Whattup shitcoiners - hope you’re ready to roll into the weekend.

Our community asked us to review/summarize a project we have not heard of until...well...today.

So, due to popular demand, we will review Hydro.

Let’s dig in…

Hydro (ticker: HYDRO)

Low-Tier Shitcoin (mostly due to market metrics)

Wtf is this shit?

Put simply, Hydrogen is a financial technology company serving the financial services industry. Lol Basically, they are a decentralized ecosystem, that offers tools for developers, companies, individuals, or themselves to use to create a more secure, smooth, and user-friendly experience, whether it be a bank, brokerage firm, trading exchange, reporting platform, or more. They consider themselves the “financial web 3.0” offering APIs and applications for developers and companies to take advantage of.

Hydro is an ERC-20 token, which means that they take advantage of Ethereum’s public blockchain, and the Hydro platform sits on top of the public ledger much like other third party apps would. This means that through their proprietary smart contracts, libraries, APIs, apps/dApps - they can act as a user-friendly bridge for developers and companies to take advantage of their tools (using the HYDRO token) without the extra headache of directly interfacing with a public blockchain, necessarily.

As of now, Hydro has one complete whitepaper, and 2 drafts, as part of their 5 piece, modular exosystem.

It seems as if they have 5 broad services:

1. Snowflake (no not the political snowflakes) - decentralized identity management.
   
   - Developers and companies can take advantage of this to perform KYC on their customers. If their customers  have a “snowflake identity” then the customer can use FaceID or other methods to quickly verify with the company. These processes (similarly seen in Civic and other identity management focused platforms) not only makes the life for the customer easier but also allows companies to onboard users much faster.
   
   - There is LOTS for Hydro to do to get user identities.
   
   - Quick tech rundown. Basically, users must “mint” their Snowflake identities. Identifies are built according to the ERC-1484 standard, specifically built for identity creation and management. It differs from other frameworks such as ERC-725 or ERC-1056 in that it is meant to be lower-level than these, and the other mentioned frameworks can actually be included in the ERC-1484 token standard criteria.
   
   - When a user identity is minted, a unique Ethereum Identification Number (EIN) is then connected to all known, owned addresses of the users. The dApps offered with Snowflake also try to get the company to cover gas costs when users perform KYC and are attempting to be forward-thinking in the mechanisms they build.
   
   - There are other technical details...such as different participants in play: users, resolvers, validators (optional), and interacting with the snowflake contracts, but you get the picture. Snowflake is their KYC effort, but it goes quite broad and can be used creatively.
   
   
2. ICE - decentralized document management
   
   - The problems they aim to solve here are around - more secure cloud storage for personal documents, business documents...nudes...whatever, can create a trustless financial or legal notary system, perhaps create a more open source document signing framework.
   
   - Technical details are TBD
   
   
3. Raindrop - user authentication
   
   - They have a server-side implementation of the protocol which offers enterprise level authentication driven by on-chain transactions. This level of security comes at a cost in the form of the gas necessary to fund these transactions.
   
   - They also offer a client-side implementation which is designed to handle higher throughput. This implementation relies on off-chain transactions which are later verified on-chain which is how they are able to handle the higher load. They say that this implementation is better suited for applications with a large volume of users.
   
   
4. Tide - payments
   
   - Not much detail here, but looks like some sort of payments mechanism...to allow for feeless transactions using Hydro. Ripple competition?
   
   
5. Mist- AI
   
   - Not much detail here either, but looks like a surveillance AI to help with fraud protection and monitoring of user funds...perhaps if held at a bank..

There’s more to it, but this should paint a picture. Hydrogen is an ecosystem, offering different modules, that have different tools (APIs and applications) that companies and developers can take advantage of. They plan to offer dApp marketplaces within each module. So Mist, for example, may be a framework for AI type of surveillance, but developers can build other cool dApps using Mist that other firms can use.

One more time - it’s a decentralized financial services ecosystem. (lol)

Who tf is behind this shit

The two founders are Michael Kane (CEO) and Matthew Kane (CTO) - (brothers?). They both run a company called Hedgeable together, for the past 9 years and have other relevant experience. You can find them on LinkedIn.

All in all, low-tier mostly due to market metrics (just super high risk), but they have big ambitions, are well connected in the financial space and wish them luck. We are a bit skeptical on specific aspects such as the viability of decentralized cloud storage and the issue of onboarding enough users for Snowflake. But, let’s see how they do!

Hope you learned some shit and be sure to follow us on Twitter!

Chat soon!

- Mike and Aaron