What initiatives are driving Harmony’s success that we should double down on? What is hurting us that we must reverse their directions? Below are our proposals and convictions at 2022Q2 Team Offsite (5/10 Mon - 5/13 Thur).

• 10 Strategy Polls – 1x NO, 2x NO, 10x NO – 1x YES, 2x YES, 10x YES
• Team Reports, Ecosystem Reports, Readings on Culture
• Ownership, Talks & Events, Market Analysis, Harmony’s Theses, Funded DAO

For “1x YES” initiatives, bring metrics to show their consistent and sustainable growths. For “2x YES”, user demands and utilities are reinforcing each other at compounding rates – time is now to allocate twice as many resources for and to prioritize them over any other plans.

For “10x YES”, the market-product-team fit is perfect along with our mission: the market is expanding exponentially every month beyond anyone’s expectations, our product is magical and delightful, and this team is the clear leader against all competitions and peers. Let’s go all-in and celebrate the wins!

Or, hold your strongest conviction with a contrarian view: despite how early in the market, how minimal is our prototype, and how lacking is your expertise – you are betting your career on an initiative against the trend and everyone.

Articulate your best arguments in a paragraph of exactly 3 sentences (with a link to a 1-pager execution plan) below. Seek for someone to take the contrarian view and write out the counter-arguments together. Each will present and answer questions in 10-min sessions before the 20 core teammates and fellows.

Each proposal must have a 1-line summary of a 6-week execution plan for its first stage: budget, lead person, numbers of engineers or business persons, impact metrics. To proceed for execution, 3 strong yes are required as approvals for 1x initiatives, 6 for 2x, and 10 for 10x. For example, “6-week for 1X: $250k, Giv, 1 eng + 1 biz, 3 game partners committed for 100k users; Approved by Peter, Leo, Jack”.

Every attendee must write at least one full argument by 5/3 Tue; vote with your emoji for topics to be prioritized at offsite. The deadline for all writing and voting is 5/6 Fri, leaving time for everyone to read before the offsite.

🌟Top proposals ready for Q2 execution

1. 🛹Peter: Game Studio
2. ☁️Giv: Website/Content Guild
3. 🛡Rongjian: Cross-Shard Transactions
4. 🏃Leo: Game Shard
5. 🐯Tom: $1M 1-Lead-3-Eng Guilds
6. 🎽Li: Head of Marketing
7. 🎥Adrian: Annual ONE Conference

👩‍👩‍👧‍👦 27 Attendees

• 💙Stephen, 🛡Rongjian, 🏃Leo, 🎽Li, 🛹Peter, 🌲Sam, ☁️Giv, 🚗Boris, 🐉Jack
• 🎥Adrian, 🔭Daniel, 🎬Danny, 🎤Matt, 💃🏻Essa, 🦒Brian, 🐯Tom, 💊Sahil, ⏳Zi
• 💻Aaron, ⚛Jackie, 📖Devin, 🐇Rachel, 🐐Mikey, 🚜Demetre, 💿Kelly, 🤖Eric, 🍄Darren

🪴2022 Q2 Team Offsite in Yountville

4️⃣April 2022 Milestones & Deliverables

📖Team Performance Review & Bonus – Q1 2022

Polls on Execution Strategies

Vision – Mission – Strategy – Execution – Milestone – Communication: Does Harmony have a unifying vision that serves as our purpose in the coming decades? Why is our mission sweating for years? Are our annual strategies consistent amid changing markets? Do we write quarterly execution plans with measurable impact? How sufficient is our bandwidth for timely milestones? Have we been telling a good story to potential users?

Via Notion Tables: For each of the following 10 topics, specify how you will split percentages of resources among the various options. Use negative percentages to advocate reversing the current practice. For example, on Topic 2 “Adoption”, you may answer 35% DeFi, -20% NFT, 20% DAO, 15% Games, 50% Wallets – totaling 100%.

1. Users: 10K Traders, 100K Investors, 1M Developers, 10M Creators, 100M Gen Z, 1B Underbanked ❓Among the addressable markets and their differing sizes, who should we be serving?
2. Adoption: DeFi (100K total non-bot users), NFT (500K), DAO (10k), Games (1M), Wallets (50M) ❓Among the overlapping but distinctive themes of blockchain products, how to split our focus while going deep?
3. Hires: Executives ($1M annual compensation), Devs ($500K), Partnership ($400K), Products ($300K), Marketing ($200k) ❓If we are to hire 20 more full-time permanent core team, how to split among the positions?
4. Tech: Protocols (systems & algorithms), Bridges (security & liquidity), Tools (compilers & docs), Services (network & devops), ZK-Proofs (cryptographers & researchers) ❓If we are to hire 20 more full-time permanent engineers, how to split among the expertise?
5. People: Team (5 strong yes to hire for permanent), Fellows (3 yes for 3-month renewals, full-time), Contributors (2 yes for 1-month renewals, 20-hour per week), DAO (5-of-9 governors for 3-month elections), Bounties (0 yes for 1-time engagement) ❓On tight core groups vs fluid contributions, how to split among the employment structures?
6. Approvals: 1 Executive (3 day to approve), 3 Senior Team (5 days), 1-Lead-3-Engineer Guild (1 week), 5-of-9 DAO Governors (2 weeks), 10% Community Votes (4 weeks) ❓To move fast while reaching consensus, who should approve for a $1M proposal?
7. Development: Spinoffs ($1M for initial development then raise $5M), Studios ($10M initial funds), Acquisitions ($2M per engineer), Agencies ($250K per campaign), Partners ($1M per campaign), Grants (1000 grants, $100K each) ❓Toward community-driven development in the long term, how to balance our top-down control versus external autonomy?
8. Spending: 2022Q3 (double down in bear market), 2022Q4 (end of typical crypto cycle), 2023H1 (end of typical macro cycle), 2023H2 and beyond ❓To bootstrap aggressively while sustaining long-term growth, how early should we spend all of our funds?
9. Engagement: Social Media ($10M annual for engaging 1M), Hackathons ($5M for 10K), Scholars ($5M for 5K), Own Events ($4M for 10K), Sponsorship ($1M for 50K). ❓To reach the next million users, how to split among the distribution channels?
10. Peers: Near (Sharding & DAO as unique features), Polygon (ZKProofs & EVM ecosystem), Avalanche (DeFi yields & NFT partners), Terra (DeFi ecosystem & stablecoins), Solana (Centralized exchanges & DeFi), Polkadot (Parachain & developer grants) ❓Our role models are Ethereum (community & culture), Starkware (ZKProofs & research) and Cosmos (Wasm & cross-chain), but which other smart contract platforms should we compete directly and win against?

We will do a full survey among all contributors and community. Feel free to improve and suggest more questions below.

• 🐐Mikey — Hiring: Which roles will be filled by internal promotion vs external hire? $1M 1-Lead-3-Eng Guilds.
• 🎬Danny – Engagement: How can we build upon hackathons, events, scholars, and sponsorships to tell compelling stories for more engaging content? Annual ONE Conference.
• 🚗Boris – Traction: How can we follow-up with existing investments and grantees, to make sure they are working on the projects and find better ways to keep supporting as the development reaches next stages? Harmony Venture Network.
• 🚗Boris – Community: How can we improve the way we receive feedback from the community? How can we separate signal from noise when it comes to follow the sentiment of the community so we can efficiently champion projects that are supported by the team and the community? Head of Marketing.

1x NO

1.  🏃Leo — 1-second finality: 1s finality is not something our users or dapp developers would care about it right now. It also pushes too much of the stress and pressure to the current system including CPU/storage and networking. It requires in-depth system level optimization in addition to the consensus algorithm as well. From users’ perspective, the 1s or 2s finality won’t feel much of a difference. Some metrics of the finality of other chains: Binance (35 sec), Cosmos hub (7 sec), Polkadot (12-60 sec), Ethereum (78 sec), data source: The Block. Scalability and unique features are more important for layer 1 chain to make a technical differentiation. More: Avalanche: a few seconds due to the directed graph, Near: 3 blocks to 120 blocks. 📖🛹🐉🏓 ⚔
• 🛡Rongjian: Harmony Protocol Roadmap. On the road to achieve 1s finality, we need faster consensus, faster database and sync process, faster rpc service etc, which are all what can improve the performance and stability of our network and services, we may not need to have 1 second finality, but working on the system optimization and upgrades to be able to achieve 1s finality will solve the major concerns about scalability and stability from our community.
• 🧠Sukanta: 1-second finality work will be extreme hard work to be put in with very little to no return from work delivered. The gains will be nominal at best and this energy in resource and brain power can be better utilized elsewhere.
2. 💃🏻Essa — Departmental DAOs (such as AmbassadorDAO, BasicDAO) should not be DAOs: We must address whether these teams are truly a DAO. While I agree that the DAO teams are essential, their classification as a DAO is misleading and harmful to their project and goals. I feel that this approach has held back their team's ability to flourish to build the necessary tools to become autonomous and self-sufficient. It would be a better fit to merge core DAOs into the Harmony team while we collaborate as one to create a foundation for DAOs and their optimized operational framework. (more). 🎥🐉
• 📖Devin: This is a blanket statement that I currently agree with but only due to my knowledge of our current core DAO needs. We generally do need to be more careful to consider what should be centralized and what should not. A hypothetical “Events DAO” is a great example. DAOs should be profitable companies, which begs the question: who would want to create a company to throw events just for Harmony?
• 🎽Li: Actually Cosmoverse was organized by their community and it was sustainable (profitable) for that company to just throw events and do media for Cosmos and related ecosystems. Ethereum community have many examples such as EthCC which is one of the largest event just to throw a big community event for Ethereum. This will scale [100x] faster than 1 team (us) organizing events for ourselves.⚔🌲
• 🐐Mikey: Yes, from a blankets perspective I agree with this as well. DAO Ops is currently refocusing and realigning with community sentiment. We shouldn't shoehorn the word DAO in to protocol infrastructure teams. Eventually I would love to see DAO’s controlling certain aspects of the protocol, but not in the next few years. I just don’t believe Harmony, or the people, will be ready for it. DAO’s are the future, but the future isn’t now. We should be preparing and learning for the future.
• 🎽Li: The way we are writing about these topics is too “blanket” as Devin and Mikey already mentioned. AmbassadorDAO has engaged more local communities than we could have as a core team. Also core team won’t have bandwidth to be hosting events as we should focus on the most scalable technology, products and partners. We also have zkDAO which has scaled to over 1000 registered students and our Research DAO already has multiple top professors as governors and giving travel grants to students. It’s hard for me to imagine our core team scaling in so many functions and this quickly.
3. 🐉 Jack — Stop Reacting to events and Start Using Mechanisms: yes, crypto is 7 x 24 x 365.25 – it’s ever consuming. We should stop feeling compelled to answer immediately to messages that will impact our ability to balance out our life’s priorities, respecting for family members around us with giving them our full attention when needed, and letting the power of rest help rebuild our strengths and let our subconscious catch up and recover. We come back stronger, more creative and more energized the next day. Choose your busy hours and thinking hours. Choose your day offs. Schedule your outbound messages. Schedule your meetings. Turn on Night or Sleep Mode. Schedule Focus time to fuel your creativity at least 3x a week to help you Think and Grow Rich. 🐐🐇🌲🎤⚔💃🏻
• 🎽Li: I love that you wrote this while taking the counter position. One of our cultural values is to thrive in chaos. The one addition I would make to this is to first minimize the chaos as Jack said, but know that if there has to be chaos that we would thrive in it. To counter your book with another, one of my favorite books is Antifragile. It says that the best systems are those that not only withstand shocks and are resilient, but paradoxically they get stronger in times of shock. I am personally a creature of routine. I love nothing more than my personal routine — frisbee, coffee, salad, reading. I can live the same day 365.25 times per year, and eat the same exact salad - kale, avocado, nuts. Yet I realize by optimizing to this point, I’ve become fragile when I travel and cannot have my “Li salad”. So each of us need to be able to handle shocks to our system, our routines because that’s what life demands of us. Minimize the chaos, but thrive in it. 🐉

2x NO

1. 🛡Rongjian — “10000” DAOs: DAO is a very experimental form of organization and it comes with uncertainty and risks. Though it may solve certain problems of centralization for the long run, but it’s not for everything. Only specific cases (protocol, investment, grant etc.) are good for DAOs while others (not sustainable, relying solely on funding) are not. Before we are fully clear about DAO and how it can help Harmony ecosystem, we should focus only on good quality DAOs that’s organic, self-sustainable, and beneficial to the Harmony ecosystem, rather than the sheer number of DAOs. Quality over quantity. 🔭📖☁️🦒🛹🎥🎤🐉⚔💃🏻
• 🎽Li: I think we should all read the 3 books from Yuval Noah Harari as pretext to see how Web3 and DAOs will become the overarching narrative for humanity in the 21st century as nationalism, religion, communism, liberalism all fade away as effective narratives for humanity to self govern.
• 🛹Peter: Li, you seem to have a romanticized version of dao’s in your mind, which is fine - gotta dream, might as well dream big. But right now, most in our community - devs and entrepreneurs - just want a functioning blockchain. And ours is not yet. RPC issues, our explorer everybody hates, shards 1,2,3 don’t talk to each other yet, clearly establishing a moat that makes Harmony more competitive and unique etc. let’s get the basics perfect, then we can attempt to conquer organizational structures that have been in place for hundreds of years. 🎽
• 📖Devin: I agree with you that number of DAOs is not a good success metric and that DAOs should be self-sustaining business models; though, I do want to push back on your broader point: theoretically, DAOs solve much more than externalities created by centralized organizations and other market forms. Decentralized organizations have been around for decades in the forms of voting trusts and cooperatives (co-ops), and thousands of traditional companies have enacted decentralized methods to create more efficient feedback loops. The “A” part is what’s experimental, so perhaps we focus on that component and build infrastructure that facilitates sustainable practices across all DAOs. 🐇🐉
• 🌲Sam: I agree with both Li and Devin... but I also agree with you, RJ. The focus shouldn’t be on “10,000 DAOs” for the sake of 10,000 – It should be “Harmony is the HOME for 10,000 DAOs”. What this would mean is that we focus on having the right tools and infrastructure (everything from the best in class multi-sig or how-to videos and on-boarding for new users) to support all of these communities coming to Harmony. Because that (the communities) is the point. Imagine that each DAO becomes what we see as the “minimally viable DAO” (i.e. 9 signatories, 100+ members, membership tokens, Mandates / Deliverables / Metrics, Path to Self-funding) - such a program would yield 1,000,000 new, active wallets on Harmony actively using the chain for voting, for treasury management, for peer bonuses and more. This is why we should be focused on it. 🐇🎽🎥
• 🚗Boris: I find interesting Li’s reference to Harari’s books because there is plenty of literature out there that I think it has been greatly overlooked. DAOs are not the first attempt to achieve decentralization. Actually, there has been a few successful cases such as cooperatives, with Switzerland being a very good example, Jeremy Rifkin’s Zero Marginal Cost Society talks about this (and some other very relevant points,) so I strongly recommend it. Then, I think the issue of the DAOs is one of decision taking, i.e., how distributed groups of people take complex decisions. Therefore, Acemoglu’s The Narrow Corridor is a MUST, I think that anyone that wants to work in DAOs must read this book, because it gives a very complete picture of how societies organize and take decisions under unstable, complex and fluid circumstances. Finally—and most important—the reason I oppose the current DAO approach. Mirta Galesic’ research on Social Learning and Decision Making (You can read her papers or hear about them in episode 9 of the Complexity podcast.) Galesic’s extensive research gives strong arguments against the existing DAO governance paradigm, because they seem to demonstrate that crowds are wise only for simple (i.e., not complex) decisions like guessing the weight of a cow or the number of corks within a container, but as decisions get more complex the crowds grow unwiser and struggle with decentralized thinking, so they eventually gravitate toward some kind of monolithic authority or become ineffective. 🐉
• 🐐Mikey: I agree with RJ. That, “We should aim for good quality DAOs that’s organic, self-sustainable, and beneficial to the Harmony ecosystem.”. The DAO Pivot and the 1DAO Alliance are initiatives from a concerned and passionate Harmony community in partnership with the Harmony internal DAO Ops team that will reinforce these ideas. I, now, would also like to echo Leo’s sentiment below re: the BAYC messaging. We shouldn’t stop now because we’ve seen some uncomfortable messages. We should, always, have ears-on-the-ground listening to broad community sentiment and be able and willing to adapt to sentiment.
• 🛰️Max: I agree with RJ. At this stage, DAOs continue to not bring any direct monetary benefits to Harmony, and the indirect benefits are limited to raising awareness about the ecosystem, which is better suited to a dedicated resource. While I understand the importance of decentralized decision making, I think of co-ops more than DAOs, which, currently, is a tainted term in my head.
• 🎽Li: I’m taking parts of Devin and Sam. Instead of statements on all DAOs, let’s use metrics, numbers, and frameworks to keep evaluating and experimenting on DAOs. Also I think everyone here would love to have 100,000 more active users on the chain as Sam mentioned above. DAO - decentralized autonomous organizations, is a form of organizing human activity, just like a company or a country.

