By Jack Chan. To be approved by: @Li Jiang, @Daniel Pagan
Strong yes: @Giv Parvaneh, @Sam Harrison, @Peter Abilla, @Esther Arey, @Matty McDonald
On Hold: Stephen Tse
Goals
Harmony Grants and Investments are looking to foster the “next big thing” at Harmony. Not just one, but at least 10, within the next 6 months. We are now laser focused on building towards these verticals: DeFi, Gaming, NFT, Metaverse and Tooling. There are significant changes to the grants program since Sep 2021.
🚀 Grants
Grant Proposals can be submitted to Harmony via the official Talk forum.
Proposal Structure
These are the basics required to have a grant be considered
- Description
- up to 2,000 words describing the proposed dApp to launch on Harmony
- screenshots of user experience demonstrating product-market fit
- include a realistic go-to-market or launch plan, marked with timelines
- integration plans with Harmony ecosystem builders, especially in DeFi
- Ask
- types of co-marketing campaigns,
- types of technical support, and/or
- amount in US Dollar equivalent
- Relevant links (or its equivalent)
- Testnet / Mainnet dApp
- Social media profiles (Twitter / Reddit / Discord / Telegram) of team or company
- YouTube / Vimeo video tutorial
- Gitbook documentation
- DocSend slide deck
- HackMd / Gitbook of whitepaper
- Canva design
- Mirror.xyz / Medium blog post
- Team
- description of all core team members supporting the initiative
- include their experiences, background, % time commitment
- LinkedIn profiles are encouraged, for doxxed core team members
Grant Specifications
Grants are recommended to have the following specifications:
- must contribute into one of these verticals: DeFi, Games, NFTs or Developer Tools
- a prototype of a fully-featured product launched on a Testnet on any chain
- be able to demonstrate a proof-of-concept of the initiative
- equity-free contributions earmarked with milestones with deliverable scope and dates
- each of the milestones are set between 4-to-8 weeks
- the first milestone should at least be launched on Mainnet
- proposals could be non-monetary, seeking for co-marketing and/or technical support
- funding* asks could range from $1K and up to $250K
Community Poll
In order to further strengthen funding proposals, we encourage the use of a community poll via on-chain voting on Snapshot, even if it’s an approved grant
- kickoff a public Snapshot voting for Harmony ONE holders
- use a Quadratic Voting method voted by wallets with a minimum of 1,000 ONEs
- set the voting period to be as little as a 2-week voting period, at most 4 weeks
- gain consensus from the community for voters with a Yes / No / Abstain votes
- campaign for your funding proposal on Discord, Reddit, Telegram, Twitter and Forum
- circle back to the proposal post on the forum thread with the results
Funding proposals approved by the Harmony Foundation may be retracted if the community signals strongly with a 67% majority to retract funding. Vice-versa, declined proposals will be reverted if the 2/3rds majority vote is in support of the proposal.
👉 Apply for a Grant
To apply, you’ll need to login to Harmony’s Forum and click on ➡️[+ New Topic]⬅️ over there
🏢 Investments
Think Startups. Better yet, think about building a Web3 startup with product market fit. We take investments seriously with a much higher bar and will give priority to teams that have already built and launched in Harmony’s ecosystem.
We have a Harmony Venture program where Harmony Foundation will co-invest into projects with check sizes of $50K to $1M, ideally for teams with modest valuations, to help teams gain an 18-to-36 month runway.
Investment Theses
The foundation intends to seek out projects that are early staged or pre-product, at a Seed or Series A funding stage with a maximum post-money valuation of $25M or fully diluted valuation of under $50M. We are flexible in terms of investment instruments: tokens, NFTs, equity, or debts. We expect the teams behind the projects to have relevant background and expertise to their current initiatives, and have at least a minimal version of the working products with existing users. Teams will have an advantage if they are already actively involved with Harmony's social media, familiar with the culture of the community and are respected by the Harmony community.
