Introducing Altera
The time has finally come for the Beta launch of VSC Network’s flagship application: Altera! If you have been following us or even our intern’s account on X, you might have seen us talking about Altera a lot lately without too much context. With the VSC Mainnet online for about a month and stabilized, it’s time to deploy the first of many applications on VSC. We’ve been building our DeFi application from the ground up with user experience as the focus, and we couldn’t be more proud of what we have created. Hive has desperately needed a “breakthrough” app to take it to the mainstream, and we truly believe that Altera could be that catalyst. Altera is next-gen DeFi built to turn Hive into a hub for cross-chain trading, payments, and more.
What makes Altera different?
One of the first questions people generally ask when presented with a new DeFi application is - “what makes it different than what’s already available on the market?”. With its focus on cross-chain payments, Altera makes managing value across different assets extremely user-friendly. On top of this, every asset deployed into liquidity pools will be paired with HBD, similar to how every asset on Thorchain or Maya Protocol is paired with their native assets. This allows for better pricing and efficient routing of assets during sends or trades. Users can log into Altera with Social Login (Discord, Google, X, Facebook, etc…) and manage all of their assets just like if they had logged in with their crypto wallet. In addition to Social login, Altera supports EVM wallets like Metamask, CTRL, and Trust Wallet as well, allowing anyone with any wallet to log in and get started in seconds.
Of course, there is support for Hive wallets such as Hive Keychain, Hive Auth, Peak Vault, and even Ledger. Giving anyone in the world the ability to connect regardless of which wallet they prefer to use is something that no other DeFi application has done. Sure, you could connect any wallet, but you couldn’t manage any asset. For example. You couldn’t trade BTC by connecting your Metamask wallet to Uniswap.
Altera takes your on-chain identity and ownership to a level never before seen. Metamask wallets can own BTC, SOL, and HIVE. Social Logins can manage HBD, ETH, and BTC on Lightning. Decentralized identities are becoming more powerful, creating a better overall user experience for anyone who wants a simple way to manage their assets.
Cross-chain payments are something that we really don’t see talked about much at all. We feel it’s a very important piece of making DeFi easy for everyone, because it allows users to move value easily. For example, if you had Bitcoin on the Lightning Network and wanted to send your friend some HBD, you would have to go through quite a few steps to do that. With Altera, it’s as simple as connecting your wallet and selecting your Input/Output assets, and entering a recipient. In seconds, Altera handles the complex steps, and the recipient receives the selected Output asset. What does this look like? We knew you’d ask, so here’s a visual.
The steps are as simple as they get. Connect your wallet, select BTC, and which network it’s on. In this case, we’re sending BTC from Lightning. Then on the To side, select HBD on Hive Mainnet. Of course, the network charges a small fee for handling the different transactions in the background, and then the recipient receives the selected asset. No swapping between multiple assets, managing gas funds on each network, and then doing a whole separate transaction to actually send the payment. The really cool part is - if the recipient has never used VSC Network before, they just received their ticket to access. On VSC, there are no gas fees, you just need some amount of HBD in your wallet that gets locked/unlocked automatically for Resource Credits as transactions are made. Talk about easy onboarding!
Altera will also help VSC Network witnesses with staking and unstaking their HIVE for consensus. We’ve made it incredibly easy to manage staking, and of course deposits/withdrawals to Hive. Here you can see what a transaction will look like when checking your history on the app. You’ll get a link to both the Hive and VSC block explorers so you can see your operations on both chains, along with a button to easily copy the transaction ID for record keeping.
As with any Beta version of any app, please keep in mind that some features may not be available. Some things may not work. There will definitely be bugs. That’s why we need you to test and try to break everything so we can make our app ready for the masses. We encourage you to test anything available, whether it’s just depositing HIVE onto VSC and withdrawing back to Hive, or sending a cross-chain payment to a friend. We need as much feedback and testing as possible, so don’t be afraid to get involved. You certainly don’t need to be a crypto expert to use it, and that’s the ultimate goal.
What does this mean for Hive?
One of the obvious questions people are asking is… What does all of this mean for Hive as a whole? Well, it means a lot of things. Hive is a very powerful blockchain that has been siloed for far too long by its own limitations and incompatibility with other ecosystems. Altera brings Hive into the future with true DeFi, connecting it with many chains through our liquidity pools. Users will be able to onboard capital into the ecosystem extremely easily, which is a complete 180-degree change from the current experience (especially in the U.S.). Whether they want to onboard fiat or swap Bitcoin for HIVE/HBD, they’ll be able to handle that in one place with one wallet.
It may sound like a very simple thing, but this opens up many doors. Pairing assets like BTC, ETH, SOL, and more assets directly with HBD in liquidity pools creates demand for HBD. Demand for HBD creates demand for HIVE, especially considering the limited amount on the market. Swaps on Altera will generate revenue for the network and liquidity providers, which could also flow into the overall ecosystem. What we’ve built creates demand for HIVE and HBD automatically, all we have to do is bring the masses. There’s never been a better time to bring Hive into the broader crypto ecosystem as a cross-chain powerhouse, and that’s exactly what we are going to do.
Call to Action: Join the Beta test!
If you’re as excited as we are and ready to get involved, join us on Discord to be one of the first Beta testers! We’ve already gotten quite a few requests, so we sincerely hope to see you there. We will be releasing access instructions over the coming days as we get the backend of the application optimized and ready for use. All you need to do now is join our Discord and react with an emoji to the Beta testing message in the Announcements channel as shown above. As a reminder, we have a new DHF proposal open that starts soon for our 2025 funding. If you have a spare vote and want to support launching Hive into the future of cross-chain, head on over and vote for our proposal using your favorite frontend!