Introduction

It has been a while since I have published anything. Over the past year, I have been doing what many of you have all been doing, dollar cost averaging my portfolio. As an investor who started in 2017, I am glad to see that my portfolio has 10x since the lows of the past few years. Dollar-cost averaging is the key to survival in bear markets. Now that we are in the middle of a huge bull run, I believe this will continue, thanks to Bitcoin!

Source: Coin Telegraph, (2021)

In my opinion, this time the bull run is being fuelled not by mere baseless speculation like the last time, but rather huge interest from institutional investors followed by a huge new influx of retail investors. The ceiling is the limit this time. We will of course see our normal large corrections; the weak hands will be shaken out and the train will go on. Despite this, at least all of us long-term hodlers can take comfort in the fact that cryptocurrency is the future and has gained the interest of large institutional investors and smart money now.

These fundamentals and current price action have rekindled my love for crypto and have re-energised my love for this space.

The wrath of the last bear market left its fair share of casualties, many of my speculative investments are dead and I would wager this is similar for most of you. I do still think that it is wise to keep the majority of your investment in Btc, Eth, and other top alts, for example, I have done well by adding to my ADA bag over the past year. However, it is not these top projects which have my interest now, it is the low cap altcoins which I speculated on and that survived the bear market I am interested in now. The reasons for this are 2-fold:

1. Projects which continued to develop have emerged stronger, albeit battered and bruised on the price front. This shows commitment and long-term focus.

2. These bull runs always end with money trickling down into low cap alts, this is where you see the “huge X gains”. This occurs as profits are taken up top, and speculation takes over.

This article will talk about one such coin I am watching closely, it survived the bear market, it is making huge headway in development, has an un-believable team and product, and is hugely undervalued in my opinion. The project is High Performance Blockchain (HPB). I feel this has huge upside potential. I am not a tech expert and will not claim to be one, I will however do my best to give an overview of this project in an easy-to-read manner, I consider myself a decent researcher, but as always don’t take anybody’s word for this- please do your own research.

What is HPB?

Source: High Performance Blockchain, (2021).

HPB, which started in 2017 and who released their mainnet in 2018, describes itself as “the first permissionless blockchain to utilize dedicated hardware to accelerate TPS, enabling widespread adoption” (High Performance Blockchain, 2021). In simple English, they use hardware alongside the software. They are a smart contract ecosystem inspired by the ETH ERC-20 platform.

In comparison to other blockchains, HPBs fees are a fraction of the cost, it delivers higher speed and is developed for the onboarding of projects which require high throughput.

The technology behind HPB

Source: Hpb.io, (2021)

From my research, HPB is a public blockchain infrastructure, utilising a BOE hardware accelerator (The hardware chipset seen above), which combines CPU serial capability and parallel processing capability of “Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)/ASIC chips” (High Performance Blockchain, 2021). Nice tech lingo for you there.

Source: Hpb.io, (2021)

As can be seen above the use of the BOE accelerator provides huge advantages in processing. This is a huge advantage to dApps which may want to consider HPB.

HPB consists of a global node network used to process and verify transactions similar to other blockchains, ensuring true decentralisation is achieved. What I find fascinating is that their consensus algorithm utilises Proof of Performance (POP). They didn’t go with the normal Proof of Work consensus. The PoP consensus considers specific performance indicators when deciding which node will become an HP-Node and write a block.

These are, in order of importance:

• Network bandwidth (50% weight)
• Ranking by community votes (35% weight)
• Number of HPB coins held (15% weight)

HPB Foundation, (2021) claims they are fully committed to joint governance with their community and they wish to operate under a win-win structure. The node operators are paid block rewards in HPB coins.

2/3 of total block rewards go to:

• High Performance Nodes: This is the node chosen to process a block of transactions, I think their ranking in terms of community voting, no of coins held, and network speed all are the deciding factors in the chosen node. 35% of the 2/3 block rewards go to this node.

• Candidate Nodes: These are the other nodes not processing the block of transactions, however, due to the POP consensus they are available and required to verify transactions, they are essentially still working. For this, the node operators gain 65% of the 2/3 total block rewards, evenly split between them all.