The following are Harmony’s Investment theses
- Fun to Play Games Games are traditional built to be fun to play, to enjoy and to relax. Developers that build with primarily game-first in mind — with well-thought out game mechanics, sensible use of in-game digital goods, using Triple-A quality graphic renderings (even in the 8-bit world, Minecraft would be the industry standard) — and secondary priorities to include GameFi, tokenomics, marketplaces, etc. Teams that have built successful Web2 desktop, browser and mobile games in the past will be strong investment candidates
- Dense Community represented by NFTs NFTs generated to represent a cause, and with a stronghold of community, will be well sought after. NFTs could be created by creative artist in any digital medium — 2D/3D still images, animations, lighting, generative art, augmented reality, music, audio, etc. If there are no solid proofs of time-tested continuous followers of 10,000+ fans for over 3 months. Cross-overs from the physical to blockchain systems will require a very close inspection for potential gaps bridging from the analog to digital world
- DeFi protocols with a strong track record We will be seeking to continuously invest in DeFi initiatives that can help strengthen the network of DeFi primitives and build upon those, whether they are to provide loss-less liquidity to help bootstrap a liquidity for bridges, DEX pools, options vaults, insurance underwritings, collateralized stablecoins, etc. Teams that have successfully deployed, with combined cross-chain TVL of $20M+ (or volume traded of $5M+ per day) on Ethereum or at least 1 other EVM-compatible chain will be highly desirable
Once the Harmony Foundation invests in your startup venture, we help your team via the Harmony Accelerator Program where you will have support to hire talents via the Talent Network, find advisors via the Advisor Network, and web3 services via the Services Network.
👉 Apply for an Investment
To apply, you’ll need to login to Harmony’s Forum and click on ➡️[+ New Topic]⬅️ over there
📖 About Harmony Grants & Investments
Benefits of building on Harmony
- Harmony has one of the most condensed (based on developers, followers, subscribers, users with wallets, to market-cap ratio) and a vibrant community, able to absorb your launched dApp and gain adoption within days, hours and sometimes minutes.
- Grantees receive support from the Harmony Foundation with a dedicated channel to help support from a technical, co-marketing and guidance if necessary. High potential teams receive marketing support with retweets and Harmony ONE Weekly newsletter posts.
- Grantees can enter into the Harmony Accelerator Program with support to hire talents via the Talent Network, find advisors via the Advisor Network, and web3 services via the Services Network.
- You can host a local meetup in your region or decentralized region as a follow-up launch announcement, with merchandise drop ship from Harmony by working with the Ambassador DAO.
Recommendations
- Don’t be shy — post sneak peaks on Reddit, engage on Discord, mention @harmonyprotocol with #HarmonyONE on Twitter, post on the Harmony Talk forum, upload teasers on YouTube and reward Testnet users. These are successful playbooks to gain community enthusiasm.
- Gain strong positive feedback from Harmony community members and DAOs prior to submitting a proposal — post the idea on Discord, Telegram, Reddit, Forum and mention #HarmonyONE and @harmonyprotocol on Twitter. Ideas are aplenty. Execution is key.
- While awaiting for a reviewer response, post weekly updates on Harmony's forum by replying to your proposal’s original post. An engaging forum post is a strong signal of a high interest in the community and grant committee to agree on pre-approving grants.
- Code bases, development materials and production assets associated with your proposal to be fully open, preferably with MIT or BSD licenses; All services and apps deployed must be easily cloneable.
Ask
- We encourage teams, especially building cross chain bridged solutions, to go multi-chain quickly; otherwise we ask for 6-month exclusive campaign with Harmony — we can work with you to plan out time windows to work across chains.
- We ask teams to use a 5-out-9 multisig account on Gnosis Safe to receive grant funds, aimed to have 3 signatories from the project team, 3 signatories from your project’s community, and 3 signatories from the Harmony community.
- We ask teams to familiarize with Harmony’s ecosystem, sending funds to a team-managed wallet, converting half to 1USDC or 1USDT, to pair with ONEs, to loan & borrow, in Harmony’s Decentralized Exchanges (DEXes) for 30-days. See DefiLlama for a list or this tutorial.
- Write developer tutorial contents on docs.harmony.one’s Tutorial section, to help benefit the entire developer ecosystem; open a GitHub pull request (PR) here to start, and it will appear on the Developer Tutorial section of Harmony’s official documentation site.
