Dear Builders,

I am speaking today about our upcoming hackathon and DAO.

Harmony is building bridges to scale applications across Ethereum, Binance, Terra, Polkadot, Bitcoin and other chains. Our key innovation is uniform scaling — Harmony’s sharding mainnet achieves 2-second transaction finality and $82M cross-chain assets.

Sushi is running natively on Harmony with a $4M liquidity campaign, daVinci NFT marketplace with curated auctions has made $500k sales, and our 11 DAOs has hundreds of active members. (more)

Yet, how do we bring more developers to our ecosystem? Especially those from traditional finance and big tech companies? Harmony is running a $1M hackathon with Gitcoin and Dorahacks from now until September 30th to recruit builders.

Our three themes — each with $300k prizes in 4 tracks — cover blockchain bridges, social wallets, and fintech integrations. Hackathon winners in each of the 12 tracks are going to create a DAO to manage the additional $40k grants based on their mainnet launch, project funding, and DAO participation. (more)

The first hackathon theme is Cross-Chain with our trustless, on-chain bridges. The 4 tracks — Liquidity, Middlewares, DeFi/NFT/DAO, Platform — emphasize the current product-market fits of decentralized applications but across multiple chains. Developers can make use of Harmony’s rich ecosystem: a cross-chain API for aggregation and asset pools; Ethereum-compatible indexing, names, and toolkits; and, unique technical features including randomness opcode, on-chain delegation and aggregated signatures, FlyClient bridges, and fast state sync with message gossips.

Besides advancing these cross-chain infrastructure, there are also many product ideas that can take advantage of our trustless bridges. For example, building arbitrage bots with our partner Hummingbot or integrating stablecoins and saving products with our Terra bridge. Harmony has also launched Bulletproof and Poseidon Hash functions for privacy coin mixers like Tornado Cash. (more)

The second hackathon theme is On-Chain with our social wallets and keyless security. The 4 tracks — Frontends, Web3, Web2, Security — emphasize the consumer experience of delighting the users without worrying about blockchain technology or custody. Wallets are becoming the Web3 portals as a DeFi dashboard for asset swaps and investments, a NFT gallery for collectible editorials and auctions, or a DAO townsquare for governance votes or payrolls. Our hackathon encourages seamless onboarding and incentivized education for smart contract wallets; builders can start from our audited prototypes featuring authenticator-based security and on-chain account recovery.

Composing Web3 contracts and integrating Web2 components is the crossing of the chasm for daily uses. Our wallets should work as a mobile or even wearable client. They can also curate crypto and domain names, work activity and reputations, or even virtual and life moments. Furthermore, the wallets can link your identity on Twitter as social clout, Github as work prowess, or Linkedin as tailored profiles. At this hackathon, cryptography or security researchers can extend our authentication to multiple factors, verify implementations with formal methods, or prototype based on our latest research papers. (more)

Lastly, the third hackathon theme is Cross-Border with fintech and social integrations. The 4 tracks — Gateways, Corporate, Regional, Impacts — emphasize the real-world value for business and communities across countries. Toward unbundling of banks, our developers can replicate many centralized services like fiat exchanges, over-the-counters, credit cards, or even corporate finance. Many global business and most decentralized teams are already facing the pain of scaling beyond tens of teammates and countries — dealing with employee payrolls, retirement benefits, medical insurance, and expense compensations. Fortunately, cryptography primitives like auditable privacy will make accounting and tax compliant for business on public blockchains.

Now is also the prime time to innovate on consumer marketplaces and social incentives on blockchain. Radical markets mean self-assessed taxation and quadratic stakes; mechanism designs focus on revealing true preferences and multi-round auctions. Both on blockchain can make retail loyalty programs or commerce logistics far more efficient — or even bring social changes in the form of basic income and retroactive funding for public goods. (more)

Yet, how do we sustain the development beyond hackathon? How to scale to tens of thousands of developers? Harmony holds more than $100M ecosystem fund and is scaling our open development with 100 or more DAOs. We have integrated with critical tools like Snapshot for off-chain voting, Gnosis Safe for multi-signature treasuries, and Gitcoin for recurring bounties. We can help make other Ethereum’s DAO tools cross-chain compatible, including Aragon and DAOHaus for incubating and managing membership; Mirror for on-chain contribution splits and fundraising; and, Yearn’s Coordinape for peer performance bonus.

Beyond tooling and funding, the key role for Harmony is to recruit a small group of governors and to set a clear set of mandates — so people, culture, and goals are fully aligned. Every DAO should be capturing the initial enthusiasm while making progress despite group inertia. These challenges and possible solutions are rather similar to those in radical markets for real estate or national politics. Therefore, we are experimenting with self-assessed pay rate like base salary, short election terms like seasonal engagement, open timesheets like deliverable reviews, dispute resolutions like quits and kicks, and retroactive quadratic funding like bounties. (more)

Let’s give a few examples of DAOs we are keen to bootstrap. The first is #ONEresearchDAO with the mission “bring the best research to production”. In fact, this has been Harmony’s slogan for a few years as our project’s technical differentiation. Now, this DAO can carry out long-term research programs on its mandates around succinct-proof cryptography, formal security, and scaling decentralization.

In particular, zero-knowledge proofs are not only ready for protecting transaction and data privacy, but also improving performance of state sync and sub-network computations. Smart contract security should also go beyond tests and audits; formal methods like mechanical verifiers and strong type systems will save millions of dollars from hacks every month. Scalability and decentralization are always at odds but not necessarily tradeoffs; new research in logarithmic or even constant data structures — for proof-of-stake validators, on-chain delegation, bootstrapping light clients — is the only way to scale beyond gigabytes of blocks. (more)

The second is #ONEwalletDAO with the mission “fearless wallet & wealth for everyone”. We deeply believe “creating wealth in harmony” and the adoption of social wallets. In particular, this DAO will educate — through powerful storytelling and visual media — on wallet security based on one-time-password (like Google’s and iOS’s) authenticators as well as social recovery with friends, family or bots as guardians. Like fearless concurrency in Rust programming, consumers should self-custody assets, identities, collectibles or governance, without worrying about hardware theft, password loss, or platform hacks.

Impacts for the first hundreds of million users can come in the form of basic income, fixed-rate savings, and curated high-yield investments. Blockchain projects are the epicenter of innovations on finance and marketplaces, drawing in enormous investment and returns; blockchain networks are rewarding stakers for transaction validations and platform security, handing out more than 10% annual return; blockchain lending products are facilitating billion dollars of liquidity every month, some liquidity pools rewarding more than 20% in short-term returns. Information is now free for 5 billion people and mobile phones are affordable for 3 billion; our collective goals should be financial wealth and social impacts for every one of us. (more)

Lastly, the third is #ONEcommunityDAO with the mission “open consensus and radical fairness”. Harmony’s mission is to scale trust and create a radically fair economy. Global blockchain adoption is still at about 1% or 80M people; we should onboard millions of users to our culture of open development, celebrate our roadmap and milestones of cross-chain products, and pollinate our values with other crypto communities.