If we said, Harmony is the platform for 1,000 projects, everyone will just cheer. We are the pioneers telling the world that DAOs will become the de facto way of organizing projects natively in Web3. It’s worth mentioning the Messari 2022 thesis here:

“If 2020 was all about DeFi, and 2021 was all about NFTs, 2022 will be the year of the DAO. Invert the talent sourcing model... earn bounties and display your proof of work to earn reputation points with the community’s decentralized HR, community vouches. You can apply for grants or submit proposals for full-time employment directly to the DAO membership. Bullish on governance infrastructure, improvements in protocol treasury deployment, and ongoing DAO distribution models that pay users, individual contributors, other businesses and DAOs alike. It’s foundational tooling that will lead to DAOs replacing most companies.”

• 🧠Sukanta: Reduced and more attentive addressment of DAO is more important. Also DAOs are not all going to be the same, some will be heavy DAOs, requiring lot more work and some will less lightweight DAOs. (Comp Sci satire, Process v/s lightweight threads in Operating Systems work that I engaged in the early 90s). So being choosy of what is a DAO and being more selective is lot more prudent. Also, the ones that are creating higher impact should receive more attention and some DAOs can merge to become a bigger ones with more contribution. i.e. DAO mergers.
2. 🔭Daniel: Project-Y Funding: The funding we’re providing via Project-Y might be relatively small but the negative impact it’s bringing to our reputation is undoubtedly high. We are seeing community sentiment take a negative turn and Project-Y is one of a handful of causes behind the shift. The perception is that Harmony is giving money to social, local causes which then alienates our global community. The community also feels that our money is being spent in ways that do not contribute to our chain, sent to groups with no plans for self sustainability. Stopping Project-Y is an easy win that can help improve sentiment and with very little effort and impact to our productivity or growth. 📖🛹🎥
• 🎥Adrian: Project X was originally conceptualized by me (q4 2021 offsite) to fund projects that have great potential to be big but do not meet the funding guidelines as set forth by management. One main example was the funding of a project that was helping solve the issue of legacy royalty payments in the music industry, a massive project that could have huge transactional volume from all of the major labels, but one that has been looked over and currently un-funded due to our guidelines. Project X changed and morphed into what we saw in Denver, essentially “decentralizing the VC” – teams of 2 were sent out to find the best projects to invest in and were incentivized by team bonuses based on investment performance. This really made everyone work hard to find the absolute best projects for Harmony to align with due to the incentives in place. In my opinion, in principle this was a massive success because we all got to fund projects that we thought would yield a massive return by end of year. Will it ultimately be a success? The verdict is still out because the year is not over with. That being said, Project X turned into Project Y, an initiative that focused on Social Tokens and DAO guidelines in order to fund projects, all using grants, no investments, with no incentive given to team to find great projects. Instead, the team was given a standard performance quota: Fund Y-number of projects using this money. On top of that, the majority of the team had no idea what a social token was or why we were pushing it, and upper management did not communicate the vision for what a social token was. Also, the grantees that we were approaching mostly had no idea what a Social Token was as well. This created a massively lop-sided, exclusionary, and tone deaf situation where great projects were considered unimportant unless the guidelines were met (social tokens and DAO formation). Projects were writing proposals just to meet the guidelines without even asking themselves if those guidelines even made sense for their project. This sets up the recipe for defeating the entire purpose of why Project X was formed in the first place. Project X was put to fund projects, regardless of operational guidelines. Project X did have guidelines but they were for how the team would get paid bonuses, not how the team would decide what projects were great and what were not. Project Y was put in place to put guidelines of “what makes a good project” back in, essentially walking back the principles of the original idea in favor of the old ways. 🛹🌲
• 🎤Matt: I agree that we should stop with standard grant amounts/guidelines and then having projects reverse engineer their proposal to fit. Project Y is a great example - most of the projects did not need 10K. I think the grant amount has to make sense to the project, and the project proposal should be written according to their business model and mission. Also, we should invest more time into ensuring those who have power to give grants in any capacity are very well oriented and prepared to complete the necessary due diligence, retrospective communications report to the community, and maintain the relationship to continue to build out the ROI. I am copy/pasting the following from my answer on “social change” - We can achieve this by improving our internal orientation/education on initiatives like Project Y, so that we select more impactful projects, negotiate more effectively, and recognize when certain projects have value even if they don’t fit the guidelines of the initiative. Rather than having projects build their proposal to fit the Project Y guidelines, their proposals should be written according to the nature of their project and their mission. Additionally, teams that fund each project should include a full report on the above stated items, on forum, to express to the community why the project had value, why the grant amount was appropriate, and how it impacts social change, the community, and Harmony. (ETHRio retrospective).
3. 🔭Daniel: Temporary Freeze on BAYC: The community has spoken and an overwhelming number of investors and community members have voiced their displeasure over the our handling of BAYC. The community and investors, including devs on our chain, feel there seems to be a lack of direction and plan. See comments on the BAYC feedback thread on Reddit and the top voted YouTube comments on the NFT LA speech. We should place a temporary freeze on promoting BAYC. We need to do some damage control. I suggest we keep the NFTs as an investment and temporarily pause on promoting our BAYC purchases until we have a solid plan for their use. Then, once that plan is fully fleshed out from all aspects (vision, engineering, marketing) and we have something solid to present to the community, we can begin marketing BAYC once more in a manner that everyone will understand. Until that happens, any promotions of BAYC will continue to be confusing and come across to the community as a desperate effort to chase hype. ☁️ 🛹🐉🐇⚔ ⚽️
• 🏃Leo: Should clarify on the freeze of promotion. Harmony needs to build a brand and strategy in NFT/Metaverse/GameFi, as I see this is the future growth area of the crypto applications, even in a bear market. (Correct me if I am wrong). Again, NFT is the approach to reach mainstream and massive adoption. Apparently, BAYC is the No. 1 brand and the highest profile community in this space. To associate Harmony with BAYC has pros and cons I can understand as our previous communication wasn’t crystal clear on our strategy. However, as I mentioned before, it is the entry point of Harmony in this space, and not necessarily the only one. It took us sometime to build the branding and networking opportunity with the BAYC community. We shouldn’t just stop/freeze now when we hit some uncomfortable messages. It’s one of the best diversified treasury investments we have made so far. Instead of freezing the BAYC initiative, I would suggest more communication and provide utilities of the BAYC/ApeCoin to the Harmony community. We shall empower the community and benefit them with the BAYC investment and engagement. I felt we shall lower the promotion of BAYC at the personal level, instead, focusing on the partnership and ecosystem collaboration to benefit the entire community though. ⚛🌲
• 🎥Adrian: I think the BAYC play is massive, it’s just that everyone is focused on their role as an NFT and less on the fact that Bored Apes are actually Intellectual Property. You aren’t buying a JPG, you are buying the rights to use the likeness of your apes across any platform. What we do with our IP and wether or not it is a failure as an investment completely depends on how we creatively utilize our IP. The IP of Nintendo’s Mario Bros before 1985 was worth absolutely nothing. How much would an NFT of Mario sell for today assuming you would own the rights to the entire Mario IP franchise? One could argue that the IP of Mario today is worth BILLIONS. 🎽 The Bored Ape community has some of the most culturally significant people in the world that bought in at an investment level to participate in funding rounds that were set up raising $450 million for a $4 billion valuation of Yuga Labs. This is serious money being thrown around and we have a huge opportunity to capitalize on what is currently being built. The problem is that we don’t have a story of what OUR apes are or what they do. I proposed in April commissioning a writer to tell the story of the apes. Story and culture is what makes IP worth owning. Harmony’s eight Bored Apes have the potential to be the most significant apes in the Bored Ape ecosystem, assuming we market them the way that Nintendo markets Mario and its surrounding intellectual property. Writer Dylan Park (Ron Howard, Oprah) helped pen the character study to flesh out who our Bored Apes could be, and his deck can be found here.
• 🌲Sam: The BAYC fallout is an example of a really good idea but poor execution and management after the fact. Like we did in 2021 with DeFi - there was a fund to bring NFTs into Harmony. The fundamental premise was that NFTs could have utility on Harmony (as evidenced by the iToken) however - that connection was never made. The difference between “let’s buy an Ape and get into the parties” and “hello, you have this NFT that you don’t know what to do with — here is something you can do with it that no other chain has” is huge. Unfortunately - at this point - because we have lost so much ground with the community, just explaining why (5 months after the fact) may not make any sense. As a course correction - we may want to liquidate our APE holdings. About a month ago, I did a rough, back-of-a-napkin calculation and found that (with both the APE tokens and the increase in value of our Apes) we would profit roughly $1.7M – in three months (I did the calculation in early April). As part of listening to our community - we can put that into our NFT tooling, ecosystem development fund. 🐇
• ☁️Giv: When we first decided to purchase apes, the goal was to signal to the community, our commitment to NFTs. We didn't have any actionable plans on how to utilize our new assets. The initial goal was to make the announcement of the purchase, then come up with a plan. But apes took center stage at EthDenver and became overly prominent and part of our branding. We still don't have a compelling use case for them. Adding avatars to an Unreal Engine prototype is not a compelling use case. During the market slump, instead of demonstrating austerity, we doubled down and showed off our apes on Twitter profile pics for way too long. It's like driving a lambo during a recession - it's insensitive and tone-deaf. I'm not against BAYC but until we have found a compelling use case for them that will give us 2x-10x growth, we need to freeze and focus on other high-impact initiatives. 🐉
• 🚜Demetre: The upiside of the Apes and the ecosystem (Otherdeeds/ApeCoin) for marketing purposes might be limited if Yuga Labs starts to clamp down on licensing as they are doing for Otherdeeds.
4. 🔭Daniel – Social events: I’m assigned to this topic but not 100% against the idea, though I do have a concern and some suggestions on the matter. Social events are often needed, but our message must be clear to the community and our investors on the purpose of the event. We must also be cautious and cognizant of the market and community sentiment. I have no hard stance against social events, but we must read the room and make sure we understand through what lens the community sees our participation. Is it a bear market? Are we, in comparison to other layer-1 chains, performing poorly? Is the community upset with Harmony for other reasons and feeling unheard? If any of these are true, then our social events (without proper messaging and delivery) act as salt on an existing wound, increasing existing frustration and adding fuel to a fire we’re working hard to extinguish.
• 🎬Danny: As the videographer on the ground in communities like Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Accra, Ghana, it is apparent to me that there is a disconnect between members of the team, and the harsh realities of these communities. Communities like these are in the very early stages of blockchain technology adoption, therefore the best impact can be made through infrastructural support (there is little to no internet connectivity) and through education. Although there is no immediate ROI with sponsoring events and workshops in these locations, I do believe it is important to continue to foster relationships with projects in these areas to be ready for when these communities come around to mass adoption; by default we will be the blockchain of choice due to our relationships and support. I like what the Ambassador DAO is doing with their monthly meetups and I believe this will be a good way to foster community engagement within regions throughout the globe. 🐇
• 🎥Adrian: Couldn’t agree more Danny – the core team needs to really find the time to attend events in neglected countries so they can really gain perspective. It’s very easy to live in Silicon Valley for years on end and assume this is how the world is when in fact billions of people have a different experience. To have a blockchain that can impact 10 billion people means having a core team that has a diverse perspective on who we are building for.🐉
• 🎥Adrian: The fact that social events are getting a 2x NO concerns me. Social events are nothing more than marketing tools. Having Deadmau5 play at ETHDenver was not about the concert, it was about what it took to get people to attend the concert, namely an exclusive Harmony branded wristband that was only attainable by starting a conversation with one of our core team members. There was no Eventbrite, no guestlist. You HAD to talk to us to get in the door. It was the carrot on the stick for developers. Believe it or not, I had many people come up to me at ETHDenver saying “I never really knew what Harmony did before talking to you”. But by “gating” entry to an exclusive event, we forced over 3000 developers and blockchain ecosystem partners to have a conversation with us at one of the biggest ETH conferences in the world. Name one blockchain at ETHDenver that had that much engagement with the community – you can’t! If anything we should be doubling down on doing these types of engagements with additional measurable steps for wristband access (1Wallet downloads, wallet whitelisting, email addresses). One last thing to note: What do people, months after an event, remember most? I would argue that our events top the list as memories that many people will cherish as positive experiences, and to have our brand associated with those memories is exactly what brands have been doing since the dawn of marketing. The key part is making sure that people leave that event knowing it was a Harmony event, similar to how people leave a rAAVE event knowing that AAVE put it on.
• 💃🏻Essa: Events need to be curated to meet their purpose: "to bring in new builders." Something we must agree on is what is a builder? Is a builder a creator of a DAO, a developer, a possible contributor, or a partner? (These are just examples.) Several "builders" are in the space, all with a value that differs from others. If our protocol performs poorly compared to other L1s, should our builder focus then be isolated to developers? I agree very much with the feedback we have been receiving from the community. It is necessary to communicate our metrics and ROI in future events to address concerns. It is essential to ensure that each event presents value to our ecosystem and supports our builders. Though some events may focus on developers, events focused on partnerships are still as necessary. Though this is not an area of specialty, I believe that our tech will improve with or without social events. When that time comes, we must still have prepared and nourished the growth of our ecosystem.🌲🐉 ⚽️
• 🎤Matty: I fully agree that it’s all about the communication to the community (and internal too) as to why an event is worth spending money on. We have seen time and time again that it’s all in the execution strategy, not the amount of money spent. We recently attended a small 3K pop up event where the ROI was much greater than a 25K event because of the strong negotiations prior to accepting the sponsorship. Everything needs to be clearly defined with a sound strategy to utilize each event as an investment. The Deadmau5 event was fantastic because of the gating, but we could have educated the community better on the why. Attending events for the sake of attending, or sponsoring events at a high ask solely for brand recognition, are usually not good enough reasons to be involved. I would much rather attend less events per year (or send much smaller teams) and squeeze every ounce of ROI than to overextend our budget and manpower to hit every event across the globe. Additionally, I think that sponsoring external events without having a Harmony team member present is a potential recipe for wasted opportunity. For these, I prefer spending much less money on sponsorships and saving that money for when we have boots on the ground. A Harmony logo on a flyer for 25K with no team members present does not move the needle for us the same way as having a small pop up booth at a 1K event with 1 Harmony member present. (I also feel similarly about hackathons - there’s no way to ensure ROI if we don’t have at least 1 team member actively involved - we cannot simply give money and walk away, and we certainly cannot give high grant amounts when the majority of the funds are used for operations and not on the builders/projects).
• ☁️Giv: In response to Danny and Adrian regarding perspective/context and long-term goals for the underserved. These are completely valid points. I think what Daniel is referring to is that externally these initiatives you’ve mentioned are not communicated with the team or the community very well or not at all. The entire team obviously cannot go to every event so I feel the events team needs to do a better job sharing their findings and accomplishments with the team and the broader community. We need to do more than share photos and videos of celebrations because at the moment this is the main perception and that’s why it is under 2x NO.
• 🔭Daniel: Giv summarized it well. It’s not that we’re attending social events, it’s the planning and messaging that follows which I’m concerned about. Photos and videos are great but it’s the only thing our community typically sees, and their judgement is based solely on that. In addition, I think our deliverables for attending social events can be more fleshed out so that we know exactly why we’re there and how to craft the post-event success to everyone watching. How many new wallets are we on-boarding? What relationships have we built and with whom? What’s our long-term strategy for being there, if any? These are the questions we should be asking before attending an event so that we’re prepared to share useful and helpful information post-event. 🎽💃🏻
5. 🔭Daniel – Social change: I was assigned this topic in hopes of clarifying community sentiment around Harmony’s involvement with social change. At the same time, I wish to communicate my thoughts on the matter, so I’ll try to find a middle ground and elaborate from there. Allow me first to say that I 100% understand that the state of lives in 3rd world countries cannot be fully described without experiencing it in person. At the same time, I think Harmony needs to be fully clear as to what we’re looking to do and how our involvement will a) improve lives and b) add to our ecosystem. We should remember that we are a blockchain platform first and foremost, and cannot survive without an expanding ecosystem, meaning more utility. If we’re looking to push for social changes via DAOs and local causes, then we must ask the question - “is this purely to make a social impact, is this to help Harmony expand its ecosystem, both?” If it’s the former, that’s fine, but we should set aside funds for charitable efforts and make it crystal clear we’re expecting zero ROI. If it’s the latter, then we should be clear what the ROI is before funding these DAOs and projects. I can name many DAOs we’ve funded in the tens of thousands each where they’ve provided zero details on how their funding will directly contribute to our ecosystem in a meaningful way either through education, transactions, or network adoption. Again, this is fine if it’s under charitable efforts, but we should be clear. Further, we should be careful in how we involve ourselves in local causes - we’re a borderless blockchain with a token that is traded globally and should consider whether we’re alienating and scaring away our investors through local social/charitable acts.
• 🎤Matty: I don’t think this topic is as binary as some may initially perceive. Charity does not necessarily equal lack of ROI for the chain and the community. It certainly can if due diligence is not properly done and if we don’t take the time to nurture those relationships. Additionally, ROI can be built over time or even manufactured by initial negotiations. A good example would be the favelas in Rio. The initial idea was to donate 20 laptops to underserved people in the area. While this is a great idea with a ton of heart, there is no vision for ROI. It’s a dart throw. Through spending the afternoon with Marcia and her team (those who would ultimately run the operations), we discussed building a blockchain club complete with an instructor, offering an opportunity to code in solidity, focused on building projects and minting solely on Harmony. This may not be the biggest immediate ROI, but it is a strong step towards seeing charitable acts as a way to fight for social change while still balancing some ROI for Harmony and the community. I do fully agree with your point, Daniel, on the communication efforts to the community. I believe we should set aside a very small portion of treasury for social/charitable efforts (or anything that does not fit under the standard launch grant framework due to undefined ROI) and fund them appropriately (no longer looking at it as standard 10K for every Project Y launch, but instead scale that up/down appropriate to the project). We should also communicate openly on the impact of each charitable effort to its community and also to ours, along with the ROI that currently exists or will be built through the growth of the relationship. We can achieve this by improving our internal orientation/education on initiatives like Project Y, so that we select more impactful projects, negotiate more effectively, and recognize when certain projects have value even if they don’t fit the guidelines of the initiative. Rather than having projects build their proposal to fit the Project Y guidelines, their proposals should be written according to the nature of their project and their mission. Additionally, teams that fund each project should include a full report on the above stated items, on forum, to express to the community why the project had value, why the grant amount was appropriate, and how it impacts social change, the community, and Harmony.
• ⛵Hakwan: I think engaging in social change directly is a challenging & costly business, and may not gel so well with our primary identity as infrastructure builders. A more fitting strategy may be to serve as the crypto-native infrastructure that would support social change, to showcase our technical powess, support & attract users, without coughing up so much money all the way. It is easier said than done, but this - giveth.io - could be our role model / partner. Extremely strong team, powerful message, clever use of crypto for their philanthropic purpose. I cannot recommend strong enough for all of us to check it out. 🐇
• 🐉Jack: I strongly disagree about backing down from the focus on social change. What I do agree is the way that we’ve been recently operating so, especially with some of the Project Y awareness campaign that seemed like giveaways. There are sustainable ways of impacting social change, with Social tokens/NFTs (it takes a while to wrap one’s head around this) and using token inflation models with DeFi-backed UBI engines to promote sustainability... all in which doesn’t involve spending frivolously. We have 3 projects which Harmony invested in (EthicHub, eSolidar, and Jia) which helps others find ways to create businesses to help themselves, through micro-lending or tokenization economy. Think of them as the web3 of Kiva. These are the things we can still do to grow the Harmony blockchain utility which helping with social change at the same time.
• 🧠Sukanta: Social change is one of the big impact that Harmony is known to instrument. Backing out is not a great idea. Important to be prudent but stopping does not seem to be a great point. Like everything life comes with compromises, but the impact that can be created with any level of participation in this area is a huge deal for Harmony, the name says it.
6. 🌲Sam - Project X-or-Y Funding: We need to have clear, public guidelines BEFORE we go to an event that explain what we are looking for and what value it will bring. That rubric (including a reference to “what would the community sentiment be about this?”) needs to be communicated far and wide and early enough that projects that would fit into the rubric have the opportunity to book attendance if they want to pitch us in person. Even in small amounts - funding like this smacks of “hey, we met you at a party and want to make you happy, so here is a grant.” 🛹 🐐🎥🔭🐉🐇💃🏻
• 🎥Adrian: I agree for the most part of this sentiment but caution on closing the door to great projects that DON’T fit the guidelines. I think the true spirit of Project X can be that avenue where great projects that don’t meet guidelines are still funded (that was its original intention). I also personally think that Project Y took the spirit of Project X and muddied it up, therefore I am not really a fan of Project Y and opt more towards Project X in this regard (see above for my writeup on this).
• 🛹Peter: We need to stop X and Y all-together. Most Harmony team members do not know what to look for in projects and, as a consequence, end up funding les than successful projects.
• 🎥Adrian: To follow up on Peter’s stance, he’s right and this does make sense. Denver’s Project X was an experiment and should be treated as such. The experiment officially ends at the end of 2022, let’s let it run its course and see where the data leads us, pausing Project X until we have the data. If we have a massive net ROI on a few projects that negates the losses of the many (20/80), we could restart it again in Denver next year. If we have no positive ROI by end of year, boom, you have your answer not to fund Project X anymore. Again I will reiterate that my original intention for Project X was not to decentralize the VC model in ETHDenver but instead it was to allow for certain projects that don’t fit the guidelines to be considered by core team for funding. Project X in Denver’s form had less of that core team oversight and as such was experimental in nature, drifting from my original intention when I first proposed it. While I was happy to take part in Denver’s Project X, I do think that Peter is right in that we should pause until we have the data that proves the model works, namely by the end of 2022.
• 🎬Danny: I agree with Peter for the most part — we need experienced and shrewd business development team members who are approving the majority of projects, mainly to ensure ROI and/or maintain community sentiment. However, I do think it’s a little early to judge most projects success. I am aware that time moves at light speed during crypto, but some projects might need more time to develop after getting more skin in the game, as being seen with projects funded by Project X and Y. Although community sentiment has come down on Vegan Africa DAO as of late, the grant was given not only because Harmony and Vegan Africa DAO shares many of the same values, but also because Sunny (VAF DAO Founder) is actively engaged with the community. She has launched an NFT collection on MAD NFT (Astral Giraffes), won ETHRio’s Social Impact bounty with BLKLeaders DAO, and also was part of the first all women team to win a hackathon at ETHAmsterdam with the project DAOra. Through these successes, even if Vegan DAO is getting backlash, Sunny is helping expand the ecosystem. It saddens me that she is being harassed on our forum and discord and I’d like to see Harmony support somehow due to all her effort she puts into the community. Not only that, we preach for more women in web3, as well as initiatives in areas like Africa, therefore we must stand by to our word and initiatives despite community backlash. FOR MORE: Vegan DAO and Sunny’s success at ETHRio and at ETHAmsterdam.

