HashPack – one year anniversary

On October 23rd 2021 we launched HashPack, putting out our project which we had worked on for six months in our free time into the public sphere. We were four Hedera enthusiasts that had randomly come together to build something cool, and even back then we had aspirations of making a big splash in the Hedera ecosystem.

It’s now a year later and HashPack is the leading wallet on Hedera, with over 50,000 active users a month and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of HBAR held in user wallets. When we launched, HashPack was a simple wallet that could display your HBAR balance, send tokens and store addresses in an address book. Then we added an NFT gallery, and the ability to trade them peer to peer with Secure Trade.

One of the most critical pieces we built was HashConnect, a protocol which allows users to securely connect to dApps and sign transactions without exposing their private keys. This is one of the vital parts of infrastructure that jump-started the Hedera DeFi ecosystem and has since enabled NFT marketplaces, staking platforms, DEX’s and more to find success on the platform.

At the end of March I wrote a blog reviewing our achievements over the first quarter of the year. Seven months later we’ve got so much more to celebrate and highlight.

Stader Labs – staking and smart contracts come to Hedera

April 9, 2022 - Stader Labs launches the first liquid staking platform on Hedera. This was the first case of a major smart contract use case on Hedera, providing staking rewards via collaboration with the HBAR Foundation. The HashPack team worked with Stader to integrate their platform with HashConnect and HashPack, and on launch day HashPack was the sole supported wallet for the HBARX pool.

On the first day of staking, the HBARX pool saw over 10MM HBAR staked across 10k transactions within the first hour. This rose to 20MM HBAR with over 20k transactions processed in the first 24 hours.

The HashPack team was sitting at the ready as we saw an incredible amount of hype and activity in the ecosystem. This was the first major test of HashConnect as well, and we’re proud to say that all systems held up extremely well with only sporadic numbers of users reporting issues during the launch.

By April 12, Stader was reporting 100MM HBAR staked. On April 14, the 200MM milestone was hit. On May 17 there was a staggering 500MM HBAR staked to the Stader platform.

Since then Stader has seen numerous updates and improvements to their platform, with plans to add more utility for the HBARX token. The Stader platform still holds one of the largest TVL’s in the space to date.

NFT summer craze - #HederaHeatwave

As summer came around, we saw the rise of NFTs and the trending hashtag #HederaHeatwave. In June, Hedera made an impressive showing at NFT NYC 2022, showcasing their marketing might with huge animated billboards all across Times Square.

The hype carried its way into the summer as the NFT marketplaces saw their largest trading volumes in the history of Hedera, with consistent growth throughout the summer. Most importantly, Hedera was seeing this action while the crypto ecosystem outside of Hedera was reporting massive drops in NFT volume. While the rest of the world was bearish on NFTs, Hedera was booming!

Throughout the summer, the HashPack team worked to beef up our NFT Gallery. Our dev team spent countless hours optimizing our code and working out the nuances of serving NFTs off of mirror nodes and IPFS. Our NFT gallery works better than ever, and we are integrated with all the NFT marketplaces and launchpads which are driving larger and larger volumes every month.

One critical partner which I have to mention here is our mirror node partner, Ledgerworks. Ledgerworks provides enterprise grade mirror node infrastructure for HashPack, and is one of our key partners that is the secret behind the high performance of our wallet.

‍Native staking – moving Hedera toward decentralization

July 21, 2022 - After months of working together behind the scenes, we successfully coordinated the launch of Native Staking with Swirlds labs. This was a major milestone on Hedera’s roadmap towards decentralization, and it was key for us to support this feature on day one.

Throughout the year, we’ve seen an incredible amount of support from Hedera (though technically they are now Swirlds Labs). They are a team of extremely passionate, talented people who are great to work with. The team at Swirlds and HBAR Foundation really are one of the many reasons why developing on Hedera is a pleasure, and we look forward to a long and productive relationship.

SaucerSwap – the Pioneering DEX on Hedera

August 5, 2022 - SaucerSwap, the first token swap on Hedera, launches to incredible success. Here are some stats from five days after their launch:

• TVL: $12.29MM USD
• Total Value Staked in Farms: $10.84MM USD
• Total HBAR in the protocol: 67.73MM HBAR
• Total USDC in the protocol: $624,561 HBAR
• Total Swap Volume: $9.47MM

It’s also noteworthy that the platform performed incredibly well throughout the launch, even under high traffic loads. This is a win for both the Saucerswap team and Hedera Hashgraph, proving that the network is plenty performant to run the final missing piece of our fledgling Hedera DeFi ecosystem.

Two months later, Saucerswap is still doing incredible with a total swap volume of $45M to date, supporting 92 liquidity pools over 50 HTS tokens.

In the DEX space, another platform called HeliSwap launched successfully as well on October 7th. After two weeks it has a healthy TVL of $6.7M.

Android app is live - iOS to come

August 31, 2022 - HashPack launches our Android App on the Google Play store. This is a big step for us to be able to provide great functionality to mobile users, and we have plenty of features coming up that will further improve the user experience.

One critical feature which we implemented in the Android App was integration with the built in hardware security features on Android devices. HashPack’s Android app utilizes Android Keystore, the device’s dedicated cryptographic hardware, to securely encrypt and store your private keys. The phone’s native biometrics (or security PIN) are used to unlock the keys.

For all our apple users who are wondering ‘wen iOS?’, you’ll be happy to know that we have plans to release the iOS version as soon as possible. And of course we are also going to use Apple’s Secure Enclave to store keys in the iOS device’s dedicated cryptographic hardware. Stay tuned!

.hbar usernames go live on Hedera

September 12, 2022 - The community was in a frenzy as “.hbar” usernames went live on Hedera. It was an extremely interesting launch, with over ten thousand domain names minted into the community’s hands within the first twenty four hours.

Now instead of using a numbered account name such as ‘0.0.123456’, if an account holds a domain name NFT minted from one of the two providers on Hedera (hashgraph.name and web23.io), that account can be referred to by its ‘.hbar’ username from within HashPack and other Hedera use cases that implement them.

In-wallet swaps and dApp browser

In September we launched two new features. The first is in-wallet swaps, powered by SaucerSwap. The newly added swap tab lets users easily swap between two tokens using SaucerSwap’s native contracts. This was one of the most requested features that users asked for upon the launch of SaucerSwap and is a big convenience item for avid traders. We intend to build out more features for this feature in the future, such as supporting other swaps as they come online and adding in aggregation functionality.

Next up, our in-wallet dApp browser was developed to make it as easy as possible for users to discover and connect to the use cases launching on Hedera. This is a feature that we’ve been excited about building for a while, works great on mobile, and we hope that it makes for a seamless experience on the Hedera ecosystem for everyone. Just click on the DAPPS tab and have fun exploring!

Final words

That brings us to the present. Our first year has been a wild ride and the HashPack is strapped in for the long haul. We’re thrilled to see all the use cases and projects that are popping up in the Hedera ecosystem, and it really feels like DeFi on Hedera is heating up.

To all our users and fans, thank you for supporting us all this time. We love our community, and we love the constant feedback that we get from our users - the things they like and dislike, the snags they run into, the upcoming projects that they’re excited about. All of this helps us build the things that the ecosystem is really excited about, so we encourage everyone to hop in our discord and give us a shout.

As a reminder, if any users require support from our team, the official method to reach out to us is via our Discord channel. Please pop in an open a ticket in the #support channel, which will allow us to provide one to one support for your issue. As always, HashPack staff will never message users first on any medium, be wary of any user that claims to be a support staff, and never enter your private key or seed phrase into a website.

See you around!

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This article was published by May Chan, HashPack CEO.