Welcome to the Proof of Usefulness Hackathon spotlight, curated by HackerNoon’s editors to showcase noteworthy tech solutions to real-world problems. Whether you’re a solopreneur, part of an early-stage startup, or a developer building something that truly matters, the Proof of Usefulness Hackathon is your chance to test your product’s utility, get featured on HackerNoon, and compete for $150k+ in prizes. Submit your project to get started! Welcome to the Proof of Usefulness Hackathon spotlight, curated by HackerNoon’s editors to showcase noteworthy tech solutions to real-world problems. Whether you’re a solopreneur, part of an early-stage startup, or a developer building something that truly matters, the Proof of Usefulness Hackathon is your chance to test your product’s utility, get featured on HackerNoon, and compete for $150k+ in prizes. Submit your project to get started! Proof of Usefulness Hackathon spotlight Proof of Usefulness Hackathon spotlight Proof of Usefulness Hackathon Proof of Usefulness Hackathon $150k+ Submit your project to get started Submit your project to get started In this interview, we speak with Brad Messier, the CEO behind XColdPro Cold Wallet Storage. XColdPro is a patent-pending, hardware-agnostic cold storage software designed to protect both cryptocurrency keys and the host machine holding them, solving critical issues around digital asset inheritance and OS-level threat defense. XColdPro Cold Wallet Storage What does XColdPro Cold Wallet Storage do? And why is now the time for it to exist? XColdPro is patent-pending, hardware-agnostic cold storage software that protects both the keys and the machine holding them. Sentinel Guard provides 12-layer OS-level behavioral threat defense on the host machine, covering the attack surface every hardware wallet ignores. Lazarus Protocol is the first automated dead man's switch built into cold storage, solving digital asset inheritance without a third party. Now’s a good time for XColdPro Cold Wallet Storage to exist because billions of dollars in self-custodied digital assets are permanently lost due to a lack of secure inheritance protocols, and rising malware threats specifically target the host machines that traditional hardware wallets leave vulnerable. Who does your XColdPro Cold Wallet Storage serve? Self-custody cryptocurrency holders who need host machine security and digital asset inheritance planning. Specifically: individuals holding meaningful positions across 27+ blockchain networks who currently rely on hardware wallets that do not protect the machine they connect to and offer no mechanism for custody transfer on death or incapacitation. Secondary audience includes MSPs and IT departments managing enterprise crypto custody through our Arctic Dominion fleet licensing tier, and estate planners advising clients with digital asset exposure. What technologies were used in the making of XColdPro Cold Wallet Storage? And why did you choose ones most essential to your tech stack? XColdPro leverages Python and Electron to deliver a cross-platform experience, secured by robust AES-256-GCM encryption and PBKDF2 with 500K iterations. The tech stack is uniquely built to operate in a fully air-gapped, no-cloud environment, while utilizing scheduled task watchdog architecture and OS-level behavioral monitoring to seamlessly integrate threat intelligence. What is the traction to date for XColdPro Cold Wallet Storage? Currently in its pre-launch phase ahead of the April 2, 2026 release candidate, XColdPro is steadily building momentum. They have secured a provisional patent, established pricing tiers, and grown an active early community of 135 Telegram members while expanding their outreach to major crypto media outlets. XColdPro Cold Wallet Storage earned a 52 proof of usefulness score - how do you feel about that? Is it just right or do you think it needs to be reassessed? 52 proof of usefulness score Honestly, 52 for a pre-launch product feels right. We have not shipped the RC yet. We have no public user base to measure. The score reflects where we are today, not where the product is headed. What matters is that the two core capabilities - Sentinel Guard and Lazarus Protocol - scored on usefulness because they solve problems that genuinely do not have answers anywhere else in cold storage. When we re-score after launch with real users and real adoption data, the number will reflect that. Right now, 52 means "this solves a real problem but hasn't proven it at scale yet." That is an accurate read. What excites you about this XColdPro Cold Wallet Storage's potential usefulness? Two problems that affect every person who holds cryptocurrency in cold storage have never been solved at the software level. First, the host machine running cold storage is completely unprotected by every hardware wallet on the market. Sentinel Guard is the first product to treat the host machine as part of the threat surface rather than assuming it is clean. Second, there is no technical mechanism in any existing cold storage product for what happens when the holder dies. An estimated $140 billion in Bitcoin is permanently inaccessible, most of it lost not to hackers but to death. Lazarus Protocol is the first automated answer to that problem. These are not incremental improvements to an existing category. They are capabilities that did not exist before XColdPro. Walk us through your most concrete evidence of usefulness. Not vanity metrics or projections - what's the one data point that proves people genuinely need what you've built? The single most concrete data point is this: an estimated $140 billion in Bitcoin is permanently inaccessible today, and the majority of it was not stolen. It was lost because the holder died without a technical mechanism for custody transfer. That is not our number. That is documented