10x NO

1. 🏏Ganesha: DAO efforts and tooling: Since DAO is one of our 10x initiative, our current DAO efforts and tooling is catered toward community building and not necessarily the utilities/products. I understand that DAO is still in early stages and we should work towards becoming the defacto chain for DAOs, I am against spinning up DAOs and building the tooling/infra that don't serve products (even if products are people who are not just dumping the DAO earned coins, but meaningfully bringing volume to our chain). My proposal is to only spend resources on DAO efforts/tooling/infra that brings volume to our chain than mere community building. 🛹☁️🎤🐉⚔🧑‍🍳💃🏻
• 📖Devin: Implementation of key infrastructure items is essential – we should have the best Gnosis, subgraph support, explorer, token minter, and dAPP/tooling selection to aid these community organized utilities, certainly. In fact, I agree that foundational tooling and infrastructure should become a primary goal and I’m reminded of the 2017-18 BTC/ETH bull run where everyone was excited about the potential of these networks – until they realized the infrastructure to support the hype didn’t exist; at the moment, this is Harmony and its DAOs. 🐇 Ergo, my counter-proposal would a not stray too far from yours: Yes, focus on utility-centric DAOs; Yes, build foundational infrastructure; But “value” is not all so black and white –– principally, who are we to dictate valuable DAO vs non-valuable DAO? Understandably we can put our money and recourses toward the DAOs we want; however, by limiting our opportunity for social (non-utility) growth, we risk becoming a sterile chain with no culture.
• 🌲Sam: A DAO for a DAO sake is not a good program. While we have spent the last 9 months or so trying to find product/market fit for DAOs - we don’t have the product and the market is too immature right now. However, over the course of the next year or two, we need to build the product so that when the market is ready - we will be a natural destination. The goal is not (and should not be) fund 10,000 DAOs, it should be make Harmony the chain that can support and provide a home for 10,000 DAOs. We do need to have a critical mass of DAOs that can and will try the tools and provide feedback for pain points and usability - but that should be a secondary goal, rather than a primary goal. To put this in terms of “what value does it bring to the chain / to Harmony” I propose the following: Assuming that each DAO has 100 contributors, 10,000 DAOs would organize 1,000,000 people, each having a wallet. Assuming each wallet brings an additional $100 to $500 to the chain, that is between $100,000,000 to $500,000,000 in additional value to our ecosystem. While these assumptions have several holes - this represents the power of scaling our community engagement operations.
• 🎽Li: I think what Ganesha means is product DAOs for example Uniswap can be a product DAO that brings on-chain transactions (steel person argument). On the other hand, there will be a variety of DAOs like services DAOs (RaidGuild). We should continue to study models that work from all blockchain ecosystems. Intuitively, I believe there can be a decentralized McKinsey, and all other professional service organizations, so we should keep exploring blockchain as a tool for humanity to organize all types of coordination activities. It’s all about coordination!
2. 🏏Ganesha — Zero knowledge non-application driven tooling & toy app development: Since zero knowledge is our 10x initiative, I am currently seeing a problem with our approach where we are proposing to build tooling and toy applications without having a product-driven approach with right partners. The right approach, in my opinion is find 1-2 strong products (applications), partner with them and drive the technology development and chase the roadmap to deliver concrete products. For example, building zk airdrop app or zk-kyc app without having a product partner that can launch and drive 10x volume is not going to be very useful. We should target products (and partners) like zk games (darkforest), zk payments, zk identity, zk marketplace, or privacy coins, partner with them and propose roadmap to build the required zk technology to deliver these products at the end. The approach of building zk tech first only works for rollup chains like polygon (and other layer-2s), but for us rollup is not the current zk application, instead targeted zk products are (like zk-game, zk-payments, zk-identity, zk-marketplace, zk-coins). 🎥🏓⚔🧑‍🍳
• ⛵Hakwan: I agree entirely with the concern - that we need to focus - but I worry that an overly top-down approach may attract community backlash. As the field is young and rapidly changing, we may indeed misjudge the trends; it is really hard to predict the future and bet with confidence on a few selected projects (historically, we have not done that well). Having said that, because ZK is a technically specialized area, I’m not sure a totally bottom-up, community-driven approach would work well either. My suggestion is that zkDAO can serve as a happy medium. In just a couple of months we are expecting to have a group of 100+ zk-devs trained by zku.ONE. If we incentivize the group to invest wisely into the ZK space and to incubate projects specifically for Harmony (to provide initial funds to them as a LP), this could be a nice way of ‘offloading’ a challenging problem to a virtual ‘middle management’ structure, who will monitor the changing dynamics of the space closely. Projects I’ve spoken to seem to generally welcome investment/support from such a growing talent pool, as finding zk-devs will be a challenge for the near future. For financial longevity, zkDAO itself will also be keen for this role; it is set up such that DAO members depend on its treasury for their lifetime basic income. Currently, one govenor is a VC (from KuCoin). With some leadership, as we grow to the size of hundreds of zkDAO developers by the end of the year, the power of the wisdom of an informed crowd can send us in the right path, re: choosing partnerships, products, and investees. We should continue to believe in decentralization. 🎥
• 🧠Sukanta: ZK is a very big deal, perhaps not super mature yet, but it is not a very stage as well. Maybe work with external folks to work on this, joint efforts with many smart folks may be a great idea.
3. 🔭Daniel – 10,000 DAOs Controlling Our Treasury by 2025: I would like to argue against placing our entire treasury in the hands of 10,000 DAOs by 2025, present a handful of reasons why Harmony is currently too premature as a blockchain for this to be successful, and a why this belongs as a 10X NO when it can potentially scare away retail and institutional investors. (more) 🎥
• 🎽Li: I think at the end of the day, we have to answer the question of what our current project and team’s purpose is. Actually before we do that, we should clarify. My understanding of putting all of our treasury into DAOs could include the core team transforming into one or more DAOs. I see this as a way to grow our ecosystem and add diverse skillsets that won’t be possible with a single core team, no matter how big and skilled that one team is. I see Ethereum, Cosmos ecosystems as good role models of having many teams with skills and treasury building out projects rather than relying on one team. 🐉
4. 💊Sahil: Stop general purpose DAO tooling efforts. Start prioritizing which 5 DAO tools are desperately needed by Game or NFT developers, and actively fund teams to build these with the sole goal of eliminating any friction for games developers & users. We need to find what are the ‘right’ DAO tools needed by developers, not what we think is cool. Get product feedback from 3 top game developers in our pipeline and drive top-down focus on those. Some examples - Add 1wallet libraries which help game developers easily embed in their gaming interfaces (see Sequence’s); easy on-ramps and DEXes on Shard 1. Let’s answer what are main things Game Devs must have to be successful: unrestricted compute (shard 1), reliable APIs/RPCs, keyless wallet that works across platforms (web, mobile), easy fiat onboarding through direct on-ramps/kyc, full explorer support, cross-shard hrc20/721/1155 support, native dex on shard1 or easy connectivity to liquidity on shard 0, DAO Tooling for gaming guilds, identity & reputation tools (extensive list). Shift resources from cross-chain bridges (ETH, BTC) to purely cross-shard message passing. With more third-party bridges getting mature (hop, layerzero, nomad, Axelar) most of the developer and user network effects will be channeled through these solutions instead of layer-1 operated bridges. We should actively pursue integration of our chain with third-party bridges. This will help us focus on getting other shards ready for application specific use cases like gaming. Reduce core-team’s time from generalized grants and shift that to existing DAO. Double down on Harmony Venture Network, with a goal of ultimately selecting 3-5 top quality teams/projects every quarter which can get 100M TVL or 50k users. We need to replicate the DeFi Kingdom’s type momentum from these teams. Solana Ventures, Polygon Studios, Stakrware are doing this well.🏓🧑‍🍳⚽️
• ☁Giv: Sahil, as usual, hits the nail on the head. There are several areas covered here. I’m in complete agreement with everything mentioned. We have a very long list of DAO tools to port over but I’m not sure we have an immediate requirement from the community for all. We should focus on the ones with the most impact to empower the community first. Focus on cross-shard transactions, identifying the next DFK, and shift to Harmony Ventures will give us a substantial advantage and will enable meaningful growth.
• 🎽Li: We all want the end goal of users and adoption. I think we need to ask ourselves what is the process that we want to use to get to that end goal. Our approach to DeFi over the past 12 months was both to reach for the top Ethereum projects (Sushi, Aave, Curve) as well as find native projects (DeFi Kingdoms, Tranquil). We have a DAO Tooling Pipeline and we should research existing tools that already have traction and bring them to Harmony while also doing launch grants to fund developers to build new tools that could gain adoption. Also, a meta-comment that applies to us, just like how Y Combinator funds hundreds of startups and a few succeed and become very much positive outliers, we also should think that we need many small experiments and learn quickly rather than thinking every application is going to work out. Saying general purpose DAO tooling efforts may be a straw person argument since I think we already have a targeted process but that’s not well communicated to everyone.

