This talk (harmony.one/talk) covers 1. Harmony 2023 fellowship program on uniform scaling and onchain security, 2. our Web3 apps framework with social (humans) and cryptographic (proofs), and 3. our NFT launchpad with (radically) fair drops and social modules.
1. Harmony 2023 Whitepaper & Fellows: Uniform Scaling & Onchain Security
Harmony is a scalable and secure blockchain. Our mainnet is live with state sharding since 2019 June and with open staking since 2020 May. Harmony achieves 2-second transaction finality with 4 shards, 250 nodes each, 25.3K onchain delegators, 60% liveness slashing, and sub-second leader rotations.
Toward 2023, we are developing 1-block composable cross-shard transactions; validator resharding every 18-hour epoch with gradual state sync; and, account abstractions for smart wallets with social recovery but no central custodians or fee forwarders.
A. Open Platform: Consensus, Staking, Development
“Open Consensus for 10B People”. That means that there will be an open platform for our future generations to create in harmony.
- Open. A platform is open if anyone can join its development, create values together, and set the rules as a community.
- Consensus: A platform of consensus make transactions with understanding and agreement, not just of majority, as a human protocol in harmony.
- 10B People: A platform is for ten billion people, as the human population is converging to in coming decades, if inclusive for everyone including those in the future.
B. Trust Dilemma: Scalability, Security, Decentralization
”To build tools and users for developers, bring the best research to production, and create wealth together among communities.”
- Build Tools: We provide infrastructure including developer tools and service endpoints, as well as give grant incentives and launch campaigns for user growth.
- Research Production: We publish and implement state-of-the-art consensus algorithms, cryptographic data structures, tokeneconomics design, and wallet security.
- Create Wealth: We help communities issue tokens with a liquid market, share collectibles to drive engagement, and sustain common goals together over long terms.
C. Web3 Ownership: Assets, Collectibles, Governance
“To Scale Trust and 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. Or, “To create cooperation for global communities, and scale their digital economies”.
- Scale Trust: A blockchain decentralizes coordindation among global communities – by enforcing contracts without trusting third parties or prior rules.
- Radically Fair: A blockchain is fair if everyone has, if not fully equal chance and rewards, meaningful participation against the power of cumulative wealth.
- Create an Economy: A blockchain, as a marketplace full of incentives, allows anyone to create tokens, secure transactions between parties, and accure values from serving utility.
Firstly, Harmony supports uniform scaling, meaning that our shards grow linearly and boundlessly with transaction demands. Our nodes, states, transactions are each cleanly divided into shards with secure synchronization with the beacon shard.
Secondly, Harmony supports onchain security, meaning that our delegators, bridges, wallets minimize trust assumptions besides malicious validators. Our end-to-end security relies only on the core protocol and smart contract execution – without risking censorship from colluded entities, suffering any single point of backend failure, sidestepping storage of authentication credentials, or leaking identifiable information.
At peak, Harmony’s protocol achieved 500 transactions per shard per second in production, our elastic endpoints served 800M requests per day – with our network accruing $1.41B total value locked, $1.48B stakes, 162 validator pools, 120 active apps, 75 DAO governors, 371K monthly active users, and 656K total wallets.
D. Showcases: Wallet Security & Social Games
- ⏳ 1Wallet (social mobile wallet) is open source and stores private keys on your mobile device instead of custodial servers. Its Apple Keychain integration and multi-party computation for recovery eliminate the security risks of seed phrases. Gen Z use 1Wallet to curate communities around chats with NFT airdrops, gated content access, and generative 3D avatars. Currently the 1000s users on Harmony engage daily over newsfeed with event discovery, street fashion, collegiate sports, and other cultural experience.
- 🦸 DeFi Kingdom (yield farming game), or DFK, is a RPG (role play game) experience as idle quests for farming DeFi yields. At peak, its transaction volume ranked the top among games of all blockchains, accuring $1.02B locked assets and 317K monthly users on Harmony.
- 🌳 Blue Forest (ZKProof strategy game) is a Play-to-Earn version of Dark Forest, which is gas-expensive even on Gnosis Chain (sometimes queuing up into weeks for a game turn). Also, Blue Forest allows tournament betting for cash prizes as well as for no-loss options.
