A lawyer turned a $50M-debt startup into a $7.4B acquisition with Steve Jobs: 1. staying with the seemingly-impossible pillars (building a worldwide entertainment brand), 2. excruciating depth in partnership agreement for mutual success (a year-long negoitation for a 10-year Disney-Pixar deal), and, 3. preserving the “from the heart” creativity as culture (enough process but always the good people to ”just keep swimming” in new eras). How about us?
Fixing Harmony is all about execution – serving developers, gaining users, and driving transactions. Below are the top 3 items per initiative that are fixable and must be fixed in coming 6-12 months – towards 100% Shard-1 traffic (uniform scaling), Harmony 2023 whitepaper (Sharding Fellows) and 20% monthly transaction growth (developer incentives).
- Technical – Protocol, Network, Services
- Ecosystem – Users, Developers, Partners
- People: Team, Culture, Investors, Grants
- Growth: Assets, Adoption, Revenues, Marketing
Protocol – open & secure consensus
1. Scalability: Other-shard usage are 0%.
See Dionysis Zindros’s research report on our protocol in 2022, tokenomics in 2020, sharding whitepaper in 2018.
2. Decentralization: Internal voting power is 49%.
See Variant Fund’s guideline on sufficient governance.
3. Security: Shard assignment is static since June 2020.
See Rongjian Lan’s resharding roadmap.
Network – elastic & viable infrastructure
1. Availability: Mainnet, testnet, endpoints were down 100+ hours this year.
Our mainnet was down 19 hours in 2022 Jan, our testnet is down 2 months.
Versus Infura’s 99.95% uptime in the last 4 years. Our monitors, dashboards, on-duty rotation fail for security incidents and partner communication. Our Gnosis multisig-safe service were down 150 hours (97.5%) total (versus Gnosis’ 99.65% uptime). Our testnet (and devnet) were down 2000 hours this year.
2. Power: 10 validators control 46.6% stakes.
See staking dashboard (2.52B tokens from top 10 among 5.41B total stakes): Binance, Robo, KuCoin, Validator.ONE, Kysen, P-Ops, Staking4All, Fortune, 三潭映月, Chainnode. Active but small: Kratos, Everstake. As of 2022/09/15, only 20 validators with 60M delegated tokens make $10K profits per month. P-Ops, with top delegated stakes, only earns 60,412,412 lifetime reward; hence at $0.02 * 5% fee (soon 8-10% among most validators), only $60,412 total. (Validator contacts)
3. States: Full nodes take [7] days to sync and [$15K] monthly to host.
See Leo Chen’s endpoint roadmap, our partnership deck with Infura, and our Elastic RPC architecture. Testnet takes [12 days] to bootstrap. Internal cloud cost at $250K monthly despite 93.1% down in transaction fees (52.8% drop in endpoint requests, from 800M in March to 378M in Sept) at [10%] compute and [40%] network utilitizations. See Celestia’s and Cosmos’s approaches.
Services – easy & robust products
1. Bridges: Isolated from Bitcoin/Ethereum assets 2022 July-October.
Only Layer0 multisig-based bridge from Oct. Our Bitcoin bridge must go through (full and multiple) re-audits of security operations and smart contracts in Q4 before relaunch – with Ganesha transition to Yuriy. Our trustless Ethereum bridge is still months from code complete and audit – with Ganesha transition to Aaron Li. See other choices and Jack Chan’s post.
2. Partners: No launch for Infura, Gnosis, Etherscan in coming quarters.
See Giv Parvaneh’s analysis on service partners.
3. Control: Only 8 people ever run full nodes, testnets and endpoints.
Leo, Jack, Soph, Diego, Socheat, Haodi, Lutty, P-Ops (Mindstyle, JP).
Users
1. Gateways: Few fiat options and long withdrawals.
US exchanges: Coinbase, Kraken. Korea: Bitthumb.
2. Custody: Wallet or multisig lack social or insitutional security.
3. Usage: No daily use of products besides short-term gains.
Only top 6 dApps have more than 1,000 daily users.
Developers
1. Features: Critical analytics (Dune, Nansen, Magic Eden) are missing.
Nansen Q1 2023 earliest. Must upgrade to Covalent’s “Increment” for analytics instead of MetricsDAO.
2. Support: Our in-person hackathons has [0]% technical conversion.
Celestia has Modular Fellows. Our engineering hires and technical engagement: Denver [..]%, Rio [..]%, New York [..]%.
