Took a dive into Hex crypto

Over the last few days, I’ve watched probably 10+ hours of interviews and debates featuring Hex’s polarizing founder, Richard Heart. The following is my summary of Heart’s basic pitch for Hex and his response to what I believe are the two most fundamental questions about Hex. Heart’s answers to the two questions below are not whole word for word quotes, but the substance of the assertions were all made by Richard and the majority are word for word statements he made. I took the liberty of slightly re-organizing and adapting his various statements so they are more concise and make sense in this context.

I welcome all thoughts / questions / criticisms in response.


My Summary of Hex founder’s “pitch” for Hex:

The market has shown a cryptocurrency does not need utility to achieve growth in price. It needs a story and good marketing. Hex’s pitch is that it’s Ethereum’s “bitcoin” but with the feature of allowing you to “deposit” it and earn yield similar to a certificate of deposit. You can stake your Hex (stake = deposit) for as little as 1 day and up to 15 years. When you “unstake,” you get your staked Hex back plus interest. The interest is your share of Hex’s 3.69% inflation. The longer you stake, the bigger your cut. This feature in theory should also support Hex’s price, as the more people hold the higher the price should be. The staking feature is built into Hex and does not rely on trusting any middle men.



Question: When you make a time deposit you actually give those funds to the bank, they become accessible to the bank. If you stake something in Hex, who are you making it accessible to? Why should you get any interest on something you don’t loan out?

Heart: You could call it virtual lending and that you’re lending it to everyone who is not staked because it holds the price of the non-staked coins up. So in theory, everyone who isn’t staked has an increased value.

Banks let your deposit sit there and act as a “reserve” to get leveraged up 10 fold and get 10 times the free money from the government, and what is that money the government gives them? Inflation. So when you put your money in the bank, anyone who gets yield gets it from inflation. Where do bitcoin miners get their yield? Inflation. Where do Hex stakers get their yield? Inflation. Staking your Hex is like getting free bitcoin mining machines that run without electricity.



Question: Why would there be demand for Hex?

Heart: Have you seen the coin market cap top 100? Nothing has adoption, and yet everything is worth billions. So it turns out in crypto, you do not need to have utility. You need to have a good story and good marketing.

In bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies no one has replaced the time deposit, the certificate of deposit. We don’t have a cryptocurrency to replace the $7.2 trillion in time deposits just in the United States and China alone. That’s larger than printed money, that’s a larger market.

Everyone thinks that what makes one crypto better than another is some bullshite narrative. Bitcoin was peer to peer digital currency – it didn’t work out and it didn’t matter, price went from $1 to $20,000 with no adoption. The narratives just changed – “it’s programmable money.” Ok well who programmed it to do anything ever? No one. So why does the price keep going up? Because the market is smarter than the dumb narratives that you guys think matter. The reason the price is going up is because people are buying it and holding it, and the excuses why they’re doing that are irrelevant. What matters is the buying and holding, so let’s reward the buying and holding. The only actual thing that makes one cryptocurrency better than another is people holding it.