1/3 of total rewards go to:

• Elected Nodes: The other 1/3 of rewards go to the elected nodes of the community. Nodes are allocated these rewards based on votes received from HPB holders. The node operators can then decide to share 0-100% of this with their community members.

Competitive advantage 1 of HPB

The use of the BOE hardware provides “true random number generation” vs standard pseudo-random numbers. This is unseen in other blockchains and this true randomness is a huge competitive advantage of HPB. In short, this enables true data encryption and true random sampling. All of the elected nodes discussed above have this feature due to the Hardware Random Number Generator (HRNG) chip within the BOE accelerator card (Hpb.io, 2021). The producers (nodes) and users (dApps) of random numbers are separated to reduce collusion, thus allowing secure confirmation, (Bitboy Crypto, 2020). Apparently, the HRNG chip can sense tiny variances in voltage (down to something like 0.001 volts) using an analogue to digital converter in the BOE, which creates the random string of numbers/letters in each new block.

For those of you who are not that tech-savvy (like me) “Random” means the numbers generated are equally probable each time, have a random variable each time, and possess no relation to previously generated numbers. The definition of “True Random” is when all possible outcomes have the same probability”. Mankind will always have bias instilled in us so we can never generate true randomness, so we must utilise technology to do it for us. Furthermore, Ethereum has previously claimed that the problem of random numbers is one of their core problems due to the fact its blockchain (and all others) relies on computers, meaning they are predictable (Bitboy Crypto, 2020). He adds the use of complex algorithms, oracles, APIS, etc… are used to try to combat this, however, this just adds to the already huge Gas fee cost. In Crypto Chemist, (2020) YouTube overview he dubs HPBs BOE accelerator capability as the Defi of Defi.

I think dApp developers should be jumping on this, the use cases are huge, the gaming, lottery, security, Defi sectors to name just a few would be far fairer and secure using this. HPB is built for this and is an affordable solution, its transaction costs are negligible compared to other blockchains due to this. This feature can drastically cut costs for dApp developers in the sectors mentioned above.

Competitive advantage 2 of HPB

What really draws me to this project is their offering of attracting ERC-20 dApps from the Ethereum network to move to the HPB mainnet under an HRC-20 format. Due to the technology used in HPB it offers tiny (barely noticeable) fees compared to ETH. As discussed above this is due to their BOE accelerator. It also offers much greater speeds in transactions because it does not need to sacrifice speed for security.

From my research, it seems HPB supports Ethereum’s Virtual Machine. Hpb.io, (2021) claim that the HPB innovative ecosystem aims to support the incubation of projects on their mainnet. HPB will be utilising “DeFi.Fund” to provide investment support for new projects and will endeavour to draw in projects from other platforms to the HPB ecosystem. I am particularly impressed with HPBs focus on the Defi sector; this is going to be huge in the next 10 years. They claim that “less than 1% of traditional finance is Defi” at present. They also state that they will support DEX platforms, e-commerce platforms, will aim for cross-chain compatibility, and will also try to attract projects in the Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) space. Defi was the thing of 2020 and it seems the NFT craze is taking over 2021. This makes HPB a huge draw for some of these projects. I think this represents only a small use case of the HPB blockchain because as mentioned in competitive advantage 1 the HRNG capability has an enormous use case across many sectors.

I feel if HPB can entice some dApps from ETH then it will explode in 2021.

Rumoured new dApp on HPB about to be announced (ESR)

There is another aspect to this whole thing, and this is the talk of a potentially huge dApp about to be announced on HPB. The HPB community are trying their best to figure out what it is. The community developer responsible for it has been giving subtle hints but is not giving anything away.

Quoting the developer, it caters to a huge audience (200m +), it is not one of dApps types listed above (so we can exclude Defi, NFT, Lotteries, etc…), it self-generates HRC-20 smart contracts year-round (24/7) with each requiring random number generation, they can’t be bought, there will be no airdrop and it claims to solve a previously believed “unsolvable real-world issue”. I will link the promotion video below. I certainly don’t know what it is, but this project could spark the start of the HPB run in my opinion.

