Official AMA with CEO Dmitriy Budorin

11 min readJan 15, 2020

Over the past couple of months since our initial announcement of the HackenAI app and the new HAI token, we have achieved several milestones, with the release of the new website, whitepaper, getting new private investors on board, and more.

With the HackenAI project comes a renewed focus on maximising token utility for the HAI token. To achieve this, the entire HackenAI team has been relentlessly working on the project in various aspects, from software development, investor pitching, strategic planning with our advisors and more. This has come with a trade-off of fewer community interactions by the core team on social media, but rest assured that we consider the community to be the pillar of our project.

On the 10th of January, 2019, HackenAI CEO Dmitry Budorin took the initiative to increase transparency and share progress updates with the community. A video AMA was held with questions collected on the VeChain and Hacken subreddits.

Transcript and highlights of the AMA

We truly believe in our product and appreciate Hacken’s investors who are continuing to believe in us. We are going to restore the old trust through our actions. We are focused on our product and we believe it will find its place on the market.
As we switched from B2B to B2C business model we have changed the communication strategy with the community. We want to build the community not around the token but around our new product HackenAI. HackenAI is a B2C application focused on providing personal cybersecurity tools for the global market. Of course, token demand will depend on product demand. So as far as we release the first version of HackenAI we will start building the community around the product, but HAI token will be an integral part of the application. — Dmitry Budorin, CEO HackenAI

What functionality will be included in the MVP?

The main focus is CyberBootCamp. It should be fun, easy and knowledgeable and a huge catalyst for HackenAI app adoption. Users should want to finish it. Also, there will be a password manager and a digital wallet for HAI staking and token swap modules. Currently, we are making great progress in product development and we are proud of what we have done.

What is the HackenAI product development roadmap for this year?

February is an internal deadline and Q1 2020 is our official roadmap estimate for the MVP release. It also depends on the Google Play Store and the Apple Store’s compliance procedures. After the MVP release, we plan to release updates regularly adding new features, with two updates planned this year.

Can you please clarify what the HackenAI user acquisition campaign is about?

We target different communities that are close to us in the first place. Hacken is the key community. We will initially launch a closed beta test for our loyal community members. We hope to get maximum feedback from our early adopters to provide the best user experience. Secondly comes the VeChain community. The next step is reaching out to the global community involved in cryptocurrencies, online trading and other individuals that would like to obtain the highest level of personal cybersecurity.

What’s your plan for user retention? (increasing the value of HAI through adoption)

One of our ideas to increase retention is to educate users on good cybersecurity habits and provide them with the most needed cybersecurity tools they will use on a daily basis. Our goal is to become an all in one security application to provide essential tools and features for personal cybersecurity. These include password manager, secure storage, VPN, digital asset tracker, etc, all in one application. We will also introduce staking options that require HAI tokens to our users as well as an innovative and fun gamification experience within the application. We will have unlockable achievements and a system of NFT collectibles within the App. We believe all of this including the innovative pricing model will positively affect user retention. We want our users to help us grow by recommending us to their friends and family. It will be the highest reward for us and a community as well.

Who is your target audience?

After successful work with both the Hacken and the Vechain ecosystem community, our next focus is the greater crypto community. 100,000 users’ achievement is our target for the first year of operations and we are very confident with our strategy that we can reach this first milestone together. We are putting in all of our efforts to create an application that anyone can use. We made it simple and functional with the elements of gamification. Functionally, our tokenized application suits, but is not limited to, most people whose work needs the highest level of personal cybersecurity, especially traders who care about the security of their trading accounts, as well as digital accounts, etc. But once again we have designed the HackenAI app to fit global market needs related to all things cybersecurity. Our marketing campaign will also play a huge role in our ability to achieve the first milestone. We all know that the key factor in the success of any application is the word of mouth. So we have created an easy to pitch application, where our adopters are our ambassadors. We believe the HackenAI will be the product that anyone will not be shy to recommend to their friends.

How will the staking system work and what are the benefits?