Creative campaigns, not advertisement or even education, are the way of engagement in the age of attention economy and information overload. Our video campaigns “The Future is ONE” and “Here’s to the Ones Who Build” bond us over the same broad vision and deep emotions. By cultivating diverse voices and governance votes, our community can drive radical fairness as a model for many on-chain communities. (more)

Here are more ways you can learn more and get involved. This talk is on our $1M Hackathon and DAOs on building bridges, but also as a strategy to scale together. In an earlier talk about on-chain wallets and bridges, I cover our architecture and roadmap about interoperability. Go vote or get elected in the other tens of our DAOs like #ONEvalidatorDAO or #ONEdreamerDAO — whether you are a researcher, engineer, creative, or user. Try our products on cross-chain finance and digital arts.

Interoperability with On-Chain Bridges and Wallets

Lastly, follow me on Twitter @stse to be part of our journey! (more)

One bonus slide: how to compare optimistic and zero-knowledge rollups versus our trustless bridge? (more)

stephen tse | s.one on Twitter: "a thread on @harmonyprotocol growth strategy"$1m hackathon & 100 dao on building bridges"how to bring more developers to our ecosystem? especially those from traditional finance & big tech companies?how to sustain development beyond hackathon? scale to 10k of developers? pic.twitter.com/du1rMuMb4j / Twitter"

a thread on @harmonyprotocol growth strategy"$1m hackathon & 100 dao on building bridges"how to bring more developers to our ecosystem? especially those from traditional finance & big tech companies?how to sustain development beyond hackathon? scale to 10k of developers? pic.twitter.com/du1rMuMb4j

Here’s to The ONEs Who Build

Harmony’s $1M Hackathon & DAO on Building Bridges was originally published in Harmony on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“i used to work for big tech companies. i used to rely on banks for my money. i also used to build ONLY what i was told possible.

but how to make the world radically fair, or even create wealth together in harmony?

this seems to be a dilemma — scaling trust without government, a fully open platform without attacks, or reaching consensus with thousands of people in seconds. actually, a TRILEMMA if you are counting without off-by-one.

but i saw the 10x social changes in the last decade. i studied cryptography which is indistinguishable from magic. builders around me now all share their code, their development, their dreams in public!

why do people isolate within one’s own island of governance? a walled garden of assets and collectibles? is it possible to embrace each other and build bridges, singing in harmony?

the oracle says otherwise; it looks like you are waiting for your next life to make things happen.

however, an anonymous coder did build a trillion dollar network to be the store of value; a 21-year kid launched an infinite machine and a global community of dreamers. YOU just need to bring the research to production, build tools across boundaries, and make real impacts in people’s lives.

this invincible summer is proving the point: clubs of people with small identity toward common goods, immutable ledgers of your life moments, radical ownership with self-imposed tax, fair rewards with quadratic votes…

also, of course, billions of trades daily in open marketplaces without middlemen or gatekeepers.

the one percent of us already knows, the consensus is not evenly distributed yet. we have built shards that horizontally and uniformly scale, secured stakes that delegate and slash rewards in a chained record, even a wallet without passwords or hardware.

now, it’s your choice to show your skills and creativity.

know thyself, being the ONE is just like being in love. the best way to live in the world you love is to build it.”

Harmony’s $1M Hackathon & DAO on Building Bridges

See our keynote talk on “$1M Hackathon & DAO on Building Bridge” — and join our hackathon with $1M prizes!

stephen tse | s.one on Twitter: "here's to the ones who build"i used to work for big tech companies. i used to rely on banks for my money. i also used to build ONLY what i was told possible.but how to make the world radically fair, or even create wealth together in harmony?... pic.twitter.com/ky21xgSccC / Twitter"

here's to the ones who build"i used to work for big tech companies. i used to rely on banks for my money. i also used to build ONLY what i was told possible.but how to make the world radically fair, or even create wealth together in harmony?... pic.twitter.com/ky21xgSccC

Harmony’s $1 Million Hackathon — Time to BUILD

Here’s to The ONEs Who Build was originally published in Harmony on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

[This is an extended transcript of Harmony’s talks at Ethereal Summit and at ex-Googler TGI in Q2 2021.]

Hello, everyone. My name is Stephen, the founder of Harmony. Our team has been building a scalable blockchain for three years. Today I’d like to share our vision of interoperability and our focus on adoption through on-chain wallets.

My research background is security protocols and formal verification. Our team of 20 has extensive background at Google, Apple, Amazon and Harvard as infrastructure builders. Harmony, with our mainnet launched in 2019, is now ready for scaling DeFi and NFT applications across Ethereum and other chains.

Harmony’s 2021 roadmap is “Scaling Cross-Chain Finance”. In just a few months, our ecosystem has grown more than 10x to have $540m staked with 109 validators. We support on-chain delegations and there are 11k delegators. Currently 41 applications such as marketplaces, governance, and prediction markets are deployed on our mainnet, totaling 3.05m transactions and 77.8k wallets. Among the 2 bridges and 4 decentralized exchanges, Harmony network secures $52m worth of assets across multiple chains.

One of our most engaging applications is the daVinci Gallery, an NFT marketplace. Harmony supports low-carbon footprint for #GreenNFT minting and airdrop. Launched just two months ago, the daVinci Gallery has listed 7,639 pieces and sold $269k worth of collectibles from 865 artists. Our beautiful interface also features full-service curation and auction for internationally-renowned artists. (more)

How will Harmony drive adoption for the next one million consumers? An on-chain wallet giving 20% yields. Users must stop worrying about seed phrases, device loss, email phishing, phone hijacking. We must secure everyone’s financial future against password breaches, software bugs, platform malwares and exchange hacks. It’s a path towards universal basic income for anyone with just a few thousand dollars and no technical background.

Many staking protocols offer 10% yields, lending protocols offer 10%, and liquidity pools offer 20%. Our opportunity is to offer consumers the ability to earn fixed-rate interests through structured financial products across multiple chains. Moreover, their wallet profiles can also hold digital arts with a gallery view or switch between custom domain names as their identity as a crypto wallet for assets and identity.

The key innovation is social recovery with on-chain security like Argent, Loopring and Gnosis Safe. We are bringing the best research called SmartOTP (One Time Password) with air-gapped and composable authentication into production. You only need a Google Authenticator; you trust only a set of open-source smart contracts. (more)

The future is a multi-chain world with many digital identities representing you. Instead of one chain to rule all, Harmony is building bridges — not walls — to connect all assets, users, and daily uses. The ONE wallet mentioned above will be the portal leading to any marketplace you need or any community you belong to or any profile you curate.

Instead of a birth country, you can own a domain name and NFT tokens that define a pseudonym country with decentralized governance and private transactions among citizens. Harmony Name Service (HNS) will map public keys to even an Emoji and Internet domains like Crazy.ONE. Harmony’s bridges will track token meta-attributes such as hosting URLs and image artifacts to support these cross-chain NFTs.

