In 2022 Harmony strives to be a top blockchain for cross-chain assets, collectibles, identity, and governance. Our main themes are:
- Adoption — We are bringing utility to users through developers and partners. Hackathons with Gitcoin and workshops at Ethereum events will boost our reach.
- Interoperability — We are bridging with Bitcoin and Ethereum for broader assets. Our cross-shard and cross-chain transactions will enable new finance applications.
- Decentralization — We are growing our validator community and network features. External voting power and resharding will guarantee our long-term governance.
- Zero-Knowledge Proofs – We are researching and prototyping products with 100x benefits, magical use cases, or universal constructs.
How to scale Ethereum applications in 2022? 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.
We openly commit and update for engineering milestones here (as harmony.one/launches).
Launch Dates & Weekly Updates
| Name | Assign | Status | Next Milestone Date | Release Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Jenya Piskunov  | Live on Devnet | February 14, 2022 | 2022 Q2 | |
Leo Chen | Execution Started | February 14, 2022 | 2022 Q3 | |
Yuriy Menkov | Objective Defined | March 4, 2022 | 2022 Q2 | |
Nita Neou (Soph)Leo Chen | Execution Started | March 31, 2022 | 2022 Q3 | |
Leo Chen  | Live on Testnet | June 10, 2022 | 2022 Q2 | |
Jacky Wang  | Live on Testnet | June 20, 2022 | 2022 Q3 | |
| Execution Started | June 30, 2022 | 2022 Q4 | |
Ganesha UpadhyayaJenya PiskunovTKRachit Srivastava | Live on Devnet | June 30, 2022 | 2022 Q3 | |
Boris PolaniaGanesha Upadhyaya | Live on Testnet | July 25, 2022 | 2022 Q3 | |
Ganesha Upadhyaya | Objective Defined | July 25, 2022 | 2022 Q3 | |
Ganesha Upadhyaya | Objective Defined | August 29, 2022 | 2022 Q4 | |
| Execution Started | October 31, 2022 | 2022 Q3 | |
| Execution Started | December 31, 2022 | 2022 Q4 | |
| Objective Defined | May 31, 2023 | 2023 Q1 | |
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Harmony in 2022 will focus on adoption through developers and partners. We will continue to strengthen our network features, to lead industry in our cross-chain architecture, and to engage broad ecosystem to build with us. There will be explosive growth and new applications this year in blockchains — Harmony is ready to be leading a part of this global fintech revolution.
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. We 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” and "Bridge to All Chains" 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 our keynotes below, we summarize our roadmap as “Interoperability with On-Chain Bridges and Wallets" and "Hackathon & DAO on Building Bridges”. The post "$300M+ on Bounties, Grants & DAOs" gives a long-term plan on our ecosystem growth.
In short, here are our focus for coming 6 months:
- 1M users with $1000 assets: earn 20% fixed return with our authenticator wallets,
- 10k developers new to crypto: serve 10k users each with our cross-chain API,
- 100 DAOs on technical and ecosystem: govern 10k bounties of $300M.
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)
Zero-Knowledge Proofs
We should focus on products with 100x benefits, magical uses, or universal constructs. The following 6 products are the most ready for 2022. We put an estimated numbers of users by 2022 per product below as a measure of success.
- Succinct – rollups (10M users), stateless (100K)
- Private – mixers (1M), authentication (10M)
- Fair – randomness (10M), anti-collusion (100K)
Our zkDAO is 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.
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)
Planning (as of 2022 Jan)
- 2022Q1: Trustless Bitcoin/Ethereum bridges, Blue Metaverse, ZKProof course, Social NFT wallet, Staking contract, Cross-Chain to OpenSea
- 2022Q2: “Blue To Fly” social tokens, fixed-rate products, decentralized RPC, Terra/Polygon Bridge, Staking derivatives, Cross-shard transactions
- 2022Q3: 1-Second Finality, Fast streaming sync, Secure resharding, Decentralized ops, State pruning, Cosmos/Polkadot bridges, Metaverse festivals
- 2022Q4: zkSync rollups, Private authentication
- 2023: zkEVM bridges, Private swaps, 100K scholars
- 2024: Stateless clients, Anti-collusion funding
- 2025: All treasury on 10,000 DAOs