Initial benefits and system were announced in the whitepaper. It is not fixed. We will change it accordingly for user value maximization if needed. They need to be in line with regulators, so as not to be treated as securities. By now we have four staking levels, you can find these in more detail in our whitepaper.

Will Hacken’s VPN service be an add-on or part of a package in the mobile app?

VPN is going to be in the 3rd release of the App probably at the end of 2020. It will be one of the features of the mobile app. But important to note that HackenAI is not only a mobile app, but it will also be available on laptops and PCs on the most popular operational systems.

Can you elaborate on ways that the app will burn VTHO? (VTHO is the gas token of the VeChainThor blockchain. It is generated by holding VET).

The HackenAI app interacts in various ways with the VeChainThor blockchain which of course require the consumption and burn of VTHO, outside of normal token transfers which we are very excited to elaborate on in the near future. Of course, we will utilize features of VeChain’s blockchain such as Fee Delegation for such interactions.

Where do you see Hacken going in the next 5 years? What is the “image” you have for the future of Hacken?

We want to create a user-friendly personal cybersecurity application that will keep people safe on the internet. We will enable and protect 10s of millions of users for our application, which will cover all OS (iOS, Android, Windows, etc). Our vision is that HackenAI will be the one App that solves most of the personal cybersecurity issues. The underlying goal will always be aiming to make people feel more secure in the ever-present digital world as well as protecting their digital assets, which we believe will be ubiquitous as blockchain technology and regulation matures.

How’s cer.live doing? When will the new certificate and stock market information arrive? Can we get information about partnership and data cooperation with CMC?

We are working on the third version of the cybersecurity score. New partners will be introduced, which we will announce in the near future.

Has the team considered offering, either as a product or as a promotion, basic code auditing services to the VeChainThor dev community at a discount so that community dapps can safely be exposed to the VeChainthor community? I think this would also elevate Hacken’s brand in the community as community devs can be great brand advocates.

This is what we are experienced in. Building new products, as well as dapps, is a long process. In my opinion, the next step after conducting a deep market analysis is building the MVP of your product to prove your hypothesis and find the first early adopters. If the hypothesis is right and the product fits the market needs the scaling process comes in. You are raising additional investments and only after this, you start thinking about security. Of course, we want to fix this issue and will do everything needed to help VeChainThor dev community make dapps safer in terms of cybersecurity. We are ready to cooperate with VeChainThor dev community and promise to give even some free reviews of dapps in the new 2020 year. Please reach out to discuss this.

During a recent AMA with Sunny Lu, he mentioned here that Hacken was possibly going to work on the security of Authority Masternodes. Can you please elaborate on this?

The Authority Masternodes (AM) security is the most prestigious works you can get from the VeChain family. AM has very strict internal control policies. We are taking steps in this direction and expect to work on it in the future. We are very experienced in blockchain security and are well renowned for testing products for security issues but we are committed to proving our skills through releasing our new B2C product, and then, of course, we plan to integrate more deeply into the VeChain ecosystem.

Great to have another project running on the network, but what’s happening and where is the communication with the community? Is the community a top priority for the team?

Our community always was and will be the top priority for the team. In the last half of 2019, we have been focusing on our new HackenAI product. We have learned from our mistakes and now we are 100% committed to HackenAI to prove to our loyal community what we are capable of and hopefully reward them in the process. The industry has changed a lot over the last two years and the instruments and market speculation that affected the price of the token in 2017 and 2018 don’t work anymore. Only the product and product marketing strategy that creates organic demand on the product and token itself would work. So, all of our team is focused now on building a great product that will fit the market needs. The result of our work will be able to seen shortly by the end of Q1 2020.

HKN price has dropped abysmally, and this was not only due to the token itself having little purpose but with the team disappearing in summer 2019. Some community members have also disappeared from social media. Please comment.

