HEAT — The 1st True DEX

8 min readJul 24, 2019

This is Part 3 of my series on exchanges that have a chance to disrupt the incumbents this coming bull season. (Part 1, Part 2)

Today we have an interview with a 🔥hot🔥 DEX that has been quietly working in the background for years. It has a chance to fill the hole left by the inadequacies of first generation DEXs. HEAT has been working hard on development for several years, and is now launching the latest and best version of their platform. Notably, their multi-year longevity assures chain stability, and strong performance.

Without further ado, our conversation with Dennis De Klerk, CTO and Founder of HEAT Ledger:

Before we get started, lets go for the question that’s on everyone’s minds — How high is bitcoin going this time around and why?

Thats easy. To the moon!

What is HEAT Ledger?

HEAT Wallet & DEX combines an ultra-secure crypto wallet, with a non-custodial crypto exchange. All under one hood, so you can enjoy your trade safely!

The wallet uses client-side authentication security, and the exchange is decentralized, so forget the panic attacks about your cryptos every time you hear an exchange got hacked.

Now that that’s out of the way, why don’t you introduce yourself, and tell us your love story with crypto!

I am Dennis De Klerk, CTO and Founder of HEATLedger.

I came to the party in 2013 as I got involved with NXT. It absolutely was a love story, perhaps a weird kind of love as I found something that I could comprehend but at the same time sometimes completely went over my head. Perhaps its this challenging factor that attracts me to crypto so much, there is always something new to learn.

How did HEAT come about?

In a matter of weeks I was building wallets in the end I built several, from there we created a fork of NXT — FIMK — which had some quite advanced upgrades back in those days and is still operational today. After three years it was time to start HEAT together with my business partner and our current CEO Svante Lethinen.

We stayed very close to the original idea for HEAT which was to make a blockchain that was very fast, had an infinite storage capacity and that could run on your PC or laptop. We are quite happy with where we are on that roadmap.

A couple of questions on the state of the industry…..

First, what do you make of Libra, the new blockchain project associated with Facebook?

I see a lot of potential in using Libra as an on and off ramp to get in and go out of crypto. As I understand it in a year from now over 2 Billion people will have Libra in their Whatsapp or Messenger apps and you can pay with those almost anywhere.

Libra is a cryptocurrency like any other, it’s a stable coin basically that’s free to use for anyone. We will definitely be making use of Libra and who knows soon after that Google coin, Amazon coin..

With increasing regulation and scrutiny by government, as well as un-reputable corporations like Facebook entering the scene, privacy is ever more important to my readers.

What steps are you protecting your user’s privacy and security?

The decentralized HEAT network and p2p protocol is like the internet. It enforces no KYC and we can not control it any more than anyone can control Bitcoin transactions.

Operators who use the HEAT network to run services (any tech capable person can fairly easily set up a cryptocurrency exchange, or crypto asset exchange on it, with negligible fees) have their individual policies regarding KYC. Regarding Facebook’s entry to crypto, just to say that I am a believer that the future is off-chain payments. Actually, we are already looking into doing off chain Libra payments as well as Atomic Swaps. We see the HEAT blockchain as a complement to Libra in a role of a decentralized storage mechanism and a host to all sorts of services that deal with Libra as well.

What is the most interesting news you’ve read about blockchain / crypto in the last month?

To be honest I’m quite busy coding and building our company most of the day but I do follow some curated news here and there, the best parts are normally shared through twitter or on our community discord.

There was however this one blockchain group that did something cool, some Finnish team ha ha. https://medium.com/@heatledger/heat-blockchain-unlimited-size-to-enable-the-adoption-of-true-decentralization-62aed1f4af67.

No but seriously I believe what Komodo did was very cool with launching their Antara framework today it’s an idea we have been experimenting with and that will definitely become a reality where anyone could launch their own chain simply through configuring one online.

On your latest HEAT chain update, you announce an 18 Million Terabyte blockchain storage (wow!) and say that it enables true decentralization. Sounds like you guys have hit a big milestone but can you explain what exactly do you mean?

Yes sure I will explain. When we set out to build HEAT we had this idea of a new type of online service framework. We would make use of the peer 2 peer nature of a blockchain network and have people do business with each other by communicating over the blockchain.

The problem we wanted to solve was that communication between customer and service provider was lost or at least not securely archived. This might be preferable in certain cases but in others — mainly in crypto businesses — you would want to keep a record or at least be able to make public your communications (as we support strong encryption for those communications) even only as a matter of dispute resolvement.

These types of possible services range from exchanges to oracles to betting to escrows, basically every type of crypto business we have seen popup in one form or another. Through our services architecture you can install a HEAT server, hook it up to the peer 2 peer network and you could serve a world audience all the while your service code looks like a standard client/server application — but in our case your server does not connect directly to your customers, instead you are hidden behind the blockchain network. You don’t have to expose the location of your service.

To enable this we needed both the big bandwidth as well as the actual servers being able to operate on low end devices like laptops or PC’s and how knows on your phone even in a future scenario.

What is this “multi-atomic-swap” I see advertised? Is that some kind of AntMan technology?

Lol. It’s Atomic Swap, although the multi does give it a nice ring. It means so much as swapping one crypto currency for another between two parties, it happens in several steps where both parties at a certain point can safely send each other crypto amounts without the risk of the other party running off or not keeping up their end of the deal.

HEAT has already a wallet, but on your latest post you announce working on a new concept.

What challenges are you addressing, and how are you fixing them?

Our new wallet is built from the ground up as a multi chain, multi protocol wallet. At its core is a HD wallet private key hierarchy that also supports adding custom private keys as well as any other HD wallet or seed with child keys making it suitable for any type of cryptocurrency.

A good amount of attention was given to designing its data model, it supports utxo based coins as well as account based coins as well as any type of sub-token/asset model imaginable.

Other challenges relate to the server infrastructure required to operate such. We have opted for a development model called serverless architecture and are making sure it operates the same on all the big cloud computing providers this way ensuring up time even in case something goes wrong with one of these players.

We have developed an integration kit that guides a developer through a number of steps to add support for their coin or asset protocol or voting or staking whatever you can think off.

Brining all these things together with the added functionality of sending crypto to anyone of your contacts over Whatsapp, Email, Sms or any other method you prefer and we believe we can make a strong contribution to a whole lot of crypto projects out there.

Sounds like you are really tackling some current negative aspects of wallets, not only from a user perspective but from the dev communities. It also sounds like you really need to work with the different chain communities to integrate their coins and enable each coin’s functions. Why should others collaborate with you?

I believe they should not only work with us. For your project to grow and reach new audiences you want to reach out. But as far as integrations go we simply have the best possible integration mechanism out there.

We’ve analyzed practically every other wallet out there and we made sure we have the easiest integration mechanism. But that’s something that is possible only as we build this whole thing from scratch and it’s not like we are building one for the first time.

In the end its crypto against the rest of the world. I don’t believe in a winner take all scenario as there are unique features to every blockchain network all deserving a place and an audience. Our aim is to bring those together in what will be your primary wallet to use all those or as a way to back up your holdings.

If the crypto kingdom were to crown a new monarch, who would you select?

At this point in time. And this won’t make me popular but I must say its Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook and by proxy of Libra. I’m not a facebook fan, never had an account there as I have always viewed it as a privacy nightmare.

But right now Libra is the biggest thing happening in crypto and I believe it will do more good things for crypto than many people realize. The privacy concerns however are real but so are the opportunities to introduce a whole new group of users to crypto perhaps users looking for better privacy and security after being introduced to Libra first.

Perhaps a good start for those users is to use our wallet instead.