1x YES

1. ☁️Giv: Harmony Scouts program to help source top gaming projects and to scale incubation of grantees with clear milestone-based incentives. 🐯🔭 📖🐇🦒🎤⚔🧑‍🍳
• 6-Week: $1,000 budget for social, Peter as lead + 1 biz dev, 3-10 games onboarded; Approved by Peter, Daniel, Leo, Ganesha.
1. 🛹Peter: The 80/20 principle is present everywhere, but especially in decentralized organizational networks. Out of 10 dao members, few will likely add value; for every 100 apps, maybe 20 will actually get any level of traction, etc. this is true in almost every situation where math is concerned. I think a scouts program can work if we are hyper careful about curating the right scouts with the right backgrounds in the specific geographies we want. For example, I’d love a scout in Vietnam who has 10 years experience in gaming and is connected to the gaming industry there. Highly selective, in specific geographies is the only way this will work. 🎤
2. ⛵Hakwan: I like this idea a lot, but seeing Peter’s points above too, I wonder why don’t we do it more like funding a collective VC group/DAO (with us as LP). Traditionally, as well as in some other ecosystems like ETH, grants are mainly for public goods. Essentially we’re giving money away, not expecting any return (except in the indirect form of increase ONE utility by adding value to the overall ecosystem). With the current incentives spelt out above (Harmony Scouts), I worry that there still isn’t much to lose for the scouts to fund the wrong projects. Instead, perhaps if we focused more on investments rather than grants, a team of VCs will be more naturally incentivized to pick the right projects and to incubate them. Even for grants, we can still give each team a limited allocation (of grant ‘slots’ that they can give out). In that case, if the projects they picked don’t turn out well, the opportunity cost should be felt. We can ask people to form scout teams themselves, and bid for these grant allocation slots. The selection of the scout teams can be an open election.
2. ⚛Jackie: Metaverse Tools: Wix-like UX for enabling NFT collectors and creators to set up web-based 3D meetup spaces pre-built with customizable environments and popular web3 utilities (e.g., .crazy.one ids, membership NFT minting, NFT collection, token-gated access and privacy control). Metaverse is a growing area with NFT community’s full attention. 50% of the OpenSea Top 20 NFT holders will be early 3D metaverse residents (i.e., Yuga Lab’s The Otherside treasure hunt game and Nike RTFKT OnCyber’s creator galleries and events). 🐉
• 6-week: $160k, Jackie, 2 eng + 1 biz, help 10 creators to launch their metaverse meetups for 1k users; Approved by ___, ___, ___
• 🦒Brian: I am not clear on the use case of what such a space would be: if it is a Discord for their own communities, why would they use it; if it is for personal meetups, why is this better than rove.to; if this is for the public, how would it have good enough appearance and in-metaverse experiences to be seen as a boost to the NFT collection? Additionally, if this is a suite of tools, it seems to be an ambitious suite of metaverse, spaces-creation platform, minting tool, and Collab.land gating - each of which are complex projects and not easy. I would need to see who the user is, what their utilities are, and how this can uniquely serve them better than the array of tools out there already.
• 🔭Daniel: Quality and utility will be an issue from my perspective. 3D spaces aren’t enough to bring people into a virtual room. People need a reason to come into a virtual space, a reason to stay, and a reason to return. This is typically accomplished in a 3d space by incorporating fully interactable objects and fun, cooperative experiences that are not easily available elsewhere. I’m not fully against the idea, but I think we shouldn’t explore a metaverse-building tool unless it allows creators to produce a high quality experience for others that rivals what’s already available. We should also ask the question “Why?” — “What need does this fill, or what problem does this solve?” I’m unsure where this would fit into Harmony’s offerings, who the audience is, the problem it solves, and what value it brings to the chain.
3. 🐯Tom: Harmony team is growing fast with international and out-of-state team members. It’s difficult to coordinate everyone’s schedule. What other good ways to run the next offsite? 1day event, lower cost, more fun!
• 💃🏻Essa: I agree with this approach. Off-site's should be (at least) quarterly and serve for both development and personal time together, in shorter increments to better accommodate the team and their personal lives.
• 🐉Jack: Instead of having the core team just have offsites in the Bay Area, we should regionalize some of the get togethers, like in Europe, Australia/Asia, to start with, together with fellows/contributors — Biosensei, Nick, Ed, etc. — alongside full time staff members like Yuriy, Jenya, Max, Victa, Al Sayadi, etc. run a joint all hands exercise at the same week, and come up with their regional offsite learnings while having a few Bay Area members join them IRL. This becomes a hub-and-spoke model of decentralization, enabling us to grow massively while retaining the culture and relationship ties. ⚔ 🐯💃🏻
4. 🌲Sam: Hiring / Onboarding Contributors. The paid Harmony workforce is 1/4th the size of other competitive blockchains. We need to keep adding team members with an emphasis on technical talent that can be used as “sales engineers” to help with project, tool and infrastructure integration.
• 🎽Li: I’m for more high touch engagement with our partners, but against doing it with core team members. Crypto contributors are very fluid anyway and I think we accomplish this best with project-based work rather than adding more team members.
5. 🎤Matty: Quadratic voting for community engagement on funding. Community sentiment is at a low, most notably with how we use our treasury and what projects we fund. First, I propose a 1-month pilot program to test this initiative on 75 proposals (Grant & DAO combined in to 1 voting pool, with top 5 receiving milestone-based launch grants) and the top 20 conferences (with top 3 receiving a larger activation). If this is successful, I propose that we set 5% of each of our grant, DAO, and event budgets aside for community voting. This will 100x our community sentiment and bring some power back to the community so that we maintain alignment with the initiatives they think are most impactful to our chain’s success. Even if we only allocate 1% of our treasury to this initiative, the community sentiment will drastically improve (more).
• 🐉Jack: The intentions are on the right path, I’d suggest an alternative, to have our community help gate our fund tranche releases. Let the Harmony team continue executing on bringing in presumably quality outbound partners and approve well written inbound proposals. When the time comes for releasing funds when they reach their milestones, if the end-product is not as expected, doesn’t meet the quality bar, is not useful within the community, we can let the community voice their opinions with quadratic voting to veto or downsize the fund releases. 🎽
6. 🐇Rachel: DAO Reporting in conjunction with DAO Tooling: These are essential to ensuring DAOs operate more efficiently & have the ability to scale in Harmony while measuring their long-term success. Reinforcing DAO reporting with DAO tools with an emphasis on accounting, data analytics, and implementing measurable infrastructure will allow us to grow our ecosystem by ensuring we are setting our DAOs up for success. The community perception seems to be that we are throwing away money at projects that have 0 return and lack of relevance to growing our ecosystem. Implementing DAO reporting, as well as making “path to self-sustainability” a requirement for DAOs to get funded on Harmony will help us to address these concerns, improve community sentiment, and ensure that we are funding projects that make sense for our chain. View one-pager here. 🎥
• 🐉Jack: Great idea, but this is after the fact, and we can use the tools at the front of the funnel. We can focus on the design of the DAO, by setting up playbooks for certain DAOs to follows, different types such as — DAOs for awareness (marketing), exploration (research), membership (guilds), causes (foundations), service provider (engineering), etc. Communicate with them which tool to use, how to get involved, how best to use the tools and for what purpose, which ones to use (and which to ignore). Measure the success based on the leading indicator (front of the funnel) than the trailing indicators (back of the funnel).🧑‍🍳
7. 🐐Mikey: Establish Project X & Y Project Managers. Project Y, in particular, has stirred up a significant amount of unsavory community sentiment. I don’t believe it is entirely unjustified, either. The lack of communication from Harmony regarding the Project X & Y Program (Project Y in particular) has soured community sentiment. (more) 🎥 💃🏻
• 6-Week: $8,250 budget (2 contributors for 6 months), Mikey as lead, + 1 persons, offer operational and communicative solutions for Project X & Y Grants both internally and externally.
• 🔭Daniel: Project Y has not produced any significant attention or benefit to Harmony, but has instead soured our reputation as we continue to give money to teams who contribute little to nothing to our ecosystem. If we keep Project-Y, we should have strict rules that must be followed. However, it’s simply not worth our time or energy, two things which we all greatly lack. We should ask the question, is the reward worth the energy it requires? Right now, that answer from what I’ve seen is a simple no.
• 🐉Jack: What if instead of fund resources to “train for” Project Y delivery? Or simply use the Ambassador DAO playbooks instead of Project Y? Or setup a single well-trained team of local Ambassador DAO membership when we’re on the ground instead of spreading to 20 untrained Project Y grantors and recipients? The latter, as we learned, became a recipe for disaster, and having PM will unfortunately put that individual in the middle of the storm.
8. 💃🏻Essa: Anti-burnout measure. If we’re going to scale our work to 10x, we need to think about the impacts this measure will have on our team without encouraging time off. Our work has not scaled with our hiring at the same rate, and we need to consider employee burnout and prepare to fight against it. (more) 🐉 
• ⚛Jackie: We can have the “buddy system” for early detecting burnout signs. Another way is to provide opportunities to rotate roles or re-scope current role.
9. 🎬Danny — Content Strategy, Tell More Compelling Stories: At the conferences that the creative team attends, we currently film every talk and/or panel that we are speaking in, with intentions of posting online. Although I agree that filming talks are important, it can impede on the opportunity to find more compelling stories to tell, and content to create. While at ETHRio, there were rare moments where I was invited to locations difficult to access by promising projects, however was busy filming at the conference. Although we couldn’t film that day, I think if we follow up with a content strategy, there are compelling stories to tell and updates to give to the world about blockchain adoption in remote areas, with Harmony at the forefront. After coming back from Ghana, it is apparent that there are profound and diverse stories to find and share in the different territories where we engage our community, including Africa, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. By following up with our efforts in communities around the world with a content strategy, we can begin to show our ambitious initiatives and our values through our media. So what does this mean for the creative team? First and foremost, we must have clear direction from entire core team as to what initiatives and messages we want to promote and focus on, therefore a content strategy can be built around that. In addition, at conferences we should film less of event talks, and focus more our efforts on connecting with builders, artists, community to find the right story to tell. 🎥 ⚽️🐇💃🏻
• 💿Kelly: Agree. The process should be: 1.) Validate the Roadmap for Growth 2.) Identify key product announcements and messages 3.) Confirm the audience for each announcement 4.) Determine what, where and how to say it. 5.) Execute. Anyone tasked with producing content should have a clear understanding of the message they’re communicating. Without this, you’re not using the full potential of your creative team, and the content will be less impactful.
• ⚽️Abhi: For every event that we go to, we need to establish a collaborative strategy to maximize outreach across social channels. Sharing stories, behind the scenes and scoops can help us with the community sentiment - why are we going to these events, what outcome we expect from them and how do we plan to achieve them is also something we can share. We are now taking a passive/defensive approach of not pushing out much on events due to the community sentiment and market conditions which is not healthy in the long run and goes against our narrative of being ‘transparent’. The transfer of information between a team attending an event in Africa to the communications team in the US or Europe has be in real-time, especially for multi-day events, as the news can go stale in a single day due to the community seeing it first on other projects’ social channels.