Appendix
Updates since Sep 2021
Since the launch of Harmony’s Ecosystem Fund in Sep 2021, we have now simplified the program to two simple categories: “Grants” and “Investments”. “Grants” are equity-free with a fair amount of due diligence, while Investments are deeper relationships going through a more rigorous process. The category changes since the Ecosystem Fund’s inception include:
- “Launch”, “Port” & “Partners”: are all grouped into “Grants”
- “DAOs”: folds into Governance discussion in Harmony’s forum
- “Hackathons”: Dora Hacks and Encode are two hackathon partners
- “Bounties”: Gitcoin will be the main host for bounties
- “Events”: Event Ops will manage this going forward with with Ambassador DAOs
- “Income”: Program is superseded by the existing Contributors program
Funding FAQ
References
Harmony ONE Accelerator Program
We're thrilled to introduce the Harmony ONE Accelerator Program! This program is meant to help the Harmony ecosystem of builders, DAOs and creators grow to the next level. This provides the next stage of growth where many of the $300M Ecosystem Fund grantees who have built on the Harmony blockchain are now ready to take the next leap.
medium.com
https://open.harmony.one/newsletter
In April, Harmony team members participated in multiple AMAs to answer community questions. Select members of the team also networked with hundreds of developers by attending ETHAmsterdam, Paris Blockchain Week Summit and ETHPortland. We also launched the Harmony ONE Accelerator Program, the ONEWeekly videos series and newsletter, and integrated with Covalent.
open.harmony.one
Welcome
To Scale Trust and Create A Radically Fair Economy
docs.harmony.one
How to build a web3 project
As @garyvee once famously said, "98-99% of NFT projects will end up being bad investments." So how can you outshine the competition and separate yourself from the web3 crowd? Here's a guide to empower founders with the right tools and principles to build the future of web3 🧵 70% of startups fail within 10 years.
mirror.xyz
DefiLlama
DefiLlama is a DeFi TVL aggregator. It is committed to providing accurate data without ads or sponsored content, as well as transparency.
defillama.com
How To Play DeFi Kingdoms | Beginner's Guide 2022
DeFi Kingdoms Official Website: https://DefiKingdoms.su#DefiKingdoms #Play2earnDeFi Kingdoms is a game, a DEX, a liquidity pool opportunity, a market of rare...
www.youtube.com
Tranquil Finance Harmony One Tutorial (Staking, Lending, Borrowing, stOne)
Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/JohnnyTimeBUSD Tip Jar:0xFf3d275BB50bB677Ea1f117730B68Cf42651a60fHey guys, in today's video we are going to learn everything ...
www.youtube.com
Sushiswap on Harmony Protocol
We are super excited to announce the launch of Sushi, one of the top decentralized exchanges (DEX), on Harmony, offering Harmony users with yet another trading option in its growing suite of DeFi applications. Now, you can enjoy all the benefits of Sushi on Ethereum, except the high gas fees, and settle transactions quickly with our 2 second finality.
medium.com
Harmony Launches Aave v3 On Mainnet
We are excited to announce that we have launched Aave v3 on our mainnet, providing users greater capital efficiencies, increased security and cross-chain functionality. The v3 was released in January 2022 on our testnet and is now making its way to mainnet.
medium.com
Launch Curve on Harmony
Summary: Harmony is proposing to deploy Curve on the Harmony blockchain to expand stablecoin swap to its community of users and provide incentives to bootstrap the launch of Curve to a new ecosystem. Abstract: Our proposal is to support Curve as it continues to expand in the coming multi-chain world.
gov.curve.fi
Harmony (ONE) Trading and Single-Sided Staking is Live on Bancor
ONE (ERC20) trading and single-sided staking is now live on Bancor! Bancor is a decentralized exchange designed to mitigate impermanent loss and offer single-sided (ONE-only) exposure. That means as ONE token holder, you can now: Instantly swap ONE in the Bancor Network (for ETH, WBTC, USDC, DAI & more) - as ONE liquidity grows, ONE swaps get cheaper in price.
medium.com