The potential is more than generative arts or virtual experience. Through our partner Animoca and Quidd, we are bringing branded assets such as Beast Quest and Atari to mainstream consumers. With airdrops, editorials, galleries — and soon NFT for group moments and community events — blockchain technology is finally creating value for people while being ambient in our lives. (more)

What will be our major technical milestones this year? All about cross chains. We are making our Ethereum bridge fully trustless and highly gas-efficient. Harmony will be among the first cross-chain solutions with FlyClient that connect Proof-of-Work Ethereum and Proof-of-Stake chains. Binance Smart Chain will be a natural extension as it is also Ethereum compatible and hosting many applications with high yields.

The king elephant in any room is Bitcoin. Harmony is prototyping state-of-the-art research for wrapping BTC as cross-chain collaterals. This approach is not only capital efficient but also fully trustless as on-chain and open-source contracts — a breakthrough in the industry. We have also launched a DOT-ONE bridge on testnet. Now our developers can enjoy Polkadot’s WebAssembly and para-chain tooling by extension. (more)

There’s so much to build together. Today I’d like to announce that Harmony has reserved $10m for bounties, encouraging many more developers to contribute. We have had many rounds of successful hackathons, bounties and campaigns with our partner Gitcoin, which has 161k developers worldwide and a strong culture of collaboration.

Our bounties range from $10k to $50k, covering exciting development in protocols, bridges, tools and applications. In particular, many schemes of rollups and a cross-chain api for aggregators will be critical middleware as Harmony’s innovation.

There are many open problems in blockchain such as cryptographic privacy and randomness security. Beyond cross-chain, applications for cross-border finance and fiat integrations will become multi-trillion dollar markets. We also see active development in formal verification and language-based security, which has been my research expertise. (more)

Harmony aims to be an open platform for creating digital economies. Our hundreds of validators and thousands of delegators are a vibrant community. Good governance means active vote participation in Snapshot, and it also means full fund custody with Gnosis Safe – we have ported over both tools to our network with great use.

To scale our many other initiatives, I’m also announcing today that Harmony will be creating 10 decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) fully owned by our community. Each DAO will be funded with up to $1M, elect a set of governors, and have specific mandates. Some will focus on project incubation and launch on our platform, some on social referrals and marketing events for our products, and some on broader social impacts like wealth creation and fairness. Let’s create radical marketplaces with mechanism designs and incentives, revealing true preferences with zero-knowledge proofs, supporting auctions with multi-party computations, ... well, to always find your perfect match!

Yet, we must focus on the real-world utility and bring impacts to mainstream society. We’d like to help educate many non-blockchain folks with the best video production in the world — so that even my family and non-technical friends can enjoy them. Harmony also partners with universities and student groups all over the world to train for the future. We are actively recruiting regional advocates and technical blockchain leads.(more)

You may find this deck at harmony.one/deck, follow my Twitter @stse or email me at s@harmony.one.

Come apply for our bounties or join our core team — we are HIRING!

Harmony’s Strategy and Architecture

Here are some more slides on our technical strengths. What’s so special about our protocol? Harmony provides horizontal scaling via uniform sharding and instant finality in 2 seconds. We solved the blockchain trilemma by bringing the best research into production. Our mainnet has been live for 18 months; our transactions cost 100x lower fees than Ethereum.

How? Our protocol features constant-sized signatures to commit blocks in a single round. Harmony is the first decentralized protocol to implement view change in production against malicious leaders. Our staking economics reduces centralization by capping block rewards while supporting on-chain delegation. (more)

With our trustless and gas-efficient bridge, Harmony is becoming a viable extension for Ethereum applications and assets. Developers simply change Chain ID and enjoy faster EVM executions identical at the bytecode level. They can use their familiar and standard Web3 tooling to easily migrate to Harmony.

What about users? They can continue to use Metamask or Ledger — but now pay minimal fees. Any Ethereum wallets or portals can work on Harmony without code changes or new installs — we are fully compatible for both transaction messages and execution environments. (more)

stephen tse | s.one on Twitter: "here's the official recording. (apologies for the bad audio)https://t.co/SC0GzFA5WC / Twitter"

here's the official recording. (apologies for the bad audio)https://t.co/SC0GzFA5WC

Interoperability with On-Chain Bridges and Wallets was originally published in Harmony on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

[This is an extended transcript of Harmony’s talks at Ethereum Denver and Miami Blockchain Week in Q1 2021.]

Hello, everyone. My name is Stephen, the founder of Harmony. Our team has been building a scalable blockchain for three years. Today I’d like to share our journey and look ahead of this fintech revolution. How to scale Ethereum applications with low fees in 2021? Why now for financial applications with cross-chain assets?

My research background is security protocols and formal verification. Our team of 15 has extensive background at Google, Apple, Amazon and Harvard as infrastructure builders. Harmony, started as a base protocol in 2018, is now ready for bridging Ethereum DeFi and NFT applications.

Last year Harmony became the first blockchain to launch state sharding and open staking. We launched a Proof-of-Stake protocol that supports 1000 slots for validators and delegators. With our focus on US market and compliance, Binance.US listed our native token ONE. We had a wildly successful Binance IEO in 2019, and now users can trade ONE tokens with fiat USD in the US.

We rode the invincible summer of decentralized finance with multiple showcases. Our forked Uniswap V2, Balancer and PolyMarket went live on our mainnet with assets from Ethereum. Harmony’s bridge to Ethereum uses a cutting-edge architecture based on FlyClient designed by top researcher Mahdi Zamani. (more)

What so special about our protocol? Harmony provides horizontal scaling via uniform sharding and instant finality in 2 seconds. We solved the blockchain trilemma by bringing the best research into production. Our mainnet has been live for 18 months; our transactions cost 1000x lower fees than Ethereum.

How? Our protocol features constant-sized signatures to commit blocks in a single round. Harmony is the first decentralized protocol to implement view change in production against malicious leaders. Our staking economics reduces centralization by capping block rewards while supporting on-chain delegation. (more)

With our trustless and gas-efficient bridge, Harmony is becoming a viable extension for Ethereum applications and assets. Developers simply change Chain ID and enjoy faster EVM executions identical at the bytecode level. They can use their familiar and standard Web3 tooling to easily migrate to Harmony.

What about users? They can continue to use Metamask or Ledger — but now pay minimal fees. Any Ethereum wallets or portals work on Harmony without code changes or installs — we are fully compatible for both transaction messages and execution environments. (more)

Which applications are perfect for fast and low-fee protocols? Let’s think about decentralized finance for the mass, and transactions too expensive for Ethereum. Traders can now balance their portfolio regularly on Harmony — and re-settle assets on Ethereum only when necessary. Harmony can also easily support on-chain market-makers that are more efficient and use granular price feeds.

Arbitrage opportunities is everywhere for weakly connected systems — such as 100 and more pegged tokens for US Dollar across tens of chains. And, 1000 of regional stablecoins to come soon! The product-market fit now is to build a decentralized exchange on Harmony that trades cross-chain assets. (more)

What about other applications? Non-fungible tokens and branded assets are native to the digital worlds. These cyber arts or virtual objects are fertile grounds for community building and experimentations. Low-fees are necessary for their organic growth. Users there commonly pool and lend assets together for group incentives. Yet, for broader access and full security, they demand an interoperable bridge to Ethereum — which Harmony gladly provides.