2x YES

1. 🎽Li: We must keep pushing community-led (ecosystem) development. Our forum is one of the most active in all of Web3, and now we can double down (or 10X) on existing grantees and DAOs who are the highest performing. We also should go out-bound to seek out the top 1% teams in Web3 and bring them into the ecosystem with grants and investments. For example, I think having 5 more strong DeFi teams in our ecosystem will be the best path to bring USDC to Harmony versus us trying to go at it ourselves. 📖 🐯🌲🐇
• 🐉Jack: I strongly agree on the philosophy of leveraging our current builders and sourcing in teams with a proven track record. What saddens me is, 1) those teams often cordially decline to engage for one reason or another, 2) most of our community members lack the knowledge to support or appreciate this. I’d suggest we first figure out our “identity”, and we stop “chasing”. Are we a game chain? a DAO chain? a DeFi chain? Then we build out the skeleton of the entire ecosystem, and then evaluate who’s who in Harmony, and let the lego blocks fall into place. If there are missing components, then we go seek them out. For the DeFi (primitive) example above, we build a sleek DeFi App Store (think beyond Terra Station), backed by 1inch/Paraswap w/ Metamask/Coinbase wallets, get a $100M LP commitment from Pantera + Falcon X + Multicoin + 3 Arrows + Paradigm + Blockchain Capital.
• 🏃Leo: Not sure Harmony is right for DeFi projects. Have you done study of the users of the popular DeFi projects? Can you name a few strong DeFi projects? Most of the DeFi projects attract whales, and most of them are copycat of each others. We need essential DeFi building blocks, but the growth of our ecosystem is not on DeFi IMHO. 🎽⚔
• 🌲Sam: I would actually push back a little on this statement: “the growth of our ecosystem is not on DeFi”. While I agree, we will not see a huge increase in users via defi on Harmony - I do not believe our blockchain can scale and support the sort of user engagement we are planning on seeing without a robust defi vertical. Every NFT, every game, every metaverse or DAO will have DeFi at it’s core to help it’s users swap tokens or products, to improve treasury management and passive income. We need to have the fundamental banking services that DeFi provide as a basic utility for the rest of the ecosystem to thrive.
2. 🛹Peter – cross-shard communication: Kart Racing League is ready to deploy on shard 1 (gaming shard), but it needs a dex and there are no dex’s on shard 1. This limits our growth and exposes a massive weakness in our architecture. In order to grow, we need cross-shard communication. 🌲 🎥🐉🏓
• 🛡Rongjian: Agree about pushing on cross-shard feature. But just to give more context. Right now, shard 0 is only having about 30% block capacity used on average, so there are still room to add a few game projects with good traction on shard 0. For extreme events that attracts lots of bots, it’s another story and whether it’s 1 DFK or 10 DFK, the extreme events will cause trouble that the solution is not on sharding. ⚔
• 🏓XiaoPeng: Both agree with Peter and RJ. cross-shard communication is the basis for multiple shards to work together, but if we don't address the real issues that cause shard0 crowding, shard1 will soon have the same problem too. I think porting bots to shard1 is 10x easier than deploying Game or Dapp on shard1. ⚔
3. 💻Aaron – Security, Monitoring, Alert: An initiative should be started to create security infrastructure, tools, tests, security policies, and guidelines, to enable users and projects obtain multiple layers of security protections, stay informed for any attempted hack, and minimize the damage in case of a breach. Every month, hundreds of millions of dollars are hacked from crypto projects. Yet some hacks are totally preventable if the developers are more diligent with testing and account security. Individual users face an even worse problem: "crypto wallet hacked" / "MetaMask hacked" shows millions of search results on Google. On Harmony, more than 80 hacks were reported in 2022. A few cases resulted in the loss of millions to tens of millions of dollars. Notably, some hacks compromised some developers' accounts and Harmony’s internal accounts. 🐇 🎥🐉⚔
• 🏏Ganesha: There's no denying that a better security monitoring and alert system is needed for harmony's infrastructure products and for projects that deploy on harmony. However, building/maintaining of such an infrastructure needs to be externalized. Some of the third-party analytic and audit firms already screen malicious attempts and notify the projects (i recommend doing a survey of them to figure out the shortcomings), but in my opinion none that exists today can cover them all. Harmony could easily fund such an initiative, upon finding a motivated/expert external team.
4. 🏃Leo – Game Studio: Blockchain game is the upcoming big trend in the industry especially when the market is not very bullish. “X 2 earn” will attract massive new users to the blockchain. Game development took time and expertise. We shall form a joint blockchain game studio with an established traditional game company to adopt more games onto Harmony blockchain. The new game studio will be a new company that focuses on bringing existing games to blockchain using Play-to-Earn model. ☁️ 🐯 Blockchain Games can be the killer apps on Harmony and the differentiator. The lower tx fee and fast finality, high tps, makes Harmony the ideal platform for games.
• 🛹Peter: Leo, we’re already doing it. Let’s work together to make this happen. Read that and let me know what you think.
• 🦒Brian: I wholeheartedly support digging into social experiences in our ecosystem projects. But while games are a wonderful way of attracting users and TVL, I can't yet see how we can compete in this arena to such a degree that would warrant devoting our resources to co-establishing a studio. At GDC, companies were asking for great sums of money for web3 integration; other chains have deeper pockets and have made major hires to partner with AAA companies. In advance of a full proposal, I wonder how if game development would take "time and expertise," that we would be able to attract these studios without either one of those. (And if we could attract them with bizdev and investment, why would establishing a studio would be required?)
• 🏃Leo: My proposal is to attract a mid-tier game studio to build a joint venture with Harmony. Big game studio like Blizzard won’t be able to work with us anyway.
• ⚛Jackie: We can have a game studio and/or a game director to organize coordinated efforts with Harmony grantees. There are great game talents in the community. ⚔
• 🏓XiaoPeng: I know there are some traditional game studios that are interested in blockchain, but they have very little blockchain experience. One of the problems they encounter is, what need to be put on the chain? What situations need to interact with the chain? I think it's not just a technical problem.
5. 🏃Leo – Game Shard: We must launch and rebrand shard1 as the game shard which is the demonstration of the Harmony’s sharding solution. We have enough users and applications to use additional shards to showcase our answers to the scaling problem. A full-blown cross-shard communication may take longer time for production. We need some interim solution for this initiative. A launch plan doc is here. ☁️🔭 🐯🌲🦒 🎥 ⚛🐉⚔🧑‍🍳
• 🚗Boris: Even though I think the Game Shard is a great idea the implementation plan seems a little ambition for a 6 weeks (or even 12 weeks) deployment. Not only the launching of an elastic rpc launch could be an entire project itself. Then some technical primitives like multisig, we do not have them even for more basic use cases, so if we must fix those before we can even start, it would be difficult deliver a bigger project like the Game Shard. Finally, I do not think we have a robust PR structure for Harmony in general, so I wonder if we could be able to have one for this project.
• ⚛Jackie: Game Shard can be its own branded chain (e.g., BLUE) for games, NFTs, metaverse, and defi. This may showcase Harmony’s cross-chain technologies and build a subset of the Harmony community focusing on web3 games.
• 🌲Sam: Daniel actually raised a potential issue with a vertical specific branding of a shard last week. What if someone wants to use the “game” shard for something that isn’t a game? Thinking about blockchains as cities (per A16Z’s Ali Yahya’s analogy) we may think about Silicon Valley as start-up central, or New York as finance town, or Washington D.C. as the government city — but you can find a Nissan / Mercedes-benz / Microsoft office in Silicon Valley, non-profits and NGOs line the streets in NYC, and whatever is totally antithetical to government in D.C. In that view, we may want to brand Shard 1 in a way that doesn’t lock us into one vertical. After all - I am pretty sure we wouldn’t want to call Shard 3 “DAO Shard”...
6. 🛡Rongjian – Protocol-native stablecoins: Stablecoin is a critical component of a strong and thriving Defi ecosystem, our current Defi ecosystem is lacking a strong and liquid stablecoin to support the demand of defi users and applications. Protocol native stablecoin can further take advantage of the billions of ONE staked in Harmony’s proof-of-stake and leverage the staking utility with Defi ecosystem. Protocol native stablecoin has been an industry trend with many major layer1s launching it. 🎽🐯📖☁️🦒🚜🎥🎤🏓⚔ ⚽️🧑‍🍳
• 🚜Demetre: mainnet for OIN stablecoin (already has $453K pools), and other DeFi proposals - specifically focusing on building a liquidity utility service for the Harmony ecosystem (more). Liquidity infrastructure proposal.
• 🏃Leo: for any stable coin, to find the usage is the most critical part for growth. We can’t subside another stable coin like Terra did for UST. Terra is putting 5+mm everyday to subside the interest of the Anchor protocol. The market probably has no room for another stable coin unless we find the real usage.
• 🐉Jack: this is only a means to an end. we’ve had OIN for quite some time now, and it’s ready for the “how to use” in our ecosystem. This is a hidden potential as OIN can then be plugged into a UBI, generating 17% yield; or have locked OIN paired with stONE to generate another 5% yield; adding insurance via Insurace to protect against protocol loss; enabling liquidation event participation. Having said all that, we can have a dashboard UX that incentivizes utility with 10x confidence, by placing it on our explorer as a fiat onramp to OIN, and then able to swap to any other token using a DEX aggregator. So much can be done here, not just getting another protocol-native stablecoin. 🌲
7. ☁️Giv: Investment in a professional website: harmony.one is by default the first place new users come to to learn about the project. First impressions matter and the website needs to clearly (and beautifully) communicate Harmony's vision, unique value proposition, and roadmap. It has to speak to and impress investors, developers, and mass consumers. A substandard website is a disservice to the great work our team has accomplished. Let's onboard the best of the best agency to help us build a world-class marketing site that represents us. Paired with top content writers. 🔭 📖 🌲 🛹 🐐🦒 🎥🎤🐉🐇⚔ ⚽️🧑‍🍳💃🏻
• 🛹Peter: I was in a meeting this morning with a top game engine. During the meeting the person went to our website and verbally said “So, are you guys a blockchain?” He was confused as to what we were, who we serve, how we serve them, and what problems we solve. A good, basic, website that follows all the best practices for good websites, would really help us. The primary audience here are non-blockchain folks, who will go to our website to learn more. ⚽️⚔
• 💿Kelly: 1.) Alignment: The core team needs to align on the messages and growth roadmap for Harmony. This should then translate into the content organization and design direction to communicate Harmony’s unique value proposition. The lack of alignment currently makes Harmony’s communication and messaging disjointed across all its communications platforms. 🐇 2.) Content Development: The website currently has a really high bounce rate. It’s been improved from the original website, but more content needs to be developed to help users better understand Harmony, the ecosystem, and to keep users on the site longer. Currently, the landing page functions as an ‘orientation device’ directing people to content on other sites. Harmony will continue to need to develop content over time to communicate its many upcoming announcements for its product roadmap, campaigns and other initiatives. 🐇
• 🎥Adrian: Are we Coordinape? Because it seems like we are from our website... “Form a DAO”? No real mention that we are a blockchain anywhere on the homepage. 🐇
• ⚽️Abhi: Agree on the points raised above, our website is good but doesn’t really scream what Harmony is and our vision, in fact there are areas on the website that does the opposite with BAYC and blue metaverse (things we are trying to tone down our messaging on social comms). For a brand like Harmony and the media presence that we are aiming for, we should also think 10x on aesthetics and branding. Almost every project I met in Amsterdam told me of how Harmony took over Denver, that’s branding and marketing! I feel we should keep that consistency across channels, not just at events. It’s been almost 4 months since the launch of our new website. 4 months in crypto times is years, the website can be continuously updated. Agree with Kelly’s point on having a continuous smooth flowing content engine for our website, we get 400k average visitors on our website (source - semrush). We are doing nothing to leverage on that number and the possibilities are limitless, in fact we don’t even have content going out from our website. I have proposed what we can do under one of Adrian’s 10x YES proposal, seemed more relevant to put it there.
• ⚽️Abhi: We are now sending weekly newsletters along with monthly newsletters but where are we collecting emails from? we are still using the 30,000 odd email database on mailchimp that we collected 6-8 months ago. We need a simple form to collect emails, it could be in the form of a SUBCRIBE button on our website, preferably somewhere very noticeable. I am woking with Kelly and team to have it on the website, it’s not to redirect folks to Mailchimp but just to collect their email addresses and we can integrate those emails to our Mailchimp database. Another way to leveraging that 400k visitors on our website.
8. 🤖Eric – Social NFT Marketplace: NFTs have enormous potential to onboard new users into web3, but the ecosystem can be daunting, expensive, and exclusive. We can create a frictionless experience that enables new users to get their first NFT (a personalized 3d avatar) within minutes of setting up their wallet (initial integration with 1Wallet), dynamically update the NFT via interactions in an NFT marketplace, and provide social utility immediately and through future integrations. (more)
• 🏃Leo: Utility and token economy for the dynamic NFT is not very clear. Love the idea of branding with physical goods. An NFT marketplace is aways needed in the 1wallet, but do we need to build one by ourselves? Can we integrate with existing marketplace?
• ⚛Jackie: This is an interesting way of bootstrapping a user’s web3 identity tied with wallet usages. I see lots potential metaverse usages from here. Will this avatar system support cross-chain NFTs (via iToken)? I’d like to have a hat on my avatar that is based on one of my NFTs on ETH mainnet. How (fast) can other Harmony projects use this 3D avatar system?
9. ☁️Giv: What is our tangible strategy for ultimate decentralization? What to do with our products? Create more DAOs? Hand-off to partners? I would like to propose a new option that will not only help us decentralize but rapidly grow all of the products and services currently managed by the core team using the Harmony Incubator program. 🌲
• 🐉Jack: I’m unsure whether a strategy would help. The Incubator sounds like a playbook, much needed indeed, or we can use the Accelerator Program instead. It’s difficult to predict with this in this new multichain world. For example, no one expected Ethereum founders to split, each taking time to form their own initiative — Polkadot (Gavin Wood), Cardano (Charles Hoskinson) and Consensys (Joe Lubin) as new blockchains or infra/tooling. From Tendermint/Cosmos, came Sommelier (Zaki Manian) and Osmosis (Sunny Aggarwal), while the founder steps down to start Virgo (Jae Kwon). From Terra, they spun off Mirror, Anchor, Secret, Loop, Wormhole/Portal, Astroport, with close cooperation with TFL. They were all unplanned, and caused by disagreement “events”, or external ”government bodies”. Also what time horizon will be the tangible strategy to start planning on? Influencers and thinkers are predicting consolidations 10 years from now.
• 🎽Li: What Jack said is quite interesting. Many other ecosystems had unplanned decentralization. I see our efforts with DAOs as methodical and Giv’s proposal as a way to incubate successful DAOs. There’s a great story of Kleiner Perkins incubating Genetech in the early days of Silicon Valley. That’s how I see us as pioneers who can help incubate entrepreneurs to build in this space and creating scalable DAOs. Something Ventured.
10. 📖Devin: Harmony must be a carbon-negative chain in 2022. With Algorand and soon Polygon going carbon neutral, it is competitively and ethically essential that Harmony commits to doing the same. The means of doing so comes in the form of the Sustainable Development DAO’s plan to potentially make Harmony the biggest carbon credit transference system. (more) ☁️🌲 🛹 🎥🎤🐉🐇
• 🛹Peter: I was in a meeting this morning with a top game engine, and one big must-have they have is that the blockchain partner must be environmentally friendly. I think this is key and will not be difficult - a close partnership with Klima Protocol would help us get there and give game developers confidence and comfort. This is important especially for gaming partners.
• 🚗Boris: I agree with this, we must become carbon negative, but I am not sure if this is something we can achieve in 6-weeks. So perhaps we should divide it into a series of milestones we must achieve to become carbon negative. Is there some kind of document or framework we can follow so we can understand what it means in our specific case to go carbon negative? I would even push it a little more, if we become carbon-negative can we create a Harmony-based marketplace so we (and other projects) can tokenize carbon credits?
11. 🌲Sam: DAO Pivot. Remove the now-toxic term “DAO” for something more innocuous. Scale back the budget for DAO Grants. Focus the effort on community involvement and tooling. 📖🛹 🎥🎤
• 🛹Peter: I’m not sure if I should provide the counter argument since I agree with you here. We do need to get away from the early branding and negative press of supporting dao’s that have little to no relationship to harmony blockchain for that matter. We need to prioritize value to Harmony - the blockchain - and not just touchy feely community type things.
• 🎽Li: I read Sam’s 1 pager but I’m still not clear on the exact distinction between on-chain community and DAO in your definition. I like what Leo said in another section about asking DAOs to create a token so that they can create sustainable economic value for themselves.
• 🌲Sam: DAOs have a smart contract in the center. For a DAO to work, it needs to “automation” at its center - otherwise, there will be someone being taken advantage of and providing their work for no compensation. “On-Chain Communities” have aspects that are on-chain (snapshot, multisig, coordinape) but actual activities are managed by human interaction. For example, the Ambassador DAO can have a snapshot vote about who to pay for running an event - however, the actual PAYMENT would have to be initiated by one person and then signed off by two others. No automation in the mix.
• 🐇Rachel: I agree with many elements of the are essential. However, I am going to go out on a limb here and provide a counter argument; I see huge promise in DAOs, and do not find “DAO” to be a toxic term. The concept of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization is brilliant, and philosophically I am in agreement with the concept of bringing us away from the traditional CEO corporate structures that have such unequal allocation of resources. Do I think that our on-chain execution of DAOs can be improved? Absolutely. Especially when it comes to the of funding & governance of DAOs. This could be handled more strategically, with sustainability in mind, and the implementation of DAO Reporting (in conjunction with tooling). However, just because the community sentiment is low, does not mean we should label DAOs as toxic and abandon something that offers so much promise. We simply need a perspective & narrative shift. Other chains will continue to use the term “DAO”. Instead of us being the ones to abandon something that is already so known & widely used in the space, let’s improve our execution strategy surrounding DAOs and shift the narrative back to one that is positive, not toxic.

