Ishan Pandey: Welcome, Andrey, to our "Behind the Startup" series. It's a pleasure to have you. As Co-Founder and CTO of HOT Labs, you're at the forefront of some truly innovative cross-chain developments. Can you start by telling us a bit about your journey into the blockchain space and what specifically led you to co-found HOT Labs? Ishan Pandey: Andrey Zhevlakov: It all started three years ago, when Petr Volnov and I set out to build the best mobile wallet for the NEAR blockchain. At the time, the ecosystem was still relatively open, and we clearly understood that in the wild world of Web3 — with its zoo of technologies — it's crucial to find a niche and be the best in at least one ecosystem. Trying to build a truly great product for all blockchains at once is simply an impossible task. Nevertheless, as we evolved, we realized that users consistently face two major pain points that we had to solve: protection from scammers and the ability to move their funds across chains when new companies arise in other ecosystems (airdrops, memecoins and etc). These are exactly the problems we began solving with the MPC protocol and HOT Omni, which laid the foundation for what is now HOT Labs. Andrey Zhevlakov: Ishan Pandey: The concept of a "meta-balance" is central to HOT Omni. Could you elaborate on the technical intricacies of how this meta-balance operates on top of the NEAR Protocol and facilitates the transfer and exchange of omni tokens across chains like Stellar, TON, Solana, and NEAR? What were the key engineering challenges in achieving this interoperability? Ishan Pandey: Andrey Zhevlakov: The meta-balance in HOT Omni is a single non-custodial balance stored on NEAR that keeps track of what the user owns across other chains like Stellar, TON, and Solana — not just by tracking, but by actually holding information about assets locked in trustless lockers. It becomes the main point of interaction: users don’t need to go to other chains, switch wallets or pay gas in different tokens — everything happens through intents, and executors handle the rest. This way, users can transfer, swap, or withdraw across chains from one place, without thinking about what network their assets are on. Andrey Zhevlakov: Ishan Pandey: HOT Omni leverages trustless lockers and an MPC + TEE network, drawing parallels to THORChain. From a business perspective, what are the most significant advantages this approach offers to developers and users compared to other cross-chain solutions, particularly in terms of security, efficiency, and capital requirements? Ishan Pandey: Andrey Zhevlakov: First of all, our MPC protocol provides many opportunities to manage access to your multichain account. From changing the seed phrase and full 2FA, to limited access to certain smart contracts, which allows you to create and configure trading bots and safely delegate the management of certain assets to AI agents. Together with HOT Omni, our network enables the creation of Binance 3.0, a truly decentralized exchange. Andrey Zhevlakov: Ishan Pandey: A core promise of HOT Omni is the ability to write a smart contract once in Rust that can interact with DeFi assets from multiple networks. This is a powerful proposition for developers. Beyond the technical feasibility, what are the broader implications of this "write once, deploy everywhere" paradigm for the DeFi ecosystem and the adoption of decentralized applications? Ishan Pandey: Andrey Zhevlakov: In my opinion, this paradigm will lead to a partial rejection of centralized exchanges and chain-specific dapps. This is an important step for mass adoption. Today, the user has to think about too many things to use their funds, use bridges, pay for gas, use different wallets for specific tasks. At the moment, there are not many tools for developing a chain-abstraction application, we at HOT Labs want to fix this. Andrey Zhevlakov: Ishan Pandey: Interoperability is often discussed as the "holy grail" of blockchain. What, in your opinion, are the biggest current misconceptions about achieving true cross-chain functionality, and how does HOT Omni directly address these misconceptions with its unique approach? Ishan Pandey: Andrey Zhevlakov: One of the biggest misconceptions about cross-chain interoperability is that bridging tokens between chains is enough. In reality, simply moving assets doesn’t solve the deeper issue of fragmented user experience — users still have to manage multiple wallets, pay gas in different tokens, and deal with the complexities of each chain’s infrastructure. HOT Omni takes a different approach by introducing intent-based chain abstraction: instead of forcing users to move tokens themselves, they interact with a unified meta-balance on NEAR that represents assets locked across chains. Andrey Zhevlakov: Actions like transfers, swaps, or withdrawals are expressed as intents, and executors fulfill them across networks. This model removes the need for the user to interact with each blockchain directly, achieving practical interoperability without sacrificing decentralization or self-custody. Ishan Pandey: Building and scaling a complex platform like HOT Omni undoubtedly comes with significant technical and operational hurdles. What have been some of the most challenging obstacles you've encountered in bringing this vision to life, and how have your team and technology overcome them? Ishan Pandey: Andrey Zhevlakov: One of the key challenges has been standardizing the zoo of standards, formats, and approaches used by different blockchains. This truly required a long process of debugging and many iterations in order to build a high-quality abstraction layer. Another major issue that any cross-chain token bridge protocol faces is the verification of transaction finality across different networks. Fortunately, our MPC network allowed us to solve this relatively quickly, as we had already built and tested it at scale with millions of users relying on it. However, I believe the most difficult part still lies ahead: popularizing the technology and onboarding developers and projects. We already have a working SDK and our first technical partners using our protocol for real-world business use cases — for example, NEAR.Intents. However, to truly establish ourselves as a foundational piece of cross-chain infrastructure, we must continue to grow our developer ecosystem and community adoption. Andrey Zhevlakov: Ishan Pandey: Looking ahead, what strategic partnerships and ecosystem integrations are you prioritizing to further enhance the utility and reach of the HOT Omni platform? How do you envision HOT Omni evolving to support an even broader range of blockchain networks and DeFi primitives in the future? Ishan Pandey: Andrey Zhevlakov: Our immediate plans include refining the SDK for interaction with HOT Omni and the MPC protocol, as well as developing a fully-featured chain-abstraction DeFi exchange outside of our wallet. As for future partnerships, we believe it’s important not only to collaborate with major blockchains, but also to serve as a bridge between chains with relatively low liquidity and top-tier blockchains. This includes many Layer 2 networks that are in need of reliable bridging solutions and further ecosystem development. Naturally, we are also interested in integrating new, specialized chains into our protocol - for example, Sui and Aptos. Andrey Zhevlakov: Don’t forget to like and share the story!

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