Last month, Hello Pal International (HP.C) announced they were getting into crypto-mining, and more specifically with Litecoin and Dogecoin. We wrote about it indicating that maybe dogecoin wasn’t the best option, even though at the time Doge was riding high. Since they released an update on how their Crypto Pal app was doing with their LTC and Doge mining operations, it made sense that we’d do a follow-up as well.
At present the operation’s gross margins are 73%. The acquisition of Crypto Pal was set when Dogecoin was operating at $0.055 USD at the top of what we can call the Elon Musk hype cycle. Right now, it’s hovering around $0.172166, and Elon is sunning himself on a rock somewhere with Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, dreaming of the stars while the earth burns around him.
How are the Dogecoin investors who followed his lead doing?
The Hello Pal Platform is a suite of mobile applications built on an instant messenger interface that helps with language acquisition, travel and social interaction. It’s been designed to be user friendly and help the users speak and understand their own language regardless of what the other person is speaking. It’s an attempt to create a universal translator of sorts.
The crypto part is a diversification, which in itself is a good idea, but their choice of coin wasn’t. They’re using Litecoin and Doge. Litecoin is a fine coin. It correlates well with Bitcoin (being the original Bitcoin clone. The grand-daddy of Bitcoin’s bastards.) and when BTC goes on a run, it tags its little buddy along for the ride. It’s also why a BTC and LTC pairing remain an excellent investment even well into the third generation of coins.
Doge, though, is a bit silly. It doesn’t tag along on Bitcoin runs. It doesn’t enjoy the widespread institutional support of BTC, Ethereum or increasingly, Cardano. When it’s not being artificially inflated by billionaire blowhards or activist-investors, it doesn’t really move. The only foreseeable benefit would be that it can still be mined from GPU’s, but if you’re missing out in terms of opportunity cost. If you’re going to set up an industrial mining factory full of ASICS – you don’t want to mine something as piddly as doge.
So let’s ignore Doge for now and focus on their Litecoin mining.
Litecoin is a proof-of-work coin and the network’s too big and too competitive to do with home computers with jacked-up graphics cards. Even if you filled your whole apartment with them, you’d make exactly zero Litecoin. So that means you’ll need ASIC rigs—or a server network using chips designed only to mine Litecoin—like the ones Bitcoin uses, yes. And these get hot (so they require cooling) and take a lot of power to operate, albeit less than Bitcoin’s. But it’s still enough to be worrisome to the environment.
Except not in Hey Pal’s case.
One of Hello Pal’s best choices is to operate one third of their litecoin miners in various locations through hydroelectric power. This is a good sustainable practice, and more companies should be doing it, but apparently they’re using more than they’re consuming and the excess power isn’t being sent to a grid (nor being sent to mine something more lucrative), so essentially, it’s being wasted.
It’s not quite the same impact as if this were excess fossil fuels being burned, but it does represent a potential loss of revenue. Other companies using hydroelectric sources for crypto-mining have struck deals with governments to take their excess electricity in exchange for a little wallet padding.
But this operation is in China, and maybe it’s best not to remind the CCP that they’re there, given the recent fallout with Bitcoin. They also intend on scaling their operations so maybe they’ll be able to use the electricity to their advantage.
“We are very excited with this unique opportunity to integrate cryptocurrency with our existing international livestreaming community with the upcoming launch of Crypto Pal. The ability to transfer value between users across international borders in an easy and efficient way is something that will greatly benefit our users and our entire platform,” said Adega Zhou, president of Hey Pal International.
They’re still going full steam ahead, though. The company’s app is still with the Hello Pal team in Hangzhou, and should be launched in the coming months. Next month their mining operations reach near-full capacity.
The most interesting feature, though, and this one has kind of flown under the radar due to some of their other choices, is their digital wallet.
They’re anticipating this being the first experience with crypto for most of its users, and apart from the occasional promo for Dogecoin, the company will give their customers the ability to earn crypto through user activities to increase interactions, retention and increase time spent. Litecoin is trading at $113.73, down from it’s all time high two months ago of $410.26. Remember that it’s correlated with Bitcoin, which means that as Bitcoin climbs, so will Litecoin, and if getting involved with this app could land you an extra few hundred bucks, it may be worth a look.
We’ll have to see how that pans out.
—Joseph Morton