12. 🦒Brian: Metaverse Creative DAO - Metaverse-related projects on Harmony lack the tools and bandwidth (see Blue Metaverse Report) to connect and interoperate with other projects so that our ecosystem could constitute a "Blue Metaverse." In addition to automatic tooling, fostering interoperability will still require significant design resources to build out: a) assets and environments on each project, b) portals from one project to another, c) rigging and rendering of NFTs to bring into each other's games or metaverses, d) Harmony-branded homes, and e) hosting hackathons to create some of the above. The needs of our metaverse-related projects appear to be too great to be tackled by one of the new studios "metaverse and gaming" studios being considered to be formed under the very-ambitious new Creative DAO proposal.
• ☁Giv: I’m not sure what the mandates of this DAO would be. It would be helpful to create a proposal draft that outlines the mandates and deliverables. On one hand it sounds like this DAO would be responsible for design resources but it also mentions tooling which would require [potentially complex] engineering efforts. If we are serious about building an ecosystem for metaverses, this initiative would seem reasonable. My concern is that there’s no unified or standard way to build given all the different game engines and technical designs so interoperability and the development of tooling/SDKs would be quite challenging.
• 🏃Leo: I support the “metaverse creative DAO” proposal to focus on the metaverse build-out. Many metaverse projects have to incentive builders to build on their metaverse. In terms of technology, there are a few available choices, like webgl, unreal, or unity. We can focus on one technology to start. The interoperability idea is cool and we would encourage to even launch a harmony metaverse NFT or HRC20 tokens to enhance the interoperability among all metaverse projects in Harmony. One thing I am not clear is the budget. How the $250K will be used? I would like to see a few breakdown of the budget. Also, do we have the resource to lead the design or set the motif of the creative hackathon? Some of those questions are not answered in the proposal. We need further brainstorming and discussion.
• ⚛Jackie: Metaverse Creative DAO is an important initiative to potentially become a platform to coordinate Harmony’s community metaverse projects (aka “Blue Metaverse”). This DAO can have a few $1-5k “Asset Bounties” (e.g., characters, environments, arts, animations...) that pre-approved 2D/3D artists can create CC-by assets to support Harmony’s community open development. Asset Bounty proposals can be submitted by Harmony grantees and be approved by DAO. This DAO may set protocol level rules for metaverse projects to follow to have pre-approved Asset Bounties. For example, protocol level rules include interoperability such as supporting .crazy.one as usernames and personal NFT inventories (so that a user can bring his/her NFT collection across metaverse projects).

13. 🦒Brian: Xoomer product manager - The top dapps in the Harmony ecosystem are well-made, elegant products appealing to specific demographics, including people most likely to have adopted web3 already. However, for us to expand out the ecosystem, we will need to reach new people - and GenX and late Boomers are a fertile market. As this demographic has different needs and tastes than much of what is being developed on our chain, it is worthy to create a central product manager to ensure that products' design, gameplay, music, marketing, security, and messaging are tailored to their needs, rather than leaving it to individual product developers, but to encourage the developers.
• 🎽Li: I am personally a fan of the idea, but I think this initiative is very hard to execute and may not be the right market timing. My parents are the biggest Harmony fans yet current tools like wallets and on-chain products do not make it easy to onboard and engage them. For example, I gave my parents tokens but despite my dad being an investor for several decades, he does not know how best to start staking or utilizing the tokens even though he watches all of our all hands and follow essentially all of our updates. I think the whole industry is not quite at that phase of adoption yet for us to focus resource on this demographics. If we look at the Crossing the Chasm framework, we are still only at the innovators and early adopter phase of industry development. GenX and late Boomers seem more to be pragmatists or conservatives in adoption.
• 🏃Leo: Is there any existing research on what GenX would be interested in using blockchain? I felt even the usability of wallet is not good enough to attract Xoomers. What Xoomers care most? How blockchain and crypto can make impact to their life? I would like to know about this demographic before making any proposals or decision.
• 🛹Peter: I feel like the old guy in the group, but Gen X’er here. I don’t feel like a specific blockchain product made for my generation would be very interesting or value-add. For a product for the boomers, I definitely don’t think we are there yet - we’re too early. Right now the ux sucks for even the most advanced users. Let’s fix that first, then worry about serving other generations.

14. 🐉Jack: Fully Orchestrated Partnerships — Today our partnerships are touch and go. We don’t follow up. We don’t have pre-launch planning, we don’t have a post-launch 10x on-ramp for our partners. It’s totally transactional. Partners may not mind it, and some may feel abandoned. For example, if BEFORE we launch games, we need orchestrate the pre-plannings — what tools they need, which launchpad to use, when to perform NFT drops to get the community riled up, inclusion into our newsletter, website, docs, build out tutorials, etc. DURING the launch, we help co-marketing to a certain degree — media blast, weekly recaps, Reddit pins, Harmony ONE Weekly inclusion, feature on Harmony Universe and our website, do tweets and retweets. AFTER they launch post-launch growth playbooks (how do we get them to 1K Daily Active Users (DAUs), guide them through guild setups, insist on them hiring community managers to build a community, get them to 10K DAUs, marketing tweet on Harmony to buying ads on gamer platforms, getting influencers to review their app, find investors with /venture) and that’s a “game” example. Another examples — DEXes (DFK, Tranquil, Curve, Sushi, Beefy, Openswap, StakeDAO — get Tier 1 investors to back them or incentivize them to fund LPs at $10M+ each), Infrastructure (Chainstack, Pocket, QuickNode, Ankr — partner with Top 3 apps on Harmony), Protocols (cross-shard tx, Zero Knowledge Proofs).
• 🛹Peter: We already have standard operating procedures for partnerships - pre, during, post and pipeline management. I just haven’t kept up with it, which is my fault. Please Go to google drive to find the document and help me utilize it and improve it and make it a standard going forward.

15. 🐇Rachel: Fully Functional Multi-sig. This is essential to ensuring DAOs operate & can function. This is at the core of all DAO Operations, and is commonly expressed as a primary pain point of DAOs within our ecosystem (see comments here from our DAO tooling talk post). To disregard this would be negligent to the community sentiment, and addressing this will show that we care about the DAOs in Harmony & are making the necessary adjustments to allow them to operate efficiently. View one-pager here. 🦒🌲
• ☁Giv: Completely agreed. We are working with a partner (recommended by Gnosis) to take over ownership of our multisig and to ensure our users have access to the latest and greatest version while maintaining performance and usability.
16. 🐐Mikey: Harmony Protocol’s blockchain explorer troubles are no secret. In fact, it has consistently been the subject of criticism throughout Twitter, Reddit, and Telegram. Focusing on a much improved blockchain explorer will put the sapience of “tech” back into the community’s core perception of Harmony. (more)🏓🌲
• ☁Giv: This is a top priority for us. We have to decide as a team how we want to move forward with this product. Soon we will have 2 more block explorers launching on Harmony (Blockscout and GetBlock) but it would be beneficial to hand off the current explorer to an external team to take over and continue building.
17. 🎬Danny: Scholarships — I believe that we should double down on our efforts to bring in quality scholars to events where we’d like to have a big presence. For one, scholars serve as great ambassadors for Harmony throughout entirety of conferences, helping us scale our outreach to potential projects we would have never come into contact with. Additionally, and more importantly, having talented scholars who participate in conference hackathons is a great way for Harmony to not only be involved within the community, but also the opportunity to build more impactful and promising projects onto the ecosystem.

As seen in ETHRio and ETHAmsterdam, Blu3 DAO scholars were able to win many bounties, including top prizes at both hackathons, which is great both for ecosystem growth and publicity (a scholar at ETHRio was just highlighted on Forbes Brazil). That being said, I think it is important to have new scholars for each conference, rather than sponsoring the same individuals. By being diverse in our selection, it will help promote Harmony to a variety of demographics, such as developers, artists, and builders of any type. To ensure diverse scholars, it would be beneficial to work with partners like Blu3 DAO, H.E.R. DAO, MAD NFT, etc. in our efforts to recruit the proper scholars to respective conferences.

For example, when it comes to NFT conferences like NFT.NYC, I’d like to see ecosystem partners, such as MAD NFT, be involved with choosing scholars who are active within the NFT community, helping to foster more growth for Harmony’s own NFT ecosystem. In conclusion, for this initiative to be successful, there must be more coordination from the events team as to which yearly events we’d like to have a major presence at, that way we have ample time to select the best quality scholars.

1. 🎽Li: We have had some repeat scholars. To clarify, those were experienced leads at hackathons who helped the new scholars win hackathons. We should however set up some guidance so there are some guidelines such as: bring 1 experience scholar like a TA (teaching assistant) to guide every 5 new scholars.
2. 🌲Sam: We have three categories of “advocates” for Harmony at events: Community members (who aren’t paid to attend, but just do anyway), Ambassadors (who are paid to attend and are part of a program), and Scholars (paid but not part of a program). I think it is important to ensure that our advocates understand what the message and value proposition for Harmony is before they attend an event, which is why I am more inclined to finance community members and ambassadors in their attendance. Scholars are still very valuable - but the program (as it stands) is full of holes. I think each scholarship is a one time opportunity (i.e. you cannot get a scholarship to both Eth Rio and Eth Amsterdam). Additionally, I think we should focus our scholar efforts on builders and crypto users with only a small segment devoted to the “lifestyle”, “content”, “artist” type of attendee (specific event exceptions allowed). I think we need to be very cautious about how we evaluate the impact of something like Blu3 DAO winning bounties.
3. 🎽Li: Scholars are paid and they are part of a very well run and structured program with Blu3. There were 6 teams between RIO (3) and Amsterdam (3) and all 6 teams won hackathon prizes.

18. 🚗Boris - NEAR Bridge: A recent proposal from Proximity Labs / Trisolaris seeks to establish ONE liquidity on Aurora (the EVM compatible layer of the NEAR blockchain) through a liquidity mining campaign. This campaign is set to run for 3 months, with ~$11,500 in TRI rewards each week. What is proposed is a match from Harmony, bringing the total rewards to ~$23,000 per week paid through a dual-farm system for providing ONE/NEAR liquidity. While the previous proposal will help establish a new market for ONE and result in greater exposure of the Harmony blockchain to the NEAR community, it does not establish a NEAR market on Harmony or allow the Harmony community to become involved with the NEAR ecosystem. Hermes DeFi proposes to match Trisolaris’ emissions of $11,500 a week in their HRMS token to support NEAR/ONE Liquidity on Harmony. Additionally, it will be necessary a match from Proximity Labs in the NEAR token to bring the total rewards to ~$23,000 per week, that they have preliminarily agreed to do after conversations held in ethPortland between Proximity and Harmony teams. To accomplish this goal, a direct bridge between Aurora and Harmony is needed. BoringDAO operates oPortal, a trustless bridging system with existing connections to both Harmony and Aurora. oPortal has operated for over a year without any disruptions. Hermes DeFi has been working to organize the creation of a bridge between Aurora and Harmony for both ONE and NEAR tokens. BoringDAO estimates the creation of a secure, trustless, Aurora ←→ Harmony bridge can be completed by June 2022. Working together in Hermes and other partners will have the benefit of collaborating with some of the project we have invested. In addition, a cooperative effort between Harmony, Aurora, and three major dApps offers the opportunity for massive community integration and easier exposure to projects on both chains. Creation of a native bridge for ONE and NEAR, as well as supporting liquidity for these tokens on both chains, brings volume, exposure, and a stronger connection between two leading fast-finality blockchains. Establishing this bridge and token liquidity will also support an easier expansion for builders from one chain to the other. See Hermes DeFi, Trisolaris, BoringDAO, Proximity Labs, NEAR. 🐇
19. 🍄Darren: Create an internal Harmony GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) that helps ensure the design/messaging for Harmony's brand and also aims to turn Harmony into a paragon of design. Filled with progressive design thinkers and talented creatives, they'll establish and coordinate with departments (products, events, marketing, website, etc) for all their design needs, while making sure we hammer home the Harmony story. But the real mandate is to propel Harmony into the future, making them a leader in design ahead of the other L1/L2s, by radically dreaming and imagining what Harmony's design/UX future could look like. (more).
• ☁Giv: I love this proposal and it’s very much in line with Kelly’s website guild. As a marketing landing-page, we are missing a huge opportunity to utilize our website to communicate various initiatives, partnerships, events, and overall project vision. To avoid having a stagnant website, we need a team who is closely aligned with our community and marketing teams to keep the pages fresh and engaging.
20. 🚜Demetre: Telegram is a disorganized firehose of comments. The search feature pales in comparison to Discord. A large challenge for all blockchain protocols is continually educating a flow of new and curious individuals who often have redundant questions. The channels and search functionality provide an excellent index for people investigating key words and questions to find definitions and relevant conversations. OlympusDAO has created a masterclass with their Sherpa Library and use of the Dyno Bot to make it easy to quickly answer questions and fetch relevant links using simple ?commands. AMAs on Discord are much like Twitter spaces but gives chat functionality that allows the community to discuss and ask questions without coming on the audio stage. Pushing a majority of community engagement to Discord would 2x quality community growth and rate of education using Discord’s robust toolset, while reducing the stress on moderators. Telegram should be used primarily for public announcements. 🌲