We recently launched a successful campaign with our partner Animoca Brands, selling thousands of digital cards for the popular game Beast Quests on Harmony. Let us help if you are planning to launch your community tokens or game assets on blockchain. (more)

What will be our major milestones this year? All about cross chains. We are making our Ethereum bridge fully trustless and highly gas-efficient. Harmony will be among the first cross-chain solutions with FlyClient that connect Proof-of-Work Ethereum and Proof-of-Stake chains. Binance Smart Chain will be a natural extension as it is also Ethereum compatible and host many applications with high yields.

The king elephant in any room is Bitcoin. Harmony is prototyping a state-of-the-art research for wrapping BTC as cross-chain collaterals. This approach is not only capital efficient but also fully trustless as on-chain and open-source contracts — a breakthrough in the industry. We have also launched a DOT-ONE bridge on testnet. Now our developers can enjoy Polkadot’s WebAssembly and para-chain tooling by extension. (more)

What do Harmony as a platform want? Developers, developers, developers. We successfully completed a 10-week hackathon with $50k prize and 20 industry-leaders as judges. That attracted almost 400 participants to launch cross-chain applications with our bridge. Harmony is a major sponsor in EthDenver, where we are a speaker and judge. Our workshop there will focus on scaling Ethereum applications with fully compatible toolchains.

Gitcoin is also our close partner for 6 global hackathons this year alone. We are also hosting workshops and bounties with Gitcoin such as bridge designs, zero-knowledge proofs and fiat integrations to engage Ethereum developers. We want developers to integrate multiple components such as lending from Aave on Ethereum and PancakeSwap on Binance Smart Chain together. (more)

Harmony aims to be an open platform for creating digital economy. Our validator community owns the network governance. Over long term, we believe that quadrating voting in our decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) will encourage fair participation. We help educate many non-blockchain folks with the best video production in the world — even my family and non-technical friends are enjoying them! Harmony also partners with universities and student groups all over the world to train for the future.

Yet, we must focus on the real-world utility and bring impacts to mainstream society. Our showcases include travel rewards, cross-border loans and prediction markets. Harmony is recruiting regional advocates and technical blockchain leads. Let’s create a more radical economy together! (more)

Harmony Foundation reserves USD $7M for grants and bounties. There are many open problems in blockchain such as cryptographic privacy and randomness security. Beyond cross-chain, applications for cross-border finance and fiat integrations will become multi-trillion dollar markets. We also see active development in formal verification and language-based security, which had been my research expertise. Come apply for our grants or join our core team — we are HIRING! (more)

You may find this deck at harmony.one/deck, follow my Twitter @stse or email me at s@harmony.one.

great audience with @don @mongolraider @freeslugs @dragonchaingang thank you @icet0696 @TheBTCQueen @scottspiegel_12 @jorgecortesinc for your hospitality. we 💙 miami!https://t.co/ivFzzP3ZaM

Here’s our guest lecture for the course “Applied AI” at Carnegie Mellon University on the applications of artificial intelligence for blockchain — and vice versa. There we cover some ideas on cross-chain arbitrage and zero-knowledge privacy.

JavaScript is not available.

my favorite intro is "The Long-Tail Problem in AI, and How Autonomous Markets Can Solve It" by @ali01 at @a16zhttps://t.co/k3i18ogD0n

Harmony Keynote: Scaling Ethereum Applications & Cross-Chain Finance was originally published in Harmony on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

1. Adoption — We are bringing utility to users through developers and partners. Hackathons with Gitcoin and workshops at Ethereum events will boost our reach.
2. Interoperability — We are bridging with Bitcoin and Ethereum for broader assets. Our cross-shard and cross-chain transactions will enable new finance applications.
3. Decentralization — We are growing our validator community and network features. External voting power and resharding will guarantee our long-term governance.

How to scale Ethereum applications in 2021? Harmony is a sharding protocol with a trustless Ethereum bridge. Our developers use Etherum tooling such as Solidity and Ether.js. Users use Metamask to store and they use our bridge to swap Harmony and Ethereum assets. We achieve 2-second finality for fast transactions and support 1000 delegating stakers for secure shards. A cross-chain Uniswap fork is already live on our mainnet. Similar to layer 2 protocols, Harmony is now fully interoperable with Ethereum ecosystem.

Below are the progress of our 2021 milestones. You may learn about our ecosystem growth in 2020.

Adoption

• Toolings for Ethereum developers to migrate code with minimal changes

• Workshops for developers at blockchain and fintech events to learn

• Hackathons for developers to compete for prizes and feedbacks

• Grants for new projects or partners to grow with incubation

Interoperability

• Ethereum Bridge for Harmony applications to swap assets with Ethereum

• Bitcoin Bridge for Bitcoin holders to earn from finance products on Harmony

• Cross-Shard for Harmony applications to compose inter-shard transactions

• Cross-Chain for any chains to communicate with Harmony as a hub

Decentralization

• Voting Power for external validators to own upgrades and governance

• Resharding for network to improve security and prevent single-shard attacks

• Services for community to own dashboards, API, monitors and wallets

• Fast Sync for network to improve performance and to enable resharding

For details of the milestones above, you may read our vision on liquidity infrastructure or our strategy and architecture.

Harmony’s Strategy and Architecture

The progress icons here indicate roughly with 12% when objectives are defined, 25% when a public proposal is ready, 37% when its execution is started, 50% when a minimal demo is ready, 62% when its features are complete, 75% when live on devnet, 87% live on testnet, and 100% when live on mainnet. Ideally milestones are scoped for 4 to 8 months of execution; progress should be updated monthly. Some may take a few quarters to complete.

https://t.co/Un4kNex2gw

Harmony’s 2021 on Cross-Chain Finance was originally published in Harmony on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Harmony is a fast, cheap and secure settlement layer. Now we are bridging with Bitcoin and Ethereum to extend our use cases. Ethereum developers can easily scale their applications with Harmony to enjoy our 2-second finality and cheap fees. Our applications are fully EVM compatible and can already withdraw and deposit Ethereum assets via a bridge. Soon we will offer the same toolings and portals such as Web3.js and MetaMask. Our value proposition as a layer 1 protocol with a Ethereum bridge is making Harmony more attractive than layer 2 protocols.

Through marketing and evangelism, Harmony is ready to showcase our technical strengths as a top blockchain. We are hosting hackathons with Gitcoin and workshops at Ethereum events to attract developers. We are incubating to launch projects through grants and product development.

Harmony’s vision remains “Open Consensus for 10B People” — that is, there will be an open platform for our future generations to create in harmony. We are committed to the mission “To scale trust and to create a radically fair economy”. That means building a decentralized, scalable and secure blockchain to settle any transactions without trusted parties. Here, fairness in radical markets promises everyone opportunity for creating meaningful wealth.