3. Differentiation: All Layer-1 and 2 protocols are cheap and fast.
Not unique: 2-second finality, 1-block cross-composability, on-chain delegation with 20K delegators, on-chain slashing with view changes, verifiable randomness.
Partners
1. Web3 projects have tens of options.
Lacks selling points and comparison charts (against the most relevant 3 and against the top 10).
2. Web2 projects takes years to launch.
Even Reddit’s community point (on Arbitrum) takes [24] months to launch.
3. Legal: Exchanges, vendors, banks require an entity for off-chain contracts.
Security tokens (controlled by a central entity) vs utility tokens (considered a public goods).
Team
1. Hiring: 4-year vesting is too long a committment on both sides.
But 3-month engagements for fellows are too short.
2. Communication: Regular sync and performance review fail.
Many fail to do daily check-ins for blockers, weekly reports on progress, monthly summary for milestones, and quarterly planning for impact.
3. Local: Bay Area team can only meet twice weekly in person.
Talent is unevenly distributed in the globle, but 996 bonding happens only in office.
Culture
1. Open: Community-shared development spoils “surprise & delight”.
Versus: the magic of Apple’s launch campaigns.
2. Drive: External contributors and advocates cannot sustain on their own.
Versus: systems (Linux, Firefox), languages (Python, Rust), protocols (Ethereum, Cosmos), applications (Maker, Aave) are in fully decentralized development and creating billion dollar values.
3. Structure: Corporate grows to 100 people while foundation remains at 10.
Assets
1. Exchange: Binance marketing budget is unused.
2. Apes: Eight blue Bored Apes are unused.
3. Names: Top-level Internet domain .country is unused.
Connect a Web2-native .country usable on any browser or connected device, for each DAO like a digital nation or a network state, to Web3-ready Ethereum Naming Service (ENS) or Harmony’s Crazy.ONE. Also 4 .com domains (blueapes, bluetaverse, bluetofly, harmonyprotocol) and 19 .one domains (alsois, amazing, asthe, blueapes, blues, bluetofly, change, crazy, exchange, harmony, hungryfoolish, incredible, inlovewith, made, madein, making, stse, wishing, with). Asking Eugene Kim, Aaron Lee, Leo Chen to take over.
Grants
1. Common Goods: Only if open source, open assets, open deploy.
See the requirements of the original grant guideline versus Ethereum Foundation’s recent allocation.
2. Exclusivity: Only if 2-year symbiosis before crossing chains.
3. Expectations: Mutual success takes long, iterative, written agreements.
See a lawyer’s year-long negotiation on Disney-Pixar’s $7.4B partnership.
Revenues
1. Transactions: Fees are down 93.2% since Feb 2022.
Transaction fees are burned. But Chainlink (oracle), Protofire (Gnosis Safe), MetricsDAO demand monthly fees. In 2022 Q1 total is 9.45M ONE tokens or $1.83M at daily price, Q2 3.60M or $264K (85.6% drop compared to Q1), July 2.05M = $43.4K (50.7% drop versus average Q2 monthly), Aug 1.7M = $41.7K (3.92% drop versus July). Or, 1-0.0417/(1.83/3) = 93.2% drop since Q1.
2. Sales: Enterprise accounts take long pipelines and profit sharing.
Marketing
1. Announcements: Missing weekly tweet announcement and monthly press.
Two confirmed PR firms (6 Eastern PR, Hokku, Panony Asia) but not launched. No invitations for keynotes, interviews, or industry alliance.
2. Engagement: Leadership team are absent in top tweets and podcasts.
3. Communities: Traders and investors without stories are mercenaries.
Ethereum is playing infinite game and building decentralized society instead.
Investors
1. Ventures: Our ecosystem raised only [$100K] total.
2. Institutional: Only Lemniscap, HashKey, Binance Labs held ONE tokens.
Apathy: Early and large retail investors are already disengaged.
3. Employees: Alignment and vesting are moot after 95% token price drop.
During 2008 crisis, Google employee stocks were repriced but vesting extended. Our all-time-high is $0.3798. See Shopify’s sliding choice for cash vs equity.
Adoption
1. Analytics: No top 3 metrics to track impact of each initiative.
https://dappradar.com/rankings/protocol/harmony and https://defillama.com/chain/Harmony.
2. DeFi: native stablecoins has $[100k] total liquidity.
Not much for MAI and OIN either.
3. NFT / DAO: Missing the currently small but native and hyper growth.
Versus https://messari.io/governor/overview.
