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 have 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)
Here’s to The ONEs Who Build
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)
Keyless Social Wallets via One-Time-Passwords (OTP Authenticator)
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)
$300M+ on Web3, Grants & DAOsWhy & How to DAO on Harmony?
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)
Keyless Social Wallets via One-Time-Passwords (OTP Authenticator)
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’s to The ONEs Who Build
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.
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)
Interoperability with On-Chain Bridges and Wallets
Below are Stephen's talk with Gitcoin, our video campaigns for recruiting builders, and project founders sharing their visions.
Harmony Grants and Investments (Paused)"ONE to Earn" for Builders & Creatives
