, and our whole approach is like, you know, really listening to the feedback of the community, being finding the pain points that that have some that are not mutually exclusive between the web 3 people and also the web two people and find a solution that works for both. So, that's why we, you know, although we still have the email onboarding, you still can get your seed phrase as a normal, you know, software wallet. But, we believe that to make that next step, you need to start building these rails that will make it extremely easy for, you know, my grandma, my grandpa to get an NFT of whatever, you know. I think that this is going to be an effort from the industry as a whole, the Hashgraph as a whole, and I think that, you know, everyone in Hedera, what's great to see is that, at the end of the day, like, the user experience top of mind. So, that's kind of how we approach it. Again, we just, we just sit down with people that maybe are new to the ecosystem and see where they're getting stuck. And then from there, you know, if we receive enough people saying that they're getting stuck on the same place, then we go back to the drawing board and say, "Okay, so how do we make this more seamless?" That's another reason why we created a DApp browser. A lot of people, although we're all super used to connecting a wallet to a dapp that’s kind of, that's very web3 way of doing things. What do people do? They go in there, get something, put their credit card and that's it, right? So that's why we created that browser, because then you already have your assets in there, and if you want to go and buy an NFT, go to a launch pad or anything like that, you can just do it with it directly inside of the wallet, and the feedback has been incredible. And yeah, I mean, I wish I could share things that are coming soon, but yeah, just let's just say that we're working a way to make it even more seamless.

Citadel Wallet – Andy - Founder
‍Yeah, no, I'm really excited for everything that you guys have been doing, especially the Dapp browser you mentioned. I mean, you guys are becoming the next App Store, having all those tabs integrated into the wallet so you can access them and use them in a very easy manner without needing to go anywhere else. You guys have been doing an amazing job there. I wanted to ask the same question to Tudor. In terms of ease of use, you guys recently just had the Earthlings mint, which went very smoothly. I heard people had a great experience going on the website. It was very easy to use. What kind of web2 experience goes into building this kind of an experience and has Hedera anything to do with that?

HeadStarter – Tudor - Founder
‍I think Hedera has everything to do with it. The fact that we can leverage such high speeds of the network, so the high throughput in TPS makes it so that the minting process of new NFTs is pretty much seamless. Of course, we are still pioneers in the space. We all are exploring new territories as we go along and innovating along with the core SDK of Hedera. And we hope to continue to deliver on a very good experience for our users. We have our expert there who's been doing an amazing job in Vladoots. We kind of poke fun of him because he kind of took the role of Dracula inside the team. I'm sorry that was an internal joke, but nonetheless, for Head Starter, it's been important at the beginning to have everything as intuitive as possible inside our Head Starter's app. That's why we started off with the application pretty much catering for swaps of IDOs in general, so swapping generally from HBAR to the new token. And this functionality we delivered since June of last year when we did the first round of our HST token Ido. And since then, we wanted to make sure that we improved the experience. We have a lot of utility NFTs that have different perks in the ecosystem. Some are already palpable, a lot of them will be more and more palpable, as well, to the users. So, at the moment, for example, if you have a utility NFT coin of Head Starter, the way that we gamified the solution is that you can either opt to continue to leverage the utility of said NFT or you can burn it, and there will be a vested compensation in HST tokens that you can avail. This burning of the NFT functionality/utility is something that we thought is an innovation in gamification in itself. These all come under the Portfolio page that once you connect your HashPack wallet with the Head Starter tab, you can tap into as well as checking what is your tier in terms of HST token holdings. And the way that we do that is by making sure that, uh, we calculate your HST holdings globally, that is, free HST that you have inside your wallet, as well as the exact number of HST you have in the Farms that are on popular Hedera DEXes today. So we look inside your portfolio. Inside the decks as well, obviously. I think with more and more features that come with gamification, with launches of new projects, with these crowdfunding events, I think that we can continue to deliver and improve the experience that people have when interacting with the dapp, with the minting or swapping of tokens. And one thing that is our core emphasis is making sure that the community has an intuitive experience on the dapp. We want to make sure that everything is as clearly explained and transparent to the user, whether that's from the project, the utility division of the respective project, the terms of each round, to all the way to the way that the mint works and the associated disclaimers. The Citadel Wallet project is unique, and we're very excited to see roll out some of the gamification applications that have been proposed by The Citadel Wallet team, and maybe we can tap into this going forward and if you like. But also what I will be excited to hear more is on the design of the wallet itself and some of the unique features that have to do with the user interface there as well.