Towards our mission, Harmony’s current strategy is “Cross-Chain Finance” as decentralized finance and interoperable protocols are the product-market fit in 2021. We are building trustless bridges to Bitcoin and Ethereum for broader access of users and assets with Harmony as a hub. An example of utility is a cross-chain exchange without custodial risks. Our current settlement layer and soon liquidity infrastructure will enable further financial innovations, leading to cross-exchange integrations and cross-border finance.

In Harmony’s 2021 on Cross-Chain Finance, we summarize our roadmap as “adoption, interoperability, decentralization”. The post also tracks progress of our milestones so we can build with our community. For your feedback, we expand below on our go-to-market strategies and technical architecture. You may learn about our ecosystem growth in 2020 or our vision on liquidity infrastructure.

Interoperability

• Ethereum Bridge: trustless and efficient asset transfers among PoW-PoS chains
  We are building a bridge for applications to access assets on Ethereum while enjoying fast transactions on Harmony. Our bridge architecture is industry leading, being gas efficient and seamless between Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake chains. Inspired by Flyclient (already deployed in ZCash), our light client uses Merkle Mountain Range (MMR) and epoch syncing. Later we may employ zero-knowledge proofs such as Plonk to further compress the states of these heterogeneous chains. (more)
• Bitcoin Bridge: contract-based wrapping and liquidity of BTC as in Interlay
  We are adapting Interlay’s BTC<>DOT bridge to support finance products on wrapped Bitcoin. Our long-term value proposition is the utility of ETH<>ONE<>BTC hub as liquidity infrastructure. Keep’s tBTC, Interlay’s PolkaBTC and Thorchain are only reaching basic production but highly valued. Our bridge can then easily generalize to many Bitcoin-based assets such as Tether’s USDT, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash. Along with our Ethereum bridge, we can enable a truly decentralized exchange across chains with BTC derivatives, USDT stablecoins and ERC20 assets. (more)
• Cross-Shard Composability: atomic swaps of assets, inter-shard contracts
  Harmony’s shards are similar to Cosmos’s zones and Polkadot’s parachains, but our shards offer simpler interface and more uniform security for developers. We are developing cross-shard transactions, comparable to Cosmos’s Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) and Polkadot’s Cross-Chain Message Passing (XMCP) but specialized for uniform shards. (more)
• Cross-Chain Communications: chain relays, data availability, interoperability
  Full interoperability across heterogeneous blockchains (such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polkadot and Cosmos) will multiply their application potentials and asset liquidity. Toward a general cross-chain framework, we are building components such as chain relays as smart contracts (to verify commitment with succinct proofs) and data availability layers (with fraud proofs and erasure codes). (more)

Partners

• Cross-Chain Uniswap: asset pools, governance tokens, project listings
  Our partners will fork Swoop (our clone of Uniswap v2 with Ethereum bridge API, both already live on mainnet) to experiment with different automated market making (AMM) and community governance. They may launch governance tokens to incentivize asset deposits for liquidity pools and to amplify project listings. Harmony will build a cross-chain infrastructure for a seamless user experience using these non-custodial exchanges. (more)
• DeFi & NFT: stablecoins, marketplaces, structured products
  We are cultivating partners with business development and integrating open platforms without permission. Top DeFi projects many artists are always exploring new chains. Ren, 0x, Terra are proposing API for multichains that we can openly participate in. Harmony will build liquidity infrastructure for experimenting with on-chain order books, market makers, and arbitrage bots. (more)

Decentralization

• Resharding: randomized validator assignment to prevent single-shard attacks
  We are re-assigning shard membership of validators every epoch to enhance our network security. Our innovations include using verifiable delay function (VDF) for randomized assignment, integrating staking and slashing with resharding, and forcing regular leader rotations. Harmony will be among the first blockchains to launch resharding. (more)
• Fast Sync & Gossips: streaming state sync, information dispersal algorithm
  We are replacing gRPC in state sync with p2p streaming with a rate limiter and downloader batch. Later we will implement RapidChain’s gossiping protocol based on an information dispersal algorithm (IDA) for sending large blocks. Both approaches, along with further performance analysis and parameter tuning, will improve our network resiliency and latency. (more)

https://t.co/Un4kNex2gw

Incubation

• ONE Wallet: on-chain security with social custodians, native multi-chain assets and derived sub-accounts.
• ONE Pool: cross-chain aggregator of pegged assets issued from multiple networks with bridges injecting assets the same pool.
• ONE Name: on-chain identity with social profiles and a radical market.
• ONE Vote: on-chain governance for network and decentralized organization (dao) for community grants.
• ONE Code: language design (process calculus, amortized resource analysis, session types, integer-constraint solver) and formal security.
• ONE Change: petitions for decision markers on social media for radical social change.
• ONE Research: bring the best research to production, focusing on security (cryptographic primitives, formal verification), decentralization (trust models), scalability (cross-chain, data availability), privacy (identity, auditability).

Read Messari’s Yearly Report “Crypto Theses for 2021” for a comprehensive overview of the industry. This report also provides the contexts and the insights on many projects with product-market fits.

We are HIRING! Prefer 5-year or more experience, offer top pay and remote work. You may consider our open bounties, hackathons, or earn $5000 for successful referrals. Email us at hello@harmony.one.

• Backend engineers (systems, network, infrastructure, compilers)
• Research engineers (cryptography, financial, formal security)
• Marketing lead, content manager, graphics designer
• Developer relations, technical communication
• Asia lead, grant manager, ecosystem growth

Harmony’s Strategy and Architecture was originally published in Harmony on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Harmony ONEs,

We are writing to seek feedback on our roadmap on cross-chain and cross-exchange initiatives.

In short, we are building trustless bridges to Bitcoin, Ethereum and Cosmos for broader access of users and assets to decentralized finance. Our consumer product is a cross-chain exchange without custodial risks. Later we will be putting centralized exchanges’ order books on chain for cross-exchange arbitrage and fiat cash-flow management.

Below we review our 2020 milestones before diving into the two broad products we are building. We conclude with our progress on decentralization and some notable reference on the current fintech revolution.

Milestones of Open Staking & DeFi

Since Harmony Mainnet launch in June 2019, we have worked non-stop to bring validators and products to Harmony. We launched Open Staking in May 2020 attracting hundreds of nodes staking more than 53% of our native ONE tokens. Below are some key milestones of our network technology and ecosystem growth.

Scalability in terms of transactions per second (TPS) is well understood but over-promoted. Almost all base protocols are under-utilized while sharding already guarantees horizontal expandability. The most meaningful feature for our users is fast finality. Harmony’s 5-second finality has a clear advantage over Ethereum’s 6-minute, Ethereum 2’s 12-minute and Polkadot’s 60-second benchmarks.

