Morning, everyone. First, I'd like to welcome the industry leaders and our ecosystem partners joining us today. What a great year for Web3 and Harmony! Not only did DeFi products find the billion-dollar market fit, NFT is now a household word. But the most exciting of all is how DAOs are going to change our future of work and social – below is how our story starts.
Day ONE: Web3 Festive Moments
Just a few weeks ago in Lisbon, we were announcing our $300M ecosystem fund for 100 DAOs. Today I am proud to report that our 23 DAOs are now funded with Gnosis Safe multi-signatures and Snapshot votings. Our Research DAO already has multiple top professors as governors and giving travel grants to students; our Wallet DAO spawned three mobile clients and pushed through many security audits. Our bottom-up approach is the "Basic Income" DAO, paying creatives and builders at $75 per hour – globally for at-will contributions. Our top-down approach is the "Organic Liquidity" DAO, market-making across tens of exchanges by thousands of strategy bots – with aligned and public incentives. Harmony has committed millions of funds to these initiatives. More importantly, we have pushed their formations, governance, and milestones in the public – all as open development across chains.
100 DAOs and Top-Level Domain .country
ONE on Messari’s 2022 Theses
Let's deep dive into a new DAO I will be spending lots of time on in the coming months. zkDAO for zero-knowledge proofs, cryptographic primitives, and privacy. That's where the 100x benefits and the magical use cases come in. We are focusing on ZK innovations that are the most likely to reach millions of users in 2022. We are most interested in universal ZK constructs that are the building blocks for Web3. In particular, here are six ZK products that already have prototypes on mainnet. The first is compressing computations and states to succinct representations – namely, low-fee zkEVM rollups, trustless Flyclient bridges, and stateless Non-Interactive-PoPoW clients. The second is protecting privacy across multiple chains and Web2-to-Web3 actions. For example, cross-chain coin mixers like Tornado – which is a top use case with 35K users and $6M revenue; Ethereum Foundation's Semaphore Project now enables anonymous authentication and voting. Lastly, fairness is now guaranteed on blockchain. Verifiable Delay Functions (VDF) will be a key primitive for randomness in games and lotteries; anti-collusion for quadratic funding will be critical for anonymous and open grants.
zkDAO – Succinct, Private, Fair
We must always remind ourselves of why we are building – the radical change and the 10x impact. What are our goals beyond benefiting tens of thousands of traders and accumulating hundreds of billions of assets? Harmony is asking where we can distribute the future for good: Where should the crypto cities be based? Who are the most in need that the technology can serve? Hence, I am very glad today to announce the $2M funding for our Africa DAO. In Africa, blockchain can facilitate digital identities, better value-chains, and environmental traceability, and reducing the possibility of fraudulent elections. Blockchain can also tackle corruption and provide better documentation to safekeeping land titles or medical records. This DAO's 3-month milestones and deliverables have already started: bootstrapping an incubator in Uganda, hosting ETH Kenya with grants for hundreds of scholars, and minting NFT for biodiversity and preservation efforts.
Africa DAO – Tech for GoodYour Career: To Yearn for the Vast and Endless Web3
How about the better half of the human population? Our H.E.R DAO is a women-centered developer community that includes self-identifying women, trans women, and non-binary audiences. To reflect inclusiveness, H.E.R. shall use the term “womxn” to represent the collective audience. Our goal is to sustainably diversify the blockchain ecosystem, leading to more versatile, holistic innovations and increased impact potential. As its governors strongly argue: Cultural and social barriers still result in too few womxn applying for and receiving funding. This lack of diversity has implications beyond a basic sense of fairness. As blockchain defines new economic systems, uniformity among its creators has led to biased products which reinforce the already existing inequities and disadvantages for womxn. Let's bring and celebrate with many of them at our next big event at ETH Denver!
