Re: [ANN][AIRDROP] 💦💦 HYDRO 💦💦 The Public Ledger for Financial Services

The pitch seems similar to other finance-focused projects like ripple/stellar. What's going to separate it from those

I think the biggest difference is that xrp/xlm are more focused towards payment systems. Hydro seems to be more focused on finance as a whole.

XRP and XLM are definitely geared toward payments solutions, but XLM also seems to be building more of a platform (with tokens being launched and FairX exchange, etc). At the end of the day, they are both protocols designed for large-scale payment processing and they offer tangible benefits for financial companies in terms of operational efficiency and speed.

It does seem like they might be targeting the same kinds of companies as Hydro though

The functionality of Hydro is very different from Ripple and Stellar. We are building a more diverse set of products rather than building our own protocol or focusing on the actual mechanisms of token transfer.

In terms of general design, the main differentiator is the hybrid private-public model Hydro promotes. It adds blockchain as a separate layer to off-chain systems and integrates the two, so companies don't need to rebuild their systems from the ground up with blockchain (and waste tons of money and time). This is how we think blockchain will get adopted in the real world more readily.

So it seems like then hydro might be targeting a different demographic than the other two since they require more of a completely restructuring of any application currently used right? Are there any other tokens focused more in this area like hydro is?

Now that I think about it, Hyperledger is probably the most direct competitor. If I was a big business I'd probably be looking at Hyperledger because they offer more custom solutions to integrate blockchain for w/e I need and they'll work with my current infrastructure. So it's along the same lines as Hydro

Brings up an interesting thought about IBM - they are building apps with Stellar but also one of the main funders of Hyperledger

Most of the implementation that Hyperledger/IBM do will be private blockchains (i.e. chains in which ownership of nodes is centralized). This was a key point of consideration for us when building Hydro - we firmly believe that the concept of a "private blockchain" is self-defeating in many ways, and offers little benefit beyond traditional databases and other off-chain protocols. The hybrid private-public paradigm we are putting forth attempts to create a win-win, where enterprises maintain control over their private systems while being able to access the key benefits offered by a public ledger (such as transparency, security, and decentralization).

Yeah I feel like big banks and stuff like that wont want to use public chains because they are then unable to keep private user data private. I could see something that allows banks to keep most data private would be useful

I agree with you here. There's already been huge pushback from banks about public ledgers. Ripple tried to solve that with gateway (centralized) nodes, but it doesn't look like a viable long-term solution.

This hybrid system probably makes the most sense for adoption, either that or we get some way to make on-chain data private without slowing down transaction times (which seems unlikely for now).

Definitely interesting stuff here with Hydro, I'll have to keep an eye on where this goes

It makes sense from the enterprise's perspective, and we understand that. It's a huge liability to have potentially sensitive data floating around on a publicly available ledger.

With that being said, Hyperledger is definitely a competitor for Hydro.

Ethereum scaling might be a problem in trying to compete with Hyperledger Fabric

We're keeping a close eye on Ethereum scaling proposals (e.g. Casper). We are confident that the platform will succeed long-term, but we are not tied to Ethereum. If it can't scale, we'll move to another framework.

Our strategy is to release products with lower transaction loads up front (like the Raindrop auth), and when we get to products and features with higher volume, we will be in a much better place as far as on-chain scalability goes.