We have prototyped multiple bridges to and from Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain. Our cross-chain Uniswap V2 and Chainlink oracle on Harmony Mainnet are launching in coming weeks. Migration is easy with our Ethereum-compatible tooling — we have successfully ported many demos of decentralized finance including Balancer, Synthetix, Curve, parts of MakerDAO and Yearn governance. Our community had fun testing several marketplaces for non-fungible tokens and branded assets.

monthly #pow📈 launched $ONE on @BinanceUS with USD fiat, USDT & #BUSD pairs💎 maker/curve/balancer/yearn demos on mainnet👩‍👩‍👧‍👦 7 $25k grants on wallets, bridges & cross-border remittances🔂 @chainlink oracle for cross-chain #DeFi liquiditywe're hiring engineers #harmonauts👇 pic.twitter.com/Zyf2o6TdKl

Are we decentralized yet? Cosmos boasts 125+ active validators and Polkadot 100+. Harmony supports 1000 seats split among 82 elected of 161 validator pools today. But the ultimate metric is human participation: We have 44 contributors on Github, while Polkadot has 84 and Cosmos 164.

Harmony Foundation is committed to funding grants for protocol and ecosystem development for years to come. The goals are to drive mainnet utility, decentralized community, and cryptographic innovations in open development. Via media grants, we partner with Camila Russo and The Defiant for a DeFi video series. Along with 109 grant governors, we have approved 13 grants for a total of $375k on bridges, tooling and decentralized exchanges.

Here’re some highlights of the Harmony Ecosystem:

• 16 apps, 10 native tokens (BUSD, 1Dai), 3 assets (Sandbox / Animoca NFT)
• 20 wallets (TrustWallet, Ledger), 13 grants (Connext, JellySwap), 50 angels
• 12 exchanges, 5 fiat pairings (Binance.US, Huobi, WazirX, ProBit)

Cross-Chain Pool with Trustless Bridges

A unifying vision of blockchains is to connect with all people and with any economy. While the disruption of financial infrastructure is still early, now is the time to bring many protocols together to scale their innovations for broader adoption.

In particular, lending Bitcoin for high-yield financial instruments on Ethereum has surpassed US $1B under on-chain management. Major chains like Cosmos, Polkadot and Cardano — with promises for interoperability of contracts and assets — recently launched the first phase of their mainnets.

Our approach to unification is to embed the light clients of multiple chains into our existing validators. Harmony’s cross-chain architecture, similar to Cosmos’ IBC and Polkadot’s XCMP, enables a trustless ecosystem with all permissionless networks. Here, a light client is another blockchain’s node using minimal resources to validate transactions at lower fees, suitable for embedding directly into Harmony’s nodes. Cross-chain transactions are more than asset transfers via atomic swaps with hash time locked contracts; the innovation, across open heterogeneous systems, to commit then verify computations and states is truly groundbreaking.

Harmony’s advantage is that we have all the necessary cross-chain components already in production. They include custodians (hundreds of validators, view changes), bonds (staking in native ONE tokens, delegation and slashing), threshold signatures (our own Boneh–Lynn–Shacham implementation), multi-party computations (verifiable randomness function), and on-chain validations (Ethereum VM based, cross-shard communication, Chainlink oracle).

We have recently launched multiple ONE-ETH swaps and bridges. We begin by bringing all ERC20 assets, especially wBTC and stablecoins Dai and BUSD, to our decentralized exchange. Not only can our 5-second finality provide faster settlements, our low fees due to sharding also enable new paradigms of on-chain market makers and lending. For example, like “menu costs” for restaurants, Kyber allows frequent updates of asset prices and slippage parameters, particularly critical for non-pegging arbitrages on assets other than stablecoins, and for congested markets during asset selloffs. Other examples are DeversiFi with Bitfinex and Serum with FTX that are aggregating liquidity from centralized sources and self-custodial wallets.

Our trustless, two-way ONE-ETH bridge with a light client gives Harmony applications full access to Ethereum’s ecosystem of assets and liquidity. Here are our opportunities: light clients like ZCash’s Flyclient across Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake chains are still under active research and require significant gas-fees. Trustless bridges such as Keep’s tBTC, Near’s Rainbow and Interlay’s XClaim are only reaching basic production.

Yet, the bigger story here is composability and liquidity — like Kyber or Serum but across all chains. Therefore, we have prototyped bridges for Binance Smart Chain and Polkadot, and soon extending to BTC as well as Cosmos. These bridges for our exchange can then easily generalize to other Bitcoin-based assets such as LTC and BCH, and to other Tendermint-based assets such as Terra and Kava.

Cross-Exchange Pool with Fiat Gateways

The future of blockchain is already here — but unevenly distributed to just thousands of people. Open finance is now a key initiative at Paypal (Visa Direct), a16z (Maker, Celo) and even governments (digital yuan).

Which product will have the market-fit for millions of people in the coming months? Harmony’s answer is a liquidity pool for Harmony-ONE assets and USD stablecoins across fiat exchanges. Soon, we can provide efficient cash-flow management (payroll, credit lines, treasury management) on our blockchain for cross-border business. Our focus is on US commerce to and from the leading southeast Asia markets such as India, Indonesia, Korea and Singapore.

Building a cross-exchange pool as described above — like Hummingbot, which is external trading bots as decentralized market makers, but on chain — requires massive integration of disparate financial infrastructure. Such liquidity pools generalize automated market makers (AMM) to any trading bot that runs on-chain as a smart contract. We believe that this innovation is the final frontier of breaking crypto into fiat gateways, thus into finance across borders. This financial revolution enables composable transactions of any off-chain assets, customer compliance and business contracts.

The immediate problem our product solves is liquidity, hence yields for closing arbitrage and price gaps, of thousands of cryptoassets across hundreds of isolated exchanges. Building on top of our cross-chain decentralized exchange mentioned in the last section, on-chain market makers and order books can then serve broadly for all assets in aggregate between any marketplace.

Beyond cryptoassets, the general problems our product solves is creating a radically fair economy of marketplaces. Fiat is simply the last mile of distribution, while cross-border is just the scale of billions of people in the world. On-demand liquidity is the common infrastructure for financial products such as serving recurring remittances in long-tail countries, scaling over-the-counter trades, and managing e-commerce cash flows.

Our technical challenges, similar to aggregated pools in traditional financial markets, include supporting market microstructures and complying with regional regulations. How can we support multiple oracles and API as fine-grained price feeds for the same asset but from different markets? How can we protect privacy but allow view-specific auditing? Solutions for these problems will be defining blockchain innovations for years to come.

Harmony has already enabled remittances between US and India. We have integrated fiat gateways (Binance US, CoinDCX) and stablecoins (Binance USD, WazirX INR) in both countries; we have prototyped end-to-end transfers of dollars and rupees to bank accounts.

Ethereum’s main innovation is the permissionless composition and trustless execution of any contracts. Harmony’s protocol will extend this innovation to other platforms as well as fiat assets. Once bridges across blockchains and once integrations across exchanges run in our unified platform, a new economy is created: end-to-end fiat settlements happen in seconds, all risks are insured with tradable contracts, and any code evolves via community forking.

Protocol with Decentralized Governance

Our founding team came together in 2018 to build, then to decentralize. We managed the COVID transition to become fully remote and stay lean with a team of 22 full-timers. Like Day ONE, we meet every Saturday at 10am for all-hands team meetings. Thriving in change (chaos!), we challenge each other during monthly team hackathons.