Book Grant: “Create Wealth in Harmony”/w=3840,quality=90,fit=scale-down)
Harmony aims for open governance and vibrant participation of our ecosystem. Toward radical transparency, we aim to disclose the funding and the deliverables of the projects as much as possible. The site harmony.one/funding tracks our grants for project launches, marketing campaigns for porting Ethereum applications, or our joint efforts with other fellow DAOs. Even more radically, Harmony aims to do business development in the open. The site harmony.one/partners shows partners and fellows we are engaging in the last or coming few weeks. That is, "In Handshake & Embrace" – like Harmony's logo. We target partners with 100K users, $100M assets, or 10X potential together. We standardize the impact metrics as goals, negotiate in our public forum, use long-form writing instead of Zoom calls... truly getting ready for the DAO-to-DAO economy.
Open Funding & Radical Transparency
What are the Web3 theses for 2022? As Messari claims: NFT infrastructure, DAO tooling, and inter-protocol bridges. How? Harmony is an EVM-compatible, sharded Proof of Stake smart contract blockchain. Our Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerant (FBFT) consensus protocol, combined with random state sharding and Boneh–Lynn–Shacham (BLS) constant-sized signatures allows Harmony to achieve finality in one block or roughly two seconds – compared to optimistic finality in Solana or Avalanche, or 6 seconds for Cosmos, or 60 seconds for Polkadot. A normal transfer costs only about 0.000021 ONE. Harmony was the first sharding-based L1 on a mainnet. It has solved the trilemma of decentralization-security-scalability by uniformly scaling with shards. Harmony’s bridges can connect any Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake chains. Our FlyClient architecture is fully trustless and highly gas-efficient. Currently, our bridges for Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain secure hundreds of million dollars of cross-chain assets. With hundreds of validators for 4 data and execution shards, Harmony with its trustless bridges provides secure and uniform scaling – a great tradeoff compared to rollups or other Layer 2 solutions.
Why Harmony? Technical Overview of Protocols, Validators & Bridges
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.
Our cross-chain bridge is both gas-efficient and trustless. Its smart contracts, based on Flyclient architecture with Merkle Mountain Range, that exist both on Ethereum (or BSC) and Harmony are the only custodians of each chain’s respective native asset... bridging to Harmony costs approximately 100,000 gas: around $20 at 65 gwei. A return to Ethereum requires multi-signature confirmation by Harmony validators, at an approximate cost of 200,000 gas. Finality back to Ethereum is achieved within 6 minutes, comparing favorably to L2s and side chains. Soon, our bridge also connects with Bitcoin and other PoW chains.
Horizon: A Gas-Efficient Trustless Bridge for Cross-Chain Transactions
Now, let us show the gratitude in a video to all the Web3 builders, especially for those we met in Lisbon.
And it all began with ONE simple idea: to live in a world you love, you must build it….
It started as a spark
And the world let it spread like wildfire
An anonymous coder built a trillion-dollar network to be a store of value.
A 21-year-old hacker launched an infinite machine and a global community of dreamers.
These dreamers are the future
Their collective hearts beat to the same drum…
They believe in radical social change.
One where trust is not needed to participate.
One where everyone can sing in harmony.
As builders, we stand stronger together.
It takes momentum to build radical fairness and radical opportunity for 10 billion people…
That’s the future we envision.
And WE will be the ONEs to build it."
👀 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zT3uvnNhZnE
And, we connected with many NFT artists and communities in New York and Miami over the last few weeks. Here's the video we played in Times Square.
👀 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYoL5mQciFA
There are much more campaigns and stories coming – so join our Creative DAO today!
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 (in the midst of winter, within me) 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.”
One more thing: instead of seed phrases, Harmony’s 1Wallet uses Google Authenticator, and backup access is obtained through social recovery. Based on close collaboration and the research paper SmartOTP, 1Wallet advances smart contract wallets beyond Argent and Loopring. In particular, 1Wallet does not require secure enclave hardware or linking with your email identity. Of course, users can also transact with traditional wallets, including MetaMask and Gnosis Safe, easily with Harmony. Again, Harmony is an open and fast blockchain. Our mainnet runs Ethereum applications with 2-second transaction finality and 100 times lower fees. Our secure bridges offer cross-chain transfers with Ethereum, Binance, and 3 other chains. Build on Harmony, bridge to all chains. We are an open platform for your assets, collectibles, identity, and governance. Come harmony.one/apply!
Monthly Newsletters & AnnouncementsDay ONE: Web3 Festive MomentsHarmony Grants and Investments (Paused)