Harmony is Ethereum-compatible and supports 1. DeFi (Aave, Curve, Frax, Sushi, Tranquil, Stably, StakeDAO); 2. games (DeFi Kingdom, DeFira, Mercury Forge); 3. NFT (Bored Apes, Animoca, Atari, MAD, .country domains), 4. DAOs (Gnosis, Snapspot, Aragon); 5. middleware (Chainlink, Graph, Covalent, DappRader, Pocket Networks, Chainsafe, Hummingbot); 6. bridges (LayerZero, Datachain, Celer, Trustless BTC); 7. gateways (Wyre, Transak, MoonPay, Simplex); 8. exchanges (Binance, Huobi, Kucoin, Crypto.com, OKX); and, 9. wallets (Metamask, Ledger, Trust, 1Wallet).
In 2023, besides protocol development mentioned above, Harmony is driving adoption via games (desktop-mobile wallet sync, tournament escrows, embedded marketplaces) – as well as impact via community (social curation, creator-fan economy, seasonal governance) and cross-chain via partners (chain-agnostic toolings, zero-knowledge-proof bridges, modular data availability).
2. Web3 Apps = Decentralized + Financialized + Nonfungible + Social + Cryptographic
Which apps satisfy these Web3 critieria? Decentralized on open blockchains, financialized with staked tokens, nonfungible with soulbound collectibles, social with seasonal humans, and cryptographic with zero-knowledge proofs.
Decentralized (Blockchains)
- Open: Any 100+ people can run any actions (submit, execute, verify, settle).
- Free: Any can fork or compose its values (patents, codes, assets, deploys).
- Safe: Any can dispute for valid transactions against 1-second finality.
Financialized (Tokens)
- Swap: Trade with any assets at a liquid price below 1% fees.
- Stake: Lend assets for any time periods above 5% fixed rate.
- Bridge: Cross assets with 10 ecosystems at 3% take rate.
Nonfungible (Collectibles)
- Name: Multiple anonymous identities, with contextual displays.
- Badges: Earn only by time and skills, with contextual rankings.
- Soul: Bound among community, no transfer but revocation.
Social (Humans)
- Circle: Follow at most 10 people or 3 topics weekly.
- Focus: Like at most 10 posts or reply 3 conversations.
- Seasons: Decay beyond 3 months or 30-mile locality.
Cryptographic (Proofs)
- Succint: Rollup millions of actions in 1-kilobyte zero-knowledge states.
- Private: Mixup any 100 end-to-end actions within hours.
- Fair: Cannot bias or predict any choices, but verifiable.
3. Chain-native NFT Marketplace & Launchpad
Project RADICAL is our platform-native NFT marketplace with strong diligence – for creators to engage fans with fair drops and social chats, for traders to bootstrap economy with deep analytics and easy automation, and for developers to modularize integrations with open source and chain features. Let’s launch 100 projects in 100 days!
10y ago I thought that the market of resources, property rights, trade, etc are the most important processes in the world. Today I think much more about the ecosystem of discussion and spread of memes / culture / ideas. The latter follows quite different laws from the former! (via stse.eth)
A. Insights & Theses
- Social experiences will drive new usage: private sales with trustless swaps, anonymous messages with configurable privacy, push notifications with gated channels, stakes for pay-to-message.
- Open source will sustain developer ecosystem: Ethereum (virtual machine & clients), Cosmos (Tendermint consensus algorithm), Uniswap (constant price with liquidity pools).
- Select creators will build community with regular engagment and incremental deliverables: musicians (weekly real-life or virtual events), artisits (monthly gallery shows and interpretations). Not: games which requires 12-24 months development, or top brands who cash grab, or degens who rug pull, or talkers who cannot build, or long-tails who cannot drive buzz.
- Fair drop allocations will build buyer loyalty: investment banking services like Binance Launchpad (since 2019 IEO, initial exchange offerings, for Harmony) time market on trends, due diligence with packaging, whitelist traders with lotteries for volume.
B. Product Strategy
- Royalties: 7% to creator, 2% to community (collective experience), 1% to RADICAL. Compared to 7.5% to creators + 2.5% to OpenSea, versus 0% to creator and 3.5% Magic Eden.
- Wallets: 1-week SMS social custody, then Ledger + Metamask. (Not: Gnosis Multisig DAO, Wallet Connect, 1Wallet, mobile wallet integrations, ENS names display, QR codes, email).
- New categories: Trading-alpha content (timed release), Creator-fan channels (gated subscription), Web2 brands (customer engagement as marketing), Crypto-native memes (4chann & Reddit as entertainment), Community tools (utility-driven development).
- Develop as open source, sharable assets, forkable deploys.
C. Radical Markets & Mechanisms
- Quadratic drops: stake ONE tokens (not NFT assets, not marketplace tokens) for whitelist, logarithmic purchasing powers, launchpad due diligence.
- Verifiable lotteries: cannot bias or predict random dice. Using our chain’s VRF (verifiable random function) opcodes.
- Mechanism design: multi-round auctions, reveal true preferences.
FAIR: “3-Body Problem” of Price & Rent on Nonfungible
How to sustain an economy of nonfungible resources such as land assets, domain names, or social ranks? What are the optimal parameters with demand-based recurring fees or single land value tax as radical solutions? Can price, tax and rent be FAIR to all 3-body of owner, renter and stakers?
Our goal is develop economics games that are fully onchain and sustainable for more than 100K users and $100M assets in years.
Let’s explore Vitalik Buterin’s fee proposal on Ethereum Name Service (ENS) and Lars Doucet’s tax proposal on game lands (versus his on Norway's oil use).
We propose the “3-Body Fairness” Problem on Nonfungible (Tokens, NFT)
- OWNER (landlord, host, holder, bearer, master, possessor, proprietor, licensee, mayor, incumbent | developer, capitalist)
- pay price (buy at sales, perform transaction, invest in development)
- pay tax (periodic fees to stakers)
- earn income (utility, revenue, investment value)
- RENTER (tenant, leasee, guest, user, roomer, occupant, lodger, dweller)
- pay rent (periodic fees to owner, gas)
- earn usage (timeslot, depreciable, depletable, degradable, perishable)
- STAKER (voter, citizen, community, DAO, native | settler, local, resident, national, inhabitant, denizen, public, common | followers, likers, investors, speculators)
- pay time (one-time deposit to owner, time-lock assets, risk-free deposit, mine transaction hashes)
- pay locality (born to land, move to neighborhood)
- earn interests (block reward, common resources, governance rights, basic income, social welfare, inflation hedge)
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4. Your Career: To Yearn for the Vast and Endless Web3
We are a Day-1 startup. Blockchains are becoming the foundation of the global economy, yet their adoption is at only 1%. That means that you as a pioneer and developer are shaping the future with 10X impact. Harmony is a community-driven project, a network with hundreds of applications, and a team wearing crazy ambitions on their sleeves. Because the invincible summer awaits!
For engineers, we value your deep understanding of how bytes work. You are a tool maker, a system hacker, and a math nerd all in ONE. Your typical day involves prototyping a top-conference research paper, debugging and profiling in hexdecimal, or writing updates to coordinate asynchronouly with tens of engineers in the open. Building a blockchain is like jumping off the cliff while assembling the plane engine on the fly – but, if you can thrive in chaos, why NOT?
For creatives, we approve your obsession with user experience. You are a product designer, a brand manager, and an industry analyst all in ONE. Your typical day involves studying what delights and what hurts through hard metrics, writing long-form narratives on the why's and the do's, or scrumming tasks for a product launch to iterate with millions of users. Building a community is like sharing your blue heart while keeping the culture alive for decades – but, if this is your dream of 50 years, start NOW?
- Develop a blockchain with high security, scalability and decentralization.
- Operate a network of 1000 nodes and $500M assets in open development.
- Optimize 100M requests per second at $250K monthly operational cost.
- Build a NFT marketplace with deep analytics, easy automation, social chats.
- Optimize for 500ms page loads, 100 hourly trades, $1M daily volume.
- Develop as open source, sharable assets, forkable deploys.