Still, we must accelerate decentralization in our network, development and governance. We are gradually transferring our 68% voting power externally to Foundational Nodes, Panagaea Captains and staking validators. In the coming months, our community will fully own testing, upgrades and 100% control of our network, initially with off-chain voting like Yearn and Synthetix, then on-chain governance like Tezos.

For development, the core team regularly and openly commits to Github. We welcome contributions via bounties, hackathons and grants. Besides cross-border finance above, our protocol will keep scaling the best research results, including data availability (Lazy Ledger, DeversiFi), cryptographic primitives (Coda, Matter Labs) and formal security (Runtime Verification, Coq), in production.

Harmony’s 2021 on Cross-Chain Finance

https://t.co/Un4kNex2gw

Excited about our journey to connect people and the economy? We look forward to your feedback on the Twitter thread above or on our Discourse forum.

Reference on Fintech Revolution

• https://harmony.one/comparison on finality (and other network features) of Harmony, Ethereum 2, Cosmos and Polkadot
• https://harmony.one/showcases on our bridges, grants, partners and prototypes
• https://harmony.one/eth3 on product survey of cryptography in future blockchains
• https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1128.pdf SoK: Communication Across Distributed Ledgers
• https://near.org/blog/eth-near-rainbow-bridge/
• https://hummingbot.io/blog/2020-09-what-is-cross-exchange-market-making/
• https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/unbundling-uniswap-the-future-of-on-chain-market-making-1c7d6948d570
• https://messari.io/article/the-bull-case-for-automated-market-makers-tokens
• https://medium.com/solana-labs/ftx-chooses-solana-for-serum-a-high-speed-non-custodial-decentralized-derivatives-exchange-c346a27c1f2b
• https://a16z.com/2020/08/04/fintech-scales-vertical-saas/
• https://a16z.com/2020/01/21/every-company-will-be-a-fintech-company
• https://medium.com/racecapital/fintech-infrastructure-101-overview-market-landscape-5d1b5c7fbe74
• https://medium.com/electric-capital/the-case-for-collaboration-why-the-us-government-and-crypto-ecosystem-must-work-together-4de0e97396a

Harmony Roadmap: Cross-Chain & Cross-Exchange Pools was originally published in Harmony on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

• 📈 Launched ONE on Binance.US with USD fiat, USDT & BUSD pairs
• 💎 Built Maker/Curve/Balancer/Yearn demos on mainnet
• 👩‍👩‍👧‍👦 Supported 7 $25k grants on wallets, bridges & cross-border remittances
• 🔂 Integrating Chainlink oracle for cross-chain DeFi liquidity

🚀 Binance.US Listing

We launched on Binance.US, one of the most respected and regulatory compliant exchanges. ONE can now be purchased with US Dollars and available to US citizens. Getting listed on Binance.US is an important step in fulfilling our cross-border finance goals.

Sending money to a relative is one of the most basic and important financial transactions a person can make. Blockchain has the potential to make it much easier and cheaper. Harmony is well positioned to make this a reality throughout the world thanks to our combination of fast transactions and low fees.

But to make Harmony the payment rails for cross-border transactions, we need fiat on-ramps, hence the need to prioritize making ONE available on a leading US exchange like Binance.US.

We are also partnering with other fiat gateways in India, Southeast Asia and elsewhere so that currency can be sent by anyone to anywhere in the world.

🔗 Chainlink Integration

Price oracles are another critical piece of infrastructure for cross-border finance and decentralized finance. We announced our partnership with Chainlink, an indispensable tool for over 150 blockchain projects.

Oracles play an important role because they allow off-chain data to be made available on-chain. This means currencies and any price related information can be integrated with blockchain finance applications.

💸 Defi Hackathon

Decentralized finance has been emerging for the past few years with Bancor, ETH Lend (now Aave), Kyber, and more. DeFi is not new.

But the rest of the world has finally caught up to the potential in decentralized finance. We’re now seeing adoption and clear product-market fit.

What value can Harmony add to DeFi?

Harmony is fast and cheap, but to learn how we can add to DeFi, we ran a team hackathon to learn, fork, and launch some of the most recognized projects: Maker, Balancer, Curve, Yearn.finance, wBTC, Aave

Each team researched the protocol, then forked and deployed a version on Harmony’s mainnet. We validated with hundreds of users sending thousands of transactions. Now we are building out some of the full products internally and with our grantees. More to come.

1/ Created my first DAI collateralized by ONE! costed me NOTHING vs $18 on Ethereum 🤯Try our demo and win PRIZES! How 👇- Sign up here https://t.co/AZWW9obcgu & make sure to select MakerDAO- Receive your 500 ONE in mainnet- Generate your first DAI, tweet it out! pic.twitter.com/2OakkoAvwb

Looking Ahead

We are prototyping cross-chain bridges, decentralized exchanges and light clients in our September team hackathon. We’ll be porting existing trustless bridges, learning about BTC, ETH, ATOM and DOT toolings and facilitating limited asset transfers on decentralized exchanges.

Ultimately, our goal is to enable cross-chain composability with Harmony as the settlement layer.

Stephen Tse
Harmony CEO

Don’t Miss

Watch The Defiant: The Curious Case of the CRV Launch

Watch DeFi’s next big thing: JellySwap

Become ONE with Harmony

Developers can build on Harmony today, a fast and open blockchain for decentralized applications. Harmony Mainnet supports state sharding with instant finality. Our staking mechanism reduces centralization while supporting delegation and slashing.

We ❤️ Developers.

Telegram | Twitter | Discord | Youtube | Medium | Facebook | LinkedIn | Reddit | Instagram

Binance.US Launch, Chainlink, DeFi on Mainnet, August Update was originally published in Harmony on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Before we unpack July’s progress, let us review the goals Harmony set out in January. Our goals in 2020 are cross-border utility and decentralized development. What did we do in July that got us closer to accomplishing our 2020 goals?

🇮🇩 Partnered for Indonesia Stablecoin

We announced a partnership with Rupiah Token, a non-US stablecoin representing the Indonesian Rupiah with one-for-one custodial backing. This builds upon our stablecoins strategy with our previously announced BUSD.

Providing cross-border payments between the US and Indonesia and other parts of Asia is just the first step. We’re very excited for the chance to provide utility to the millions of individuals and families who need to send money to and from the US to Indonesia and the rest of Southeast Asia.

⏱ Mainnet with 5-Second Finality

After tons of optimizations on consensus/system/network code, we've brought down the block time from 8 seconds to 5 seconds!Users transactions are confirmed just in 5 seconds now! A further improvement on the Dapp user experience on Harmony. 💪https://t.co/UMpNvqunnn

Two of the biggest problems in blockchain are getting users and scalability. These two are related as nobody wants to use slow dapps, and because dapps are slow, blockchain doesn’t have a lot of users yet.

At Harmony we are solving for this. We improved our block finality from 8 seconds to 5 seconds, a 38% improvement — faster than 99% of the public blockchains. Kudos to our engineering team for this huge milestone.