Other notes on HPB

Their community is extremely active and engaged in the project. I implore anybody interested to check out their Telegram and Twitter page, regular updates are given by the development team. The Telegram community has developed a lottery using HRNG which is quite fun to take part in.

HPB also has a great mobile wallet (HPB Wallet) and a desktop interface for keeping HPB on Ledger or Trezor (myhpbwallet) which is similar to the classic myetherwallet, so it is very easy to use. I have a ledger and all you do is download the app onto your ledger, ensuring the ETH app is also installed. It is so simple.

HPB price prediction

According to coinmarketcap, the all-time high of HPB was $9.92 on January 13th, 2018, and dropped to as low as $0.03 on March 13th, 2020. It is currently trading at $0.15 (time of writing). As you can see the upside potential for this project is huge! The trading volume is about $1.5 million per day currently. The market cap of HPB is $10,913,023 at the time of writing. I think it is hugely undervalued.

I feel the team is playing the long game with this project, I will concede that their marketing should be improved, however, they are actively engaged in the development of this project. I have a feeling a lot of smart money is flowing into it at these low levels. I think the fundamentals are great and I am confident it will reach its all-time high again.

These are the low-lying projects you need to consider to see the most upside potential. Just my 2 cents, I’m happy to take the risk for the potential reward, especially when this project has been quite active through the bear market and constantly developing.

Conclusion

Overall, I think HPB will be one of these projects which has a crazy run this year. I am surprised it has not run yet, but then again; many great projects have not seen their runs yet as money continues to flow into the larger cap projects.

As mentioned above HPBs use of hardware and software means it doesn’t have to choose between speed and security, something that all other blockchains have to do. Its HRNG capability has huge appeal to many dApps. We will certainly see HPB shine when ESR is released on it. HPB offers higher transaction per second due to the BOE so scalability and security is not an issue, its programmable language makes it fully customisable and it has very low costs because its hardware reduces stress on servers.

Overall, I think HPB will do well in 2021. I am bullish on this. What other low-lying projects are out there?

Further information

• HPB Website: http://www.hpb.io/
• HPB Twitter: https://twitter.com/HPB_Global?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
• HPB Telegram: https://t.me/hpbglobal
• HPB Full White Paper: http://www.hpb.io/static/file/whitepaper/HPB_Whitepaper_English.pdf
• HPB 1 Page Summary Whitepaper: http://www.hpb.io/static/file/whitepaperA4/HPB_A4_en_%E8%8B%B1%E8%AF%AD_English.pdf
• ESR Information: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/m1sumw/esr_on_hpb_blockchain_if_you_like_a_good_crypto/
• ESR promotion video:

References

• Coin telegraph. 2021. Bitcoin price peak in December 2021 as ‘main bull run’ begins — Willy Woo. [online] Available at: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-price-peak-in-december-2021-as-main-bull-run-begins-willy-woo [Accessed 11 March 2021].
• Crypto Chemist, 2020. The #1 revolutionizing blockchain infrastructure! | high performance blockchain (hpb) review. [video] Available at: < https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=CDoMPvDFAEs > [Accessed 12 March 2021].
• Bitboy Crypto, 2020. Most SHOCKING 50x Potential Altcoin (HPB Crypto Delivers). [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YY-R8LbhaUQ [Accessed 13 March 2021].
• Hpb.io. 2021. High Performance Blockchain. [online] Available at: http://www.hpb.io/ [Accessed 12 March 2021].
• HPB Foundation, 2021. HPB 2021 Roadmap. [online] Hpb.io. Available at: https://www.hpb.io/post-550 [Accessed 12 March 2021].
• Hpb.io, 2021. Whitepaper. [online] Hpb.io. Available at: http://www.hpb.io/static/file/whitepaperA4/HPB_A4_en_%E8%8B%B1%E8%AF%AD_English.pdf [Accessed 12 March 2021].