Founder's Spotlight - Hassen

Let’s start at the beginning. How did you first discover crypto?

I was on telegram and there was this bot that if you do captchas you get DOGE coins, me and my friends were spamming it to then use those DOGE coins to gamble on stake. This was long before elon musk promoted DOGE and long before stake became a big company. Very quickly after the whole elon musk - doge saga I started looking into other crypto currencies, mainly bitcoin, ethereum but also I saw in a groupchat RUNE which I kept buying and then selling at the same support and resistance zones, that was also before rune ever hit above 20$

You got into THORChain very early. What was it about the project and $RUNE that stood out to you compared to everything else happening at the time?

Thorchain was solving a real problem that is crucial to the vision of crypto. If we truly want this financial world where we are immutable, uncensored, and have full self-custody then thorchain was a necessity, these wrapped assets always added a middle man and what we needed was a trustless solution that is what thorchain is. A protocol where users can exchange assets in an immutable and trustless way just like satoshi would have wanted.

You were active in the ThorGuards community. How did that experience shape your understanding of THORChain and the broader ecosystem?

Thorguards was my first experience with NFTs and also with directly integrating with an online community, I was still young back then and a little immature, but I learned what matters to investors and buyers, I mean thorguard was such a great group, its a shame it died down. Investors put money in because they expect value, and if investors leave then you have lost your base, it is far harder to rebuild an investor base than to simply take care of those relations and grow from there. I would say I was very very naive back then and I was unfamiliar with a lot of the marketing tactics and I did not know how to differentiate between vaporware or real solid ideas or project compared to just promises and hype. It was an important lesson in my growth.

What was the biggest pain point in your own crypto experience that eventually led you to decide to build something yourself?

Having to constantly juggle so many wallets, the worst was when I finish a setup on a new wallet just to learn this wallet wont solve my problem either. When I decide to sit down and do my buys or sells of the week it would take me 2h just to get everything done. Its a pain.

What made you take the leap from community member to founder and start BiorLabs?

It was a slow process, I started investing in startups which led me to then volunteer and help many startups even within thorchain. Slowly as I was super ambitious and enthusiastic, those startups would give me more tasks, and my responsibilities would grow as well as my knowledge and experience. Eventually I started understanding the core principles of a startup, what a startup needs to be a startup instead of vaporware, and what makes a startup fail, mainly I had to learn from failures, why this or that fails. Ive seen projects succeed too but usually my involvement was limited, I wanted to have a project where I play a role and end up successful.

Can you walk us through the original vision for BiorVault? Why focus on a self-custody mobile wallet combined with real-world payment cards?

Because it is a real pain point. The original vision was actually a cross-chain protocol for monero, after we learned that serai-dex is already making one and that we most probably do not have the talent needed for that, we decided to instead support serai-dex by building a wallet that would integrate them, of course after realizing their project will take a while to develop we decided lets just build a wallet, and later we can support them when they are ready. I quickly got obsessed with the wallet idea and wanted it to be perfect, from there the idea of biorvault was born. 

BiorVault is designed to feel familiar to Web2 users while staying fully non-custodial. How did you approach making powerful features like cross-chain swaps simple and approachable for newcomers?

Well very simply we decided to cut all the friction, if you look at CEXs they dont allow any trading pair to fly, so we decided to do the same, if a swap would be too complicated for a user to perform, for instance multi hop swaps that require multiple signatures, we simply remove those from being available. A user can manually do the multi hop swaps regardless. We then modified the terminology, “unlocking token” to create a spending cap which is far easier to understand. When you say unlock you need to explain that they are locked and what that means, but to create a spending cap is far simpler to understand, you are allowing us to spend your funds, how much are we allowed to spend. Its simple. The next step was to make tracking the swap and understanding the swap easy. All the information needed to be clear, with clear titles in front of each number. Many swappers today if you are not familiar with defi you wont understand half of those numbers or lines.

Why was integrating deeply with THORChain so important for BiorVault? What unique advantages does using THORChain’s native liquidity provide compared to wrapped assets or other bridges?

THORChain brings the CEX experience to our self-custody wallet. THORChain makes us competitive.

Of all the features in the app, like the debit cards, portfolio tracker, swaps, and more, which one are you most proud of? And what can users expect in the near future?

What I am most proud of is the user interface and user experience and not any specific feature, simply because we put so much work and effort into it. It is unique and yet it is good. Users can expect to have crypto cards in the near future KYC and non-KYC with also Bill pay at their disposal. (note that The non-kyc cards are prepaid cards and not any kind of shady business dealings)

For everyone watching who wants to start spending their crypto directly in the real world without complicated off-ramping, where can they go right now to download BiorVault and get instant access?

On the appstore or playstore. We are live!!! We even allow de-googled android users to download our APK file if they dont use the playstore: https://linktr.ee/biorlabs