Citadel Wallet – Andy - Founder
‍Yeah, this is exactly why I'm so excited about my partnering and working with two great projects and teams, HashPack and Head Starter. Everything you mentioned, Tudor, it just shows your understanding and knowledge in Web3 and knowing what exactly people need to get that user experience and just enjoy the process of participating in Web3, and not just getting frustrated with wanting to get those NFTs and tokens, but the process is so complicated and time-consuming and costly that they kind of regret, during that process, that they're even doing it. I think Hedera's strength is in bringing that fast, cost-effective speed, cost-effectiveness, and the security. It has the highest security that any network can offer to the community to Web3. So, then talented and experienced teams like Tudor's team and Marc's team can put together applications and solutions that can benefit from that speed and also bring that value back to the Web3 user. From Citadel wallet standpoint, why we want it to be there, native is because we care about the user-friendliness of the device. We care about the experience of the user when interacting with Web3 applications. And nothing else can compare with Hedera's speed and cost-effectiveness. And if it was slow and expensive and frustrating for people to use, they would even not like the device that we're making for the network. When you connect and try to pair the wallet with the software wallet and sign transactions, and it's taking a long time, and the screen is too small, you cannot really see the full message. You have to scroll through pages to see the message. The device is very hard to interact with; there's no touch screen. It's just two buttons, for example. The overall experience becomes too complicated. And for someone who is coming from Web2, it creates a lot of barriers and obstacles. They don't want to give up the performances and experiences that came from Web2. They want to benefit from the advantages of Web3 decentralization ownership. But at the same time, I think people value time and cost way more than anything else. I know there are a lot of conversations about privacy. Privacy is important to people. But I would argue that saving time and saving money is way more important to people. And that's why we see people getting so excited and involved with these Web3 projects, which are all open projects. You can see the transaction history of all the accounts, what NFTs they hold what tokens they hold, but because of that extra value of speed and efficiency and cost effectiveness of Hedera Network, I think that's going to bring a lot of value to web 3 web 3 users and web 2 users who are trying to move from web two to web3. And with our device, we want to make the process so seamless. So when they buy the wallet, buy the hardware wallet, they pair it with HashPack, they don't even need to worry about private keys them being hacked or stolen. They can just simply pair, connect, and sign any transactions they need on Hedera Network. We're going to support all of federal services, including HBAR transfers, native tokens, and NFTs. Native staking, there's scheduled transactions, there's smart contracts, all of these cool services, with added security, I think is going to bring a lot more users from other web 3 ecosystems to Hedera. And also, my hope is we bring more web to users to web3 through this device, through the network that is as performant and efficient as Hedera Network. We're getting close to the end of the hour. I did want to give a chance to listeners to ask questions. So if anybody has any questions or comments, doesn't have to be a question, please request to speak and I'll bring it up here. If not, anybody else has any last comments? Marc, Tudor:

HashPack Wallet – Marc Ugas – Director of Operations
‍No, I mean, I think that it was incredible finally making this official, and you know, talking through everything. It was... yeah, I mean, we've all kind of been waiting for this for a long time. And, you know, it's almost here, so yeah, super excited. Yeah, but that's about it, so unless... yeah, Tudor, if anyone has any questions, yeah, you can either request to speak or you can always, you know, just reach out to us individually. I'm sure that, you know, Andy or us would be happy to take any questions.

HeadStarter – Tudor - Founder
‍Absolutely. Yeah, thanks for that, guys. Obviously, I had a great time in the spaces here with you all. I think, one thing that, could be emphasized on is that, since we are all deeply entrenched in the community, we are very uh, approachable in our Discords. And obviously, the fact that, the lady who had their influencer by many social media metrics is leading, such an important project for Hedera, and he's speaking here about H bar to the Moon. I think, I think to the importance of this problem to compassion that is bringing behind it, I think maybe a small note, it could make sense to maybe Handy for you to tell us a bit more about the NFT drop that's will be coming up.

Citadel Wallet – Andy - Founder
‍Yeah, no, good point, Tudor. I wanted to finish with that. Um, I hope everything that we talked about it was clear to the community, and since there there is no questions, uh, I'm hoping that we did a good job explaining everything. And at the end, I did want to touch to that nft drop that is coming at the end of this month, so tomorrow we'll have the full white paper for the nft project, dropping on Friday, which goes into the details of the all the nfts in the collection, what kind of utilities and privileges come with those nfts, and of course, ET will come with the hardware wallet. So everyone who buys those nfts, they will be able to claim the hardware wallet within six to eight after six to eight months when we're ready to go to market, and the nft launch will happen through Head Starter. You will be able to go and connect and mint your nfts. The nft collection is called Guardians of The Citadel, and it just makes sense since the hardware wallet is called Citadel wallet. We wanted to come up with kind of a symbolic way to honor the project through an nft project, so we created these knight characters that are going to protect the Citadel and make sure that your assets are secure. That's kind of the idea behind the nft project, and the nft project itself will evolve and grow over time as Citadel wallet grows and evolves, but look forward to the white paper that is dropping tomorrow, and it will include the exact date of when the mint is coming, but it will be at the end of March. All right, so I think there is no questions from the community. Um, I really enjoyed having this conversation with you, Marc and Tudor. I just enjoy every time I get a chance to talk to community members, builders, projects, one to one or in this kind of public forums. I just get really excited to see how far the ecosystem has gone as a whole. When I was just starting out with the Twitter account and trying to promote Hedera, the community was so small. There were no wallets and no projects, none of that. It was just a concept, an idea that some of us passionate supporters gathered around and tried to support it. And now, where I see how far it has gone, it's just a no-brainer that Hedera is going to be one of the biggest DLT networks in the world and is going to dominate in terms of utility, usefulness, community. We have a very strong and passionate community. It was just a pleasure to talk to you guys, and I'm looking forward to doing more spaces like this and hopefully bring talk about more exciting projects, more exciting products being developed in the space. I think that's all for today.