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Welcome to Kadena Eco’s Project Spotlight Series, where we highlight the groundbreaking work of organizations currently building on Kadena!

Today, we’re shining the spotlight on Hypercent, another community-based project that is driving user adoption by helping verified projects launch on Kadena through their innovative launchpad platform and their upcoming NFT marketplace built using Kadena’s NFT standard, Marmalade. By providing a fair and open way for newly founded projects to launch their IDO, they are accelerating the growth and success of the Kadena ecosystem. Along with their NFT marketplace, Hypercent will be helping develop the user and developer experience with Marmalade such that future builders and users can fully access the tools and functionality for NFTs that Kadena provides through Pact.

We recently spoke with Andrei Popa, Hypercent’s Co-founder, about their launchpad and the vision for the future of the Kadena landscape.

Hypercent is a unique Launchpad on Kadena. Hypercent is also a code of value that started in our time as early Kadenians. Inspired by Kadena’s philosophy, we guarantee that these values will always be part of Kadena’s Ecosystem by making sure the projects we launch adhere to them as well. Our goal is to strike the perfect balance between launching fun projects that bring a new audience to Kadena’s Ecosystem and useful projects that create extra utility for the people already here. We do this by launching utility tokens and NFTs on our Launchpad, and soon, by offering a fun experience on our NFT marketplace. Scalability and innovation of the crypto user’s experience are our main priorities. Our platform offers an all-in-one experience, having the first web-injected wallet inside a Launchpad Platform offering native mobile web compatibility and an internal automated no-code launch protocol (for tokens and NFTs) that is ready to scale.

I joined the blockchain space in 2017 in the middle of the first ICO era as the marketing manager for an ICO in the wellbeing industry. As the well-being sector wasn’t something I enjoyed, I moved to a digital marketing project called Zoidcoin Network.

I’ve worked there through the whole bear market and saw it pivot to Fintech and become ZoidPay. In between ZoidPay and Hypercent I’ve advised crypto projects on the marketing and tokenomics side.

Alex Danalache (Co-Founder) and I met whilst he was the founder and UX designer of an Ethereum-based Launchpad that aimed to breach the line between tokens and legal ownership of funded projects in a gamified experience back in 2017 whilst I was working with Zoidpay as a CMO.

I met Andrei Popa (CTO) at a blockchain event where Alex was also present with his project. Andrei was working as a CTO for SupplyBlockchain (now Tailpath), a platform that provides tracking for the delivery of assets around the globe. SBC also provided access control at NATO’s largest medical exercise in Europe/Romania and was promoted by the UK Embassy in Bucharest as a solution for tracking food and clothing donations.

All our values have resonated profoundly with Kadena which we discovered almost two years ago and have been hooked on ever since. These are the same values that constitute our core vision regarding Hypercent today.

We interact with projects we like in very incipient phases to make sure they share the same values as the Kadena Ecosystem.

We look into the founder's background, we analyze the idea to see if it makes sense business-wise and market-wise. We make sure they don’t raise more than they need but also that they don’t promise too much for the amount they are raising. All the projects we launch are KYCed by us and everyone signs a contract, so bad actors would have a lot to lose.

Our token utility model is designed to create a strong middle class to avoid single ownership of power in the projects that we launch. Shortly put, very big players cannot buy a lot more than smaller players. Our aim is to create as many holders as possible rather than have the tokens that we launch in the hands of a few big players.

More importantly, whenever we meet a new project we offer value straight away. If their proposal would be lacking we aim to improve their business model and help guide them to the Hypercent and Kadena standard of launching.

The explosive artistic landscape of NFTs is impressive and proves we can leverage crypto to solve unique problems. I think there is room to innovate in even more areas. I’d look at an NFT’s intrinsic “proof of ownership” and augment it with verifiable data and identity.

Marmalade and Pact enable novel ways in which business logic could be coded into an NFT, making Kadena the right ecosystem to build the next generation of apps. Think of unlocking your electric car with your wallet that holds a special NFT, that you can also improve by adding more features to it, like Autopilot. In Marmalade, a developer would write a custom policy contract that implements the NFT’s logic.

Finally, there is an initiative within the community to work directly with the Kadena team to build rich, robust policies that other projects in the ecosystem can build on top of.

The values of Kadena have always been centered on the product and the passion of the people that are building it. Kadena’s search for an ideal of quality has been very inspirational for us. It is something that has been romanticized in the early community of Kadena.

As a result of this, Kadena’s marketing efforts have been secondary to the product that they are building, so this is where we felt that we fit in perfectly.

There was a marketing gap inside the Kadena Ecosystem which we were able to fill and we also had a deep understanding of what Kadena stands for.

Naturally, we wanted to be part of Kadena Eco’s grant program.

We have calls with a big number of projects. Some are very useful for the ecosystem, others bring a bit more fun to the table which is always welcome.

We have a couple of big favorites but we can’t spoil the news just yet!

In the next six months, we will get the most out of Hypercent 1.0, meaning improving everything we currently have on the launchpad and getting the NFT marketplace to its best version while constantly injecting new business in both of them.

In the next year we will keep on business development efforts ranked up to the maximum, while in the background we will be working on launching the 2.0 version of our platform, and developer tools, alongside a mobile app with tons of cool new features.

In three years down the line, we will have already been scalable and have a full stack solution across all platforms and devices and will be mainstream adoption ready.

This space requires a lot of thought and depth to make sure you are sustainable in the future. Make sure that your community gets the best representation of your vision and never compromise on that.

It might be attractive to catch the short-term waves of attention, but take some time to reflect on the future and slow down a bit to make sure that your vision can be correctly executed and planned for. You might find yourself in a unique and creative position to innovate.

Many thanks to Andrei for sharing his vision for the future of the ever-growing Kadena ecosystem!

Be sure to check out this space in the coming weeks for more Project Spotlights, as we’ll continue to profile innovative organizations that are currently building on Kadena with support from Kadena Eco, our innovation network that supports startups at every phase of their development journey.