💰 Funded 7 Grants

🥳 We have been selected as a @harmonyprotocol grantee!🛠️ "JellySwap" allows users to swap coins between different blockchains! All swaps are fully decentralized, transparent and based on HTLC logic.ONE BTC, ONE ETH, ONE ERC20 swaps coming soon to https://t.co/PC7Z7gbvUH https://t.co/aMFJeESgEJ

Our community has been busy building, kickstarted by our open grants. In the first month of the grant program, we awarded 7 teams for a total of $130,000 in awards. The grantees for July are:

• Ript.io: interaction tool for beginner developers working with HRC20 contracts
• Jelly Swap: bridge for swapping ONE/BTC/ETH token pairs
• Money Home: remittance app for USD-Indian Rupee stablecoin pair
• Vivo: app to send and request HRC20 tokens with your friends & contacts
• Ibriz: mobile wallet for HRC20 staking, delegating and rewards
• SesameSeed: decentralized exchange for HRC20 / ERC20 tokens
• SmartStake: staking performance dashboard & analytics

🙌🏼 30 New Validators and 25 New Angels

In July we grew from 49 to 79 elected validators. This continues our decentralization progress in three ways:

• Economic: a diverse group of token holders will act in the best interest of the protocol (governance).
• Technological: a mix of advance and new validators helps the ecosystem grow. Moreover, more validators means that the network is more secure and reduces single-failover risks.
• Geographical: growing the community in various locations helps us become more decentralized.

👍🏼 640 Mainnet Slots

On May 16, 2020 we launched the first sharded proof-of-stake public blockchain with 320 external nodes. Then in June, we grew that to 480. And on July 31, we upgraded mainnet to 640 external validator slots. The quest to become more decentralized ultimately means that Harmony represents less of the network and the community represents more. We’re deliberately taking the steps to get there and accomplished a big milestone toward decentralization in July.

Looking Ahead

We are in the midst of a team hackathon, focused on all the building blocks we need to create so that there’s seamless transfer of assets between Harmony and Ethereum, leading to cross-chain composability & liquid stablecoins in August, then cross-border utility (remittance & e-commerce) with fiat gateways & regional partners in September.

We look forward to building utility with our community and partners.

Stephen Tse
Harmony CEO

Don’t Miss

Stephen spoke at Tsinghua University, the most prestigious university in China, at the invitation of Tsinghua Professor Kevin Xiaokang Mo (Stanford PhD, Distinguished Research Professor on Advanced Cryptography and Blockchain). Read our lecture “Ethereum 3? Scaling Cryptography in Blockchain”.

Ethereum 3.0? Harmony’s Guest Lecture on “Scaling Cryptography in Blockchain”

We also shared a Periscope video for the community. You can view it here.

Our team update!📈 5-second transaction finality for #DeFi & #fintech settlement.🏗️ Hackathon on @ethereum bridge for cross-chain stablecoins, connecting open blockchain @Polkadot @cosmos & payments @circlepay @ripple.😇 Grants & angels for fiat gateways beyond crypto. 🚀 https://t.co/bQjnVJOl33

Watch our yearn.finance video on the Defiant: What’s up with $YFI and yEarn?

5-Second Finality, BUSD & Rupiah Token, July Update was originally published in Harmony on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Harmony’s Guest Lecture at Tsinghua’s Yau Mathematical Sciences Center

At the invitation of Tsinghua Professor Kevin Xiaokang Mo (Stanford PhD, Distinguished Research Professor on Advanced Cryptography and Blockchain), Harmony Founder Stephen Tse is giving a guest lecture “Scaling Cryptography in Blockchain” on 2020/07/29.

Study notes: https://harmony.one/eth3

stephen tse | s.one on Twitter: "more bounties on @gitcoin w/ 161k developers worldwide & culture of collaborationour bounties range from $10k to $50k on protocols, bridges, tools, applicationslet's 10x security w/ @AndrewCMyers @Das8Ankush static types & formal proofs, @peckshield audits#eth3 starts here! pic.twitter.com/XO6YrbnTCV / Twitter"

more bounties on @gitcoin w/ 161k developers worldwide & culture of collaborationour bounties range from $10k to $50k on protocols, bridges, tools, applicationslet's 10x security w/ @AndrewCMyers @Das8Ankush static types & formal proofs, @peckshield audits#eth3 starts here! pic.twitter.com/XO6YrbnTCV

Lecture Abstract

Ready for Ethereum 3.0? In this talk, Stephen Tse covers cryptography already in use on blockchain mainnets such as Ethereum, ZCash and Harmony. Highlights include non-custodial exchanges with zero-knowledge rollups, stateless clients with a logarithmic number of headers, and cross-chain composability for decentralized finance. He surveys the latest usage metrics, competitive landscape and why cryptography is the 1000x magic for building open platforms.

Ethereum 3.0 is a set of ideas for beyond the foreseeable Ethereum 2.0 roadmap (phases 0, 1 and 2). I'd say it includes Casper CBC, super-quadratic sharding, data availability proofs, private leader election, STARKs (signature aggregation, witness compression, VDFs, state roots).

Stephen also focuses on scaling cryptography by bringing the best research results to production. With this engineering approach, Harmony achieves high performance by optimizing its consensus protocol with Boneh–Lynn–Shacham signatures, securing sharding membership with unbiasable randomness, and compressing delegation states for open staking.

Like precompiles in ethereum, but for every curve, every finite field, every type of crypto, every hash function.....Basically anything that can be optimized client-side gets a precompile with reduced gas costs.

Feel free to comment on our study notes (in progress) at https://harmony.one/eth3.

Stephen Tse
Harmony CEO

About Harmony

Harmony is a fast and open blockchain for decentralized applications.

Our protocol has achieved secure and random state sharding. Harmony Mainnet supports thousands of nodes in multiple shards, producing blocks in a few seconds with instant finality. Our staking mechanism reduces centralization while supporting stake delegation, reward compounding and double-sign slashing.

Are we decentralized yet? Harmony aims to build an open network of nodes operated and governed by a large community.

Visit us at https://harmony.one.

About Stephen Tse

Stephen (Harmony Founder & CEO) has been obsessed with protocols and compilers since high school. He reverse-engineered ICQ and X11 protocols, coded in OCaml for more than 15 years, and graduated with a doctoral degree in security protocols and compiler verification from the University of Pennsylvania.

Stephen was a researcher at Microsoft Research, a senior infrastructure engineer at Google, and a principal engineer for search ranking at Apple. He founded the mobile search Spotsetter with institutional venture capital; Apple later acquired the startup.

You may reach him at s@harmony.one, Twitter @stse, or Telegram @stephentse.

my guest lecture "scaling cryptography in blockchain" at tsinghuaon latest zkproof magic - non-custodial exchanges w/ zkrollups @deversifi, stateless clients w/ log(n) headers @ElectricCoinCo #flyclient, cross-chain composability for #defi @InterlayHQhttps://t.co/NjYHDLns4A

Ethereum 3.0? Harmony’s Guest Lecture on “Scaling Cryptography in Blockchain” was originally published in Harmony on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.