After hearing about the controversy regarding Hedron in the HEX community, doing some research and listening to the Twitter Space with CryptoOrca and Mati Allin, it’s an interesting case to try and draw some ground truth from.

Hedron is a system of smart contracts on Ethereum and the upcoming PulseChain fork to allow the tokenization of HEX stakes, basically making them into an NFT, which allows them to be traded as new assets. If you have HEX stakes, you can claim or mint Hedron.

So what’s wrong with that?

The case against Hedron seems to go like this: by making new assets from your HEX stakes, this takes the HEX truth engine and game theory into uncharted waters. Of course nothing can affect the HEX smart contract itself, but the idea that the staked HEX in fact can be traded is a path that wasn’t accounted for in the original idea. The reason argued that this is not complimentary to HEX is because if Hedron becomes popular, it could detract from the HEX value proposition, getting paid to lock up coins over time, in a somewhat conceptually similar way to how a UASF (user-activated soft fork) can provide justification for a new coin and some users “go over there”, similar to BTC/BCH back in 2017. Hedron gets to easily on-board the HEX community and some users may prefer to use Hedron more than HEX in the future.

Now what is the case to support Hedron?

One could look at it as an innovative product that provides HEX users access to share stakes that they own. If you’re staking for the famous 5555 days period, you can’t touch your coins without penalty for at least 7.5 years and that is quite a while. We like delayed gratification, but a new feature available to users to keep their coins locked up, yet derive value from those t-shares, seems like the type of project the community would welcome aboard. Hedron in a way actually encourages longer stakes, such as 10-15 years ones, because you can get some value out of them sooner while keeping your stakes. It differs from a “Vampire Attack” in that Hedron isn’t incentivizing users to leave HEX and join Hedron, but more like, “here’s a free token for HEX stakers, you can use the system to tokenize your stakes too”.

You never need to sell your HEX, but you can sell your Hedron or HODL it just the same. And probably the most fundamental point that makes an “affect game theory” argument go south is that stakers can already sell their private keys to whoever they want as the keys control the wallet regardless of who is in possession of them. The wallet controls the stakes and therefore you can already trade HEX stakes as a native feature of the blockchain. Hedron just compartmentalizes this process, making it easier and safer to do on an NFT marketplace that’s already established.

There’s also a touchy feely argument on both sides here: alienating people and projects that are using the blockchain in a completely legitimate way is not good. Building on an ecosystem in a different way than founders intended is fair game and it’s not the most healthy thing for the OA or anyone else to try and “fix” anything. No HEX user is bound by any contract to abide by any rules or “the spirit” of what the founder or controlling interest party prefers. That’s what you signed up for when using unstoppable code.

But of course if you have (un)vested interest in seeing HEX do as well as it possibly can, meaning you have little to no appetite for risk to the ecosystem, it makes sense to try and bring solid arguments to the table and discuss them with the community. Developers are gonna develop and if you’re interested in the truth and engineering, you’ll lean towards that direction. Trying to do something contentious such as fork and try and stop Hedron from interacting with HEX won’t work because Hedron could fork and workaround it and it’s turtles all the way down from there. Trading stakes isn’t ending stakes… 5555s unaffected.

Of course everyone has their own interests and should rightfully be suspicious of new projects and their implications to HEX. They should want to protect the product and nobody wants to weaken the golden goose. HEX is a beautiful system and we want to keep it that way. But we all want to do it in a logical, community-driven way and support new products that give HEX users more features while also price go up.