industry data. Every hardware wallet on the market was designed to prevent unauthorized access. None of them were designed for what happens when the authorized person does not come back. Lazarus Protocol exists because that gap is real, measurable, and growing every year as more people hold significant value in self-custody with no continuity plan. How do you measure genuine user adoption versus "tourists" who sign up but never return? What's your retention story? We are pre-launch, so our retention story is not about app logins yet. It is about conviction. Our 135 Telegram community members have been with us through the entire development process. They are not followers from a marketing campaign. They are people who found us because the problem we solve is personal to them. They hold crypto, they have families, and they have no plan for what happens to those holdings if something happens to them. That is not a tourist. That is someone waiting for a product that does not exist yet. After April 2, retention will be measured by license activations, Sentinel Guard engagement rates, and Lazarus Protocol configuration completions. Those are the numbers that will tell us whether people are using the product or just buying it. If we re-score your project in 12 months, which criterion will show the biggest improvement, and what are you doing right now to make that happen? User adoption, without question. Right now our score is held back by the fact that we are pre-launch with no public usage data. Twelve months from now, we will have RC users running Sentinel Guard on their machines, Lazarus Protocol configurations active, and BootVault licenses deployed across individual and enterprise accounts. The product itself is built. The patent is filed. The architecture is sound. What changes the score is people using it, and that starts April 2. How Did You Hear About HackerNoon? We are publishing two technical articles on HackerNoon this week - one on Sentinel Guard's host machine defense architecture and one on Lazarus Protocol and the inheritance problem. HackerNoon is the right platform for technical content that needs to reach builders and serious holders, not just crypto speculators. The Proof of Usefulness hackathon came up during that process and the alignment was obvious. Since you are targeting tens of millions of self-custody Bitcoin holders but currently have a 135-member Telegram community, what is your primary go-to-market strategy to bridge this gap following your April 2026 release? We are not trying to reach millions on day one. The go-to-market strategy is targeted, not broad. First wave is direct outreach to crypto security reviewers, podcasters, and editorial outlets who cover self-custody - people whose audiences already hold in cold storage and already understand the problem. BTCSessions, Mental Outlaw, Techlore, Naomi Brockwell, Stephan Livera. These are not random influencers. They are people whose audiences will immediately understand why host machine defense and automated inheritance matter. Second wave is contributed articles in security publications (Dark Reading, SC Media) and estate planning publications (Financial Planning Magazine, Probate and Property, Above the Law) to reach the professional audiences - advisors, attorneys, MSPs - who are being asked about crypto inheritance and have no answer. Third wave is press release distribution on launch day through wire services and direct submissions. The community grows from credibility, not from ad spend. With secondary audiences like MSPs and IT departments for your Arctic Dominion fleet licensing, how do you plan to scale B2B enterprise sales alongside your individual self-custody focus? The enterprise path is built into the product architecture, not bolted on. Arctic Dominion is a 10-unit fleet licensing tier with a 12% volume discount, designed specifically for MSPs and IT departments deploying cold storage across client environments. Sentinel Guard's behavioral threat defense scales across managed machines, which is exactly what an MSP needs - standardized host-level security they can deploy and monitor for clients holding digital assets. The B2B sales motion is different from individual self-custody. It runs through contributed content in MSP publications like MSSPAlert and Channel Futures, direct outreach to managed security providers, and the enterprise pricing structure on the shop. Individual and enterprise are parallel tracks, not competing priorities. The Lazarus Protocol introduces a dead man's switch for inheritance—how do you ensure that this automated system is foolproof against accidental triggers while maintaining absolute air-gapped security? Lazarus Protocol uses a 5-stage notification system specifically designed to prevent accidental triggers. It is not a single timer that fires and transfers your keys. The user defines inactivity thresholds, and when those thresholds are approached, the system escalates through multiple notification stages before any action is taken. The OS-level background watchdog monitors for user activity on the machine itself. If the user returns and interacts with the system at any stage, the process resets entirely. No keys are ever transmitted at any point in the process. The inheritance plan executes locally, on the air-gapped machine, using pre-programmed instructions the user configured. There is no server, no cloud, no third party that can trigger or intercept the process. The air-gap is maintained throughout the entire lifecycle, including inheritance execution. Meet our sponsors Meet our sponsors Meet our sponsors Bright Data: Bright Data is the leading web data infrastructure company, empowering over 20,000 organizations with ethical, scalable access to real-time public web information. 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