As we decided to switch from a B2B to B2C business model, we focused fully on developing the product itself. As a result, in the midst of this, we have changed our communication strategy with the community. Of course, we miss the people who left, but we are moving forward. Now we want to build the community not just around the token but around our new product HackenAI. HackenAI is a B2C application focused on providing personal cybersecurity tools for the global market. Of course, token demand will depend on product demand. So as far as we release the first version of HackenAI we will start building the community around the product, but HAI token will be an integral part of the application.

Is pre-sale over? What can you do to prevent the price fall?

Yes, we have managed to close the pre-sale and now we have enough funds to work on the product. And all deals were closed according to our pre-sale terms with lock-ups. All presale investors believe in us and in our product and they are not speculative traders, they are not going to sell tokens immediately after the listings. We have closed exactly as much as needed to finish the product development.

Do you have long-term corporate investors? If so, what will you do to prevent them from making sales?

In the case of HAI, we have long term investors. And they are not only long term investors, but they are also our partners and mentors. They believe in the product and help us to build the incredible one. Of course, they have long term lockups for the tokens, and they are 100% on board and committed to seeing us succeed with our tokenized product.

What happens to the HKN tokens that don’t get swapped? Will their HAI tokens get burnt?

We have implemented the token swap function within the HackenAI application. All HKN holders will have plenty of time to swap tokens, as currently, we do not have plans to limit the swap time.

I would love to hear more about the utility of the HAI token.

The number one utility of HAI is a subscription. We made a deep analysis of the market and found out that the price for personal cybersecurity applications varies from 5 to 20 USD per month. We decided that HAI will be used to cover subscription fees with a discount to the original USD price. The second utility is staking. Staking means that you can freeze some tokens in the App using smart contracts to get some benefits, like a free subscription or additional features, etc. Lots of applications provide their users with lifetime subscriptions, so for our users, we have created different HAI stacking levels to receive some benefits using our applications. The third utility is gamification, we will have a lot of features available for the tokens within the App. And the fourth utility is the ability to sell cybersecurity services on our CyberMarketplace within the HackenAI App, which will be powered by HAI.

Can you please elaborate on the supply and demand model in the White paper?

More users — more demand on the token. We use a system similar to multi-level referrals where you can go and pitch the HackenAI product to your friends and family and can even make it fun by pointing out some security flaws in their current setup, which allows you to be able to pitch HackenAI and how it can help them. By referring five or more new users you are helping to increase the demand on the token and popularity of the App.

What makes you believe HackenAI will have constant demand and success moving forward?

The quality of the product matters the most. We believe the tools and features provided within the product will help users to improve their personal cybersecurity. Today there are a lot of applications that offer different cybersecurity tools, but we believe that only all-in-one style application will gain most users’ attention. We have a long term plan and strategy on how to grow HackenAI and make it more useful for the users.

What’s going to happen with EOSHKN?

It’s also going to be swapped to HAI. The details will be announced soon.

Even though locking rewards are going to be offered, HKN has had problems with liquidity and short-sellers, is there going to be big exchanges since the beginning of the swap/after the IEO.

Yes, of course, we are planning to get listed on the bigger exchanges soon after the launch of the application and utility for the token is introduced. The idea is to synchronize the releases on the application to exchange listings, which we believe will have the maximum effect on new listings. Thanks to our strategic partners and advisors, we now have the knowledge of how to work legally and properly with market makers.

Going back to the point above, this mismanagement of the community and the team has made the initial investors, especially the top ones lost 99% of their money. Some of these were the ones that helped to get Hacken running. A mere 1:15 ratio seems too little.

We have introduced the increased ratio for our most loyal community members who are willing to lock up their tokens for 3, 6 or 12 months. 1:30 ratio will be available with a 12-month lockup option.

Where can we swap our HKN, and can we receive an e-mail for notification?

All HKN is going to get swapped within the HackenAI application. Please visit www.hacken.ai and leave your email there to get regular updates.

Why ST on Kucoin again?

Right now we are discussing what is going to happen with HKN after the start of the swap process.

Once again, the community is a top priority and thank you so much for all of your support. Stay tuned for more updates on our official social media channels.