10x YES

1. ⏳Zi – Social 1Wallet: Social in the context of 1Wallet is not a collection of features and functions; it is the center of gravity for the user experience. We intend to build something much more potent beyond the conventional utility of Web2 social apps. Social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter evolved social networks into social media. Moreover, e-commerce platforms like Uber and Airbnb are network marketplaces with social integrations. In short, we see social as the “killer app” for Web3. It has the latent potential to foster strong network effects. 🎥
• ☁️Giv: While I'm a big fan of 1wallet, I have to take the contrarian view on "social" as an approach. What major hair-on-fire problems are social wallets solving? I'm not against social features, I'm just questioning the order of priority. To me, adding real utility to appeal to mass consumers should be prioritized. My parents are not going to care about chatting and sending tokens to friends. But tell them they can deposit money and get back 20% yield in stable tokens with just a few clicks and they will download it in seconds. Again, I'm not discounting the social features, I just think your roadmap and order of priority are non-optimal. Launching with social features limits the audience to a small demographic. Add to that the fact that it only supports iOS (12% of phone users worldwide), and now you're looking at an even smaller slice of the pie. 🧑‍🍳
• 🏃Leo: social function is essential. However, as a wallet, we shall first provide most of the popular functions of a wallet before we invest more in the social functions.🧑‍🍳
• 🐉Jack: Maybe I don’t understand the gen-Z’s or alphas. How about we start with the “end in mind”? Chat with value transfer is what Meta trying to crack with their Messenger and Marketplaces combo; but most Marketplace exchanges are still happening offline making it like LocalBitcoin. For 1Wallet, if there’s no purpose other than vanity chatting and showing off an NFT/POAP or able to vote for a novelty governance ... those aren’t strong enough of a “pull” and it won’t win against other attention-competing mobile apps. It’s a chat app with no one. We face a chicken-and-egg problem. Like Giv said, 20% yield, or monitor your portfolio, you’ll get the Gen X & Boomers. Give them a loot box (red packet?) daily with 3D NFT airdrops if you share with a friend, maybe Gen Y’s and Z’s will join and it goes viral. One-button click to batch send all pre-determined DFK quests, you’ll get the GameFi whales. Twitter alert on NFT influencer movements, collectors will check hourly. Having a chat app takes a really heavy load on development, infra and maintenance. We need to look for a purpose that people can relate to today, a “pull”, if we want to hockey stick growth.
• 🛹Peter: There’s a customer segment where security is of utmost importance and views social interactions on a wallet as an attack vector; social interactions can also lead to mistakes and self-inflicted problems, such as sending funds to a mistyped address because I was distracted from a social interaction.
2. 🛹Peter - 10X Gaming/Gamefi launch plan: We go after the Indy Devs, A, and AA gaming studios with intellectual property ready to be put on-chain. At the same time, we create an offering worthy of getting attention from game developers interested in blockchain. ⚛ 🦒 🎥🌲🎤. (Marked as Top Proposal; see discussion for 🏃Leo’s similar 2x proposal.)
3. 🐯Tom Our current tgi event is difficult to scale due to shortage of experienced hosts and lack of playbook/process. How could we engage 10x tgi guests to 25,000 a year? It’s time to rethink a better tgi. 🦒 ⚽️
• 🎽Li: Decentralize TGI and grow it to 100 cities via Ambassador DAO. Train hosts both in Palo Alto, San Francisco, and then 100 ambassadors to host TGI in our unique style. The week during NFT LA when I hosted TGI “by myself”, I actually made at least a 10% improvement on my own hosting effectiveness. 📖
• 🏃Leo: thinking in web3 way, start a TGI token, NFT pass, and a DAO of TGI.
• ⚽️ Abhi: I would love to see and be part of TGIs in Europe, we may not have a lot of core team members in Europe, but we do have fellows, contributors, ambassadors and regional DAOs. But scaling it is a challenge, Europe is not one city.
4. 🏃Leo: DAO tokens: Each DAO should put the treasury management as the highest priority to make sure the DAO can run in a long term sustainable way. Since we are building web3 DAOs, each DAO should launch a token, either NFT or ERC20 tokens. Token is everything in web3. It provides access, membership, incentive, voting, etc. It is literally everything in web3 world. Harmony’s role in the DAO is to provide a bootstrap fund, and push each DAO to get external source of income, and investment. If a DAO has no capabilities or talents to attract some external investment or find a way to generate sustainable income, the DAO shouldn’t be started. This is a high bar of the DAOs. And it is the quality vs quantity argument for the DAOs. But it is the only sustainable way to start DAOs in any ecosystem. 📖 🐯 ⚛ 🦒⚔
• 🐇Rachel: I am in full agreement that treasury management should be at the top of our list of priorities when it comes to DAOs, and I am also deeply supportive of the notion that we should encourage DAOs to operate with sustainability in mind. However: The counter argument I will provide here is that not all DAOs require a token. While this may be true for a majority of DAOs, we must first ask ourselves: What is this DAO’s function? Is a token necessary for them to operate efficiently? Is this a “core” DAO in Harmony? Let’s take the Ambassador DAO for example, one of our core DAOs. We had a clear 6 month initiative to scale in-person events for Harmony, which required us to onboard ambassadors, host events internationally, and compensate the ambassadors by allocating funds from our treasury. Our goals include educating & expanding our geographic reach by hosting events & growing our communities around the world, which has not required us to implement any token / tokenomics. This is just one example. So yes, while I am in agreement that a DAO launching a token & implementing tokenomics may contribute to a DAOs strength & sustainability, I believe there will be cases where it is not a necessity, depending on the DAOs function. (Additionally, I feel that we would need more than this to 10x our growth.)

🐇 Rachel: In addition to what I’ve previously stated, I’ve done some more research as suggested by Stephen and have put together the following analysis, identifying the common denominators of what makes DAOs successful: From my findings, I’ve identified that most successful DAOs/DAO projects have incorporated a DAO token in their model. My perspective has begun to shift. Now I wonder: If a DAO does not have a token, can it truly be considered a DAO? (or be on the path to success/self sustainability?) I’ve decided to touch back on this point as I now see a lot of validity behind this perspective, and am now leaning more towards being in agreement.

• 🌟Novell: For Q2, we'll be focused on setting up our infrastructure so that we can 10x. We have already proven ourselves in the last few months that we are able to execute, attract and win. While we have experienced incredible growth, it is time to set up our core ops now to lay the necessary foundation to 10x. (ETHAmsterdam Recap, ETHAmsterdam wins).
• 🚜Demetre: I’d be happy to help strategize treasury management options. We can rank on and off-chain options with the associated risks involved while giving examples of portfolio allocations. DAOs can diversify smart-contract risk by deploying stables in multiple protocols. Tranquil and Hundred are both excellent places to earn yield on stables on Harmony at the moment. If they launch a token, we can help them implement bonding to grow their owned liquidity.
5. ☁️Giv: Recruit Head of Marketing & Growth: Go all in and aggressively push for high-impact marketing campaigns internationally with the goal of 10x growth in 3-6 months. 📖 🌲🐇 🦒 🎥🎤⚽️💃🏻
• 🐯Tom: Harmony’s current marketing/growth function is decentralized. The marketing work is shared by a group of core members including stephen, li, giv, daneil, adrian, abhishek, peter, etc if we want to hire a full-time marketing/growth role, we need a clear job description of his/her responsibilities and expected deliverables.
• 💿Kelly: The Head of Marketing should provide direction for Harmony’s campaigns, messaging and announcements working to support Harmony’s product roadmap and growth roadmap. This role will oversee events, all communications platforms (website, video, social media, forums, blog posts), media engagement, and branding.
• 🌲Sam: Responding to Tom - I think that is Giv’s point. The decentralized marketing team leads to confusion, missed opportunities, insulted partners and vendors and creates confusion in the marketplace. 7+ people trying to come together to make ONE single message just isn’t working. We need a single, professional executive that owns our message. This person will take input from everyone, but they are the final arbiter of what goes where and when. A job description with responsibilities, deliverables and headcount couldn’t be easier...in fact Kelly did a fairly good job writing one up above.
• 💿Kelly: Seconding Sam’s point here. All Harmony’s external communications should operate as one UNITED voice across all platforms.
• 🔭Daniel: 100% agreeing with Sam and Kelly above. Kelly explained it quite well and in one sentence — communications must be one united voice. Our messaging must be consistent and our priorities should be packaged so that it is clear and well understood. This takes time and lots of effort, and should remain a constant. Hiring a head of marketing is a great start in the right direction.
6. 🏏Ganesha: Cross-shard smart contracts in Q2: the cross-shard smart contract full feature completion should be our top priority goal for q2 and early q3 (10x, currently lack resource allocation). The next set of apps (beyond defi & nft) will decide between app-chain architecture (polkadot, cosmos, avalanche), layer-2, and sharded chains. While app-chains lack shared security, layer-2's lack sequencer decentralization, scalability, and efficiency, there is huge opportunity for sharded chains like harmony to grab the market, but it has to happen in q2 or q3. ☁️🔭 📖 🐯 🌲 🎥🎤🧑‍🍳
• 🛡Rongjian: Agree that the main differentiator and next major selling point of Harmony will be the sharding and cross-shard protocol features. But we shouldn’t rush it out and provide lackluster product that people hate. We should make sure it’s definitely a killer feature that’s better than other projects.
• 🔭Daniel: Cross-shard messaging will allow Harmony to stand out from the crowd and remind everyone that we’re a technology-focused company. We should not only be thinking of how to deliver this from a technological standpoint, but also how to deliver this from a marketing standpoint as well. How we market this can make an incredible difference on its impact, and those efforts must start ASAP.
7. 🏏Ganesha: Cross-chain tech (trustless token/nft/arbitrary-messaging bridges to 11-chains: bitcoin, eth, bsc, polygon, solana, avalanche, fantom, polkadot, cosmos, cardano, arbitrum): While there exists many third-party bridges (some even raised several hundred million $, e.g., LayerZero), I don't think there will be 1 bridge to rule them all, making the ecosystem flooded with many bridges and users/devs now have to “do-your-own-research” DYOR to select one over the other, in which case, a bridge by harmony tends to have better trust and more popular. Building ourselves (vs relying on third-party) has both advantages and disadvantages: on one hand trust, flexibility, uniqueness as no other layer-1 provide inter-operability layer by itself, on the other hand, lack of expertise, resources, dedication, time to market. 🐯🌲
• 🚗Boris: I agree in the need of a cross-chain stack, and I also worry about some of the cons you mentioned, especially the “lack of expertise,” because I think that there is not a clear technical solution to implement these kind of bridges. So it seems to me like this is fundamentally and R&D project, and we do not have the innovation pipeline that is required to develop novel products that will reach the market. We need to be lean, iterate, prototype, etc. and our current process seems more rigid.
8. 🐉Jack: 10x User Confidence with 10x User eXperience (UX) — Today I would rate the way we organize Harmony’s information architecture at a C-minus. We lack tutorials, updated docs and some crypto primitives — newcomer speculators have no idea how best to swap or bridge over their ETH, MATIC, BNB, UST/LUNA, DOT, ADA, etc. We have no DEX aggregators (yet) and didn’t promote our yield aggregators. Harmony OG investors return to find out their Chrome Wallet Extension deprecated and their Ledger Nano S shows a different address on Metamask. Developers aren’t sure which SDK is best to use. New node operators can’t find a good one-click option, while existing ones run shards 1/2/3 nodes without an updated shard 0 database. Non-crypto owners cannot easily purchase ONEs, and those who do find an onramp witness high friction and declined cards while trying to buy ONEs. Institutional investors don’t have the confidence in being whale LPs as all our DEXes are in the low millions of dollars, without having an enterprise-class user interface, insured and backed by Harmony or a lead by major VCs. It is hard to have confidence for those to begin on-ramping into Harmony’s ecosystem without some hand holding. We can do better. 🐯🐐🐇☁️ 🦒 🎥🎤 📖⚔🧑‍🍳💃🏻
• ☁Giv: 100% agree with this. However, there’s a lot to unpack here and we would need to break this up into multiple proposals. The user journey for a new investor is very different to that of a new developer. I agree that we have done poorly on all user onboarding scenarios. If I had to prioritize, I would focus on developers. Our onboarding for new developer must be flawless and delightful. If we don’t instill confidence, we will lose them. Developers are the lifeline of our ecosystem and we need to do better with our documentation, resources, support and general dev releations (that we must hire for).
9. 🎥 Adrian: 10x PACKAGING our Message / 10x our SEO and Web Presence — Notion is not a publishing platform. We need to convert all of Notion to harmony.one (beautifully) and lock down Notion for internal only, maintaining transparency while being mindful of our partners. Click the links for the full explaination.— 6 week plan - Hire a web team to build and a comms team to deploy messaging and information - $500k estimate / yr.🌲 📖 ⚽️
• ☁ Giv: I’m in agreement about our poor presentation of content. Notion is a great tool for internal communication and some external communications. It’s clean and easy to use. But as Adrian said, it’s not a publishing tool. Our website has become a Frankenstein’s monster with some links going to web pages and some to the forum, some to badly formatted Notion pages. It looks bad and make our project seem sloppy and amateurish. For example, look at how a new user sees the team page with empty boxes and badly laid out content. This is linked from the top nav. Would you feel good about backing a project with a website like this? We need to double down on creating beautiful content, organized in a logical way to delight and inform our community. 🌲🔭⚽️
• 🔭Daniel: Our external messaging has been confusing to the community. The website presents a confusing message by prioritizing everything except information about our blockchain and 90% of its links lead to stale and disorganized Notion pages. Our SEO and web presence is far behind other chains. Analytics show that we have a high number of visitors to the website, but the majority of visitors click a link, are taken to Notion, and don’t return. Messaging needs to be more focused - we are a blockchain with great tech - hire professionals who can package and deliver this in a digestible manner.
• ⚽️Abhi: The messaging seems scattered and can be confusing. The way I see our notion is that it has become a one place dump for all internal and external communications. Notion is a great tool for internal communication, I am saying this coming from my agency experience that we are not leveraging our strong outreach and community for basic 101 marketing stuff like SEO. I strongly believe we should double down on publishing high-quality content for users to learn more about the Harmony ecosystem, and the blockchain ecosystem in general. This is one way of bringing in new users, through education while leveraging SEO. Many crypto brands do this, main example being Binance, which has a Binance Blog, brings in an estimated 160K organic users every month, while the Binance Academy brings in over 400K users every month (Source: Ahrefs). Similarly, NEAR has a blogsection and a learn section - NEAR university. Creating high-impact content on the Harmony website can open us up to thousands of new visitors every month. The ‘About Harmony’ section can talk about Harmony (What is Harmony ONE, how to stake on Harmony, How to build on Harmony, How to become a Harmony validator), while ‘Harmony Learn’ can educate the users on generic topics like sharding, ePOS, how are L1s different from L2s, etc. We need content on the website too, not just Notion or Medium, to maximize organic growth. I have also mentioned before that we don’t need to discontinue the use of medium, in fact it can complement our blog section where we drive traffic from Medium to our website.
10. 📖Devin: The DAO grants budget should be reduced by 10x, from $50M to $5M. Why? The feedback received by the DAO operations team from our top DAOs and Harmony community members supports a more strenuous examination of DAOs coming to Harmony. If we are to 10x our examination of new DAO grants that would mean the annual DAO budget should fall at a commensurate rate (10x). (more) 🎥
• 🌲Sam: What we learned over the past 9 months is that we have not quite reached product / market fit for DAOs. The focus should follow the Messari thesis in this regard. To highlight the same line that Li provided earlier: “It’s foundational tooling that will lead to DAOs replacing most companies.” To me, what this means is that we should not be focused on the number of DAOs that are created and running on Harmony, but rather the quality of the DAO tooling infrastructure that we have. To build out DAO tooling will take more time than spinning up additional on-chain communities. We need to be more methodical and - honestly - more constrained. After all - it is the constraints that drive creativity. I agree that the $50M budget for “DAOs” is too high - but I don’t want to have Harmony abandon DAOs. We discovered a LOT about how decentralized organizations work and don’t work and we need the time and space to put those learnings into action. By decreasing the fund to $5M and staking that fund - we can create a passive income stream of ~$500k a year that can help fund DAO tooling while not depleting our treasury. We show that we are listening to the community and that we take our stewardship of the treasury seriously. Then, when the product and market come together, we will be well positioned to have Harmony be a center of gravity that pulls the right sort of decentralized organization into its orbit.
• 🎽Li: The $50M guideline is not a “must spend” just like an event budget of $100K doesn’t mean figure out how to spend until you hit the max. This is not my investment bank where they gave each analyst $25 a night and all the analysts would get together to buy food so that each of ended up splitting and pay $24.98 and save the leftovers for lunch the next day. Take it seriously that we can think big about each of the categories listed in our $300M ecosystem fund category. Crypto market adoption is not a smooth line, see Layer 1s and DeFi in 2020-2021 and NFTs in 2021. By the time the market is ready for exponential scaling, you’d wish you had the budget back. Don’t give it all up just yet, Devin.
11. 🌲Sam: Harmony is the most battle-tested blockchain for gaming. In the next three months, we need to (a) Tell that story, (b) incentivize games to deploy and gain users on Harmony, (c) build / buy / deploy the necessary tools for gaming on chain, (d) be prepared to amplify the marketing messages of our gaming partners Breakdown on The Game Plan here. 🎥🎤
• 🏃Leo: Agreed. Actually all new games should launch on our game shard. I had planned the game shard launch plan, with the incentive is part of the plan. Will you be interested in taking this task? See my 2x proposal.🌲
12. 🐐Mikey: Expand the “Full-Time” Harmony Employees. The exponential of adding Harmony team members has been mentioned already throughout this agenda. I want to bring special consideration to adding “Full-Time” employees. When commenting on Harmony’s “Core Team” members the reaction is always confusion or shock. Yes, there are “full-time fellows”and “part-time” contributors and “half-time” contributors. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that a 10x in Harmony would also require the “full-time” employees to scale with it.⚔
💯Promotion for Full-Time Team to Scale Departments
1. 🎤Matty: As Sam mentioned above - “The paid Harmony workforce is 1/4th the size of other competitive blockchains”. I agree with this point, so I am not the best contrarian POV. I think we should continue to scale our contributors team for executing initiatives, and allow core members to carve a little more time for managing their teams, directing big picture ideas, community engagement, partner relationships, etc. I think hiring a few more core members would be helpful for this. Additionally, I think we can do a better job of removing low-effort contributors, paving the way for the stronger contributors to advance.
2. 🔭Daniel: I agree with Matty and Mikey on expanding our core team. Adding to this, before we proceed, we first need to identify areas in which additional expansion is needed. I know we prefer to keep our hierarchy as flat as possible, but a visual layout of our teams and their responsibilities could be beneficial to ensure that a) we avoid overlap and b) ensure we’re hiring in the right areas. We should also ensure that we establish and follow a process for hiring and onboarding. All potential hires should go through the same process while ensuring there is a need for their skill. Bypassing this will create additional confusion and consume unnecessary time. I would love to get Tom’s s input on the most efficient way to identify needs of team expansion and a process for interviewing / approval / onboarding.
13. 🐇Rachel: Enhancing our tech & marketing. For us to 10x our growth, its essential that we get back to what makes Harmony a unique and valuable chain: the tech. In order to do this, we should spearhead initiatives to onboard new talent (with the help of Tom) to onboard new developers & engineers, as it is commonly observed that we are short staffed in these areas. Refining our tech, growing our team & fixing fundamental issues such as our RPCs & multi-sig, while improving & refining in other areas (such as finality and sharding) will address common concerns of the community while making us stand out from other chains. However, refining our tech alone will not be enough to 10x our growth. We will need put out clear messaging & direct marketing that illustrates the value proposition of Harmony, and have our messaging be backed with tangible products and move away from conceptual, abstract & ambiguous messaging. This will need to be done with the assistance of a professional marketing agency. Improving our tech, and highlighting this through the distribution of clear, concise messaging by marketing professionals (suggested example from Devin) If we truly want to scale and compete with other giant chains, this is absolutely necessary. View one pager here. 🎥 ⚽️🌲
• ☁Giv: This touches on several areas that I’m in strong agreement with. 1) Focus on core strengths. It’s ok to dream big, experiment, and research but let’s not lose focus. Our tech is superior, let’s double down and become the best platform for developers. 2) Hiring. 10x growth will not happen until we hire more. The current team is stretched as it is and if we are to reach our goals, we will need a bigger boat. 3) Marketing. This is key. While we can do ad hoc marketing using our internal resources, this will not have the sort of impact that will give us 10x growth. Working with marketing professionals will allow a larger narrative to be created around our value proposition that we can then amplify across different campaigns. This is not a nice-to-have.
14. 🎽Li: We are now facing the realities of a) growing as a team and community, b) being distributed globally with different cultural and professional backgrounds, and c) working asynchronously through a combination of voice and text. This has led to more diverging voices, viewpoints, and misunderstandings. My goal of writing this document is to remind ourselves to all work in harmony by 10X-ing each of our own empathy and mental models. By 10X-ing our own empathy internally, I believe we can resolve all inter-human frictions. 🐐🎥🎤💃🏻 ⚽️
❤️‍🔥10X Empathy in Harmony
1. 🛹Peter: I don’t have a counterargument. I read your paper and I agree with almost all of it. It’s a good reminder that, even though we all have our own point of view and will disagree, we are still a team and a team takes care of each other.
2. 🧠Sukanta: Li, beautifully said, the fun is in the hard journey for the ones who change the world , empathy is something we often forget in our journey which we need to be conscious of
3. 🎤Matty: I love this. We must actively seek to practice empathy for ourselves and those around us. It must be a conscious effort. We all know the web3 world doesn’t sleep, and we each find ourselves overworked and overstressed quite often. As a result, we don’t practice empathy enough. Take the time. Take the time to practice empathy with yourself. Take the time to be there with your peers. Find 1 person and spend time with them each week. Express your empathy openly. Share vulnerabilities in a safe space. Focus on serving.
15. 🦋Amy – Social Tokens: Although it's been a year since its introduction, social tokens have yet to be adopted by the market for web2 influencers, artists and organizations. NFTs have clearly taken off as every company is now launching their own version of NFTs yet social tokens have not. Social tokens can replace the function of money, loyalty programs, equity stock ownership, membership access and truly enabling local economies for each company / influencers' communities. While Harmony may not be an industry leader on NFT, I think now is the time for Harmony to double down on social token adoption to leverage Harmony's strength on super low gas fees especially given where the market is with adopting social tokens. This includes investing and hiring team members to build a strong social token platform like Rally.io ($12b valuation with what appears to be an end-to-end solution with its own native chain), Forefront ($3b valuation with no native chain but a 6-week accelerator program), Unit ($300m valuation) etc., tokenomics and legal experts, BD / relationship managers, accelerator programs and what not. (more)
16. 🚜Demetre: DeFi has exploded in the past two years and has nearly $200b currently participating across all chains, with Harmony unfortunately only holding a 0.3% marketshare. DeFi isn’t just for yield farming investors, it has laid the groundwork for liquidity infrastructure enabling dApps and DAOs to grow and operate sustainably. Harmony can 10x their ability for incubating new projects if we can offer liquidity as a utility - much like prioritizing better plumbing for more efficient water flow throughout a city. See my Liquidity infrastructure proposal.
• 🧠Sukanta: Here are some observations that I would like to share as a friend, well-wisher and supporter a fanboy of Harmony. I am a hard working entrepreneur and I have known and learned so much really smart and technical minds like business process minds. So please read my observations as encouraging notes. (more)

Harmony Community Growth Proposals

We recently asked the Harmony community to send us their proposals for growth to be discussed at the team offsite next week. The below submissions are complete and unfiltered. There were only 32 submissions. Many of the topics below are being addressed already and we will share the rest with the team next week.

talk.harmony.one

Harmony Team Reports

2022 April - Harmony zkDAO Newsletter

This is the first of our monthly Harmony zkUpdate, a newsletter on the progress of both zkDAO and zku.ONE. tldr: our students at zku.ONE (zero-knowledge university) have launched 20 new projects on testnet, we have enrolled 1,500 new students for the May-June cohort, and accordingly we're on target to reach 100+ ZK developers in our DAO by July.

zku.one

Harmony Protocol Roadmap

The Harmony protocol roadmap lays out the milestones and major features that the Harmony engineering team will focus on in the foreseeable future to make Harmony blockchain a fully decentralized, secure and high-performance network that's capable of serving millions of users.

open.harmony.one

The BLUE: State of Harmony's Metaverse

Many projects in Harmony's ecosystem self-identify as metaverse-related. However, most lack several features generally considered as constitutive of a metaverse. Because many of these projects are nascent and lack traction in winning users, investment, brand interest, and developing features, there is often a sizable gap between their ambitious roadmaps and their current state of fundraising through selling NFTs.

open.harmony.one

Harmony Products Roadmap

The Harmony core team currently manages several products internally. While some products receive more resources and attention than others, we agree with the community that overall, we need to do much better in this area. We realize the need to invest in better UI/UX, thorough QA, product marketing, and general follow-through to ensure our launches bring maximum impact to the ecosystem.

open.harmony.one

Harmony Decentralization Roadmap

Decentralization is one of the key attributes of the blockchain. In terms of all the underlying technologies, both permissionless and openness can be achieved in web2 world to some extent. However, decentralization is the definitive differentiator of web3 from the web2 world.

open.harmony.one

Blue Metaverse: Apes Games, Social Tokens, Digital Festivals

Below is our talk at ONE Event during NFT.LA 2022, showcasing demos and roadmap of Harmony's Blue Metaverse.

harmony.one

Stanford University: Ask Me Anything

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE7PKRjrid4 We started the project 4 years ago with a mission of scaling trust and creating a radically fair economy. Harmony in 2026 will serve as a unifying Web3 platform. We see Metaverse as the market-product fit of marrying culture and technology for billions of users. Welcome to Harmony!

lijiang.notion.site

The Harmony ONEWeekly

ONEWeekly Welcome: Greetings to everyone in the Harmony community and hope you're all doing well! This week we continue to see the Harmony team focusing on engaging the community, sharing the technical advancements of the blockchain, and speaking to various challenges and how the team is working to overcome them.

medium.com

On-boarding 10,000 Developers for ZK Products

At Harmony.ONE, we aim to become a leading ecosystem where researchers and industry practitioners alike would feel at home. We have recently founded zkDAO , , and PrivacyDAO , with committed funds of over $10M to support basic research and publication of academic papers related to zero-knowledge proof technology (ZK).

zku.one

1DAO Alliance Framework & Guidelines

D ecentralization. A ccountability. ptimization. O Written by DAO operations team: Devin Marty, Sam Harrison, Michael Benson, Chak Raam, Rachel Brissenden, and Gabby Vorbeck. To be reviewed by Daniel, Giv, and Li. Internal feedback given by Peter and Stephen Harmony takes the community's sentiment seriously - it lives at the center of every action the DAO operations team makes and is the impetus for this document.

open.harmony.one

Harmony Ecosystem Reports

Legoland Metaverses 🔜+ ⚔️The custody battle (of wallets)

Gm 1Walletoors A shortage of stories in Web3? Don't know her. But we do know how to make the most current stories related to crypto, NFTs, and other degen activities digestible. Here are this week's Easter eggs🥚: 🎮 Building a metaverse playground:

1wallet.substack.com

Liquidity DAO Q1 2022 (Term 1) Progress Report

Report Summary Accomplishments: Built connector between Harmony network base connector and Hummingbot. Launched internal tracking tool and market making campaign on OKX. Better refined "Liquidity Score" through deeper understanding of liquidity metrics. Using internal tokens (8,008 per governor) to make a market on OKX when ONE first launched on the exchange.

talk.harmony.one

ETH Amsterdam Recap

Draft* Full Recap coming out later this week (including scholars feedback form) The purpose of ETH Amsterdam was to achieve ONE objective: To recruit strong women developers into the Blu3 ecosystem and potential projects to be built on Harmony. Coming out of RIO, Blu3 DAO founders, Amy and Novell were exhausted and burnt out.

blu3tofly.notion.site

⚽Blu3 DAO - ETH RIO Recap

After a 6-week planning marathon for ETHDenver, Blu3 DAO was asked to plan a scholarship program for ETHRio with less than 10 days away! Initially, we thought it'd be an impossible task. However, Blu3 DAO core members were quick to jump in and take the lead.

blu3tofly.notion.site

DAOra Labs: All Womxn-Team Wins ETH Amsterdam Hackathon

Have you ever heard of a hackathon project that went on to become an industry-changing company? In mid-April 2022, I was reflecting on my first hackathon entry and win in four years. In March 2022, I traveled to Rio, Brazil with the Blu3 DAO and co-launched the Black Leaders DAO to advance the next generation of black leaders in web3 during the Ethereum Rio Hackathon.

medium.com

Common Prefix - Harmony

Common Prefix is a team of scientists and engineers specializing in blockchains. We work from first principles, with an eye for rigor and formal cryptographic security proofs. We contribute as the advisory team for Harmony's underlying science.

www.commonprefix.com

Social Token 101 and Minting

BLU3 DAO APRIL 2022 AMA 𝓣𝓱𝓪𝓷𝓴 𝔂𝓸𝓾 𝓯𝓸𝓻 𝓪𝓽𝓽𝓮𝓷𝓭𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓸𝓾𝓻 𝓢𝓸𝓬𝓲𝓪𝓵 𝓣𝓸𝓴𝓮𝓷 101 & 𝓜𝓲𝓷𝓽𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝔀𝓸𝓻𝓴𝓼𝓱𝓸𝓹. We hope the workshop provided you with a fundamental understanding of what a social token is and clarity around the social token and minting process.

blu3tofly.notion.site

🇧🇷EthRio Impact Report (Matt McDonald)

🌲ETH.Portland Retrospective (by Devin P. Marty)

🌴NFT.LA Retrospective (by Devin P. Marty)

Recommended Readings on Culture

The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze

The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze [Shin, Laura] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze

www.amazon.com

Best of Maggie Siff (Wendy Rhoades) | Billions

Watch Maggie Siff's best moments as Wendy Rhoades in Billions.

www.youtube.com

From a psychological perspective, what keeps employees engaged at work and how can managers leverage employee engagement for positive reinforcement?

Trust consistently shows up as the pivotal feeling related to engagement. What creates trust? In a word, integrity. Managers can motivate their teams with honesty and reliability — both of which can be fostered through the skills associated with unpacking the employees’ fears and frustrations. Once you have trust, providing appreciation and opportunities for growth are key to inducing dedication to achievement. – Denise Shull (the performance coach depicted on the show “Billions”).

When the Bough Breaks - ER (Season 4, Episode 4) | Apple TV

A crack-addicted woman delivers a stillborn baby, and she didn't even know she was pregnant. Greene never tested her during a previous visit for stoma...

tv.apple.com

Watch The Last Dance | Netflix

This docuseries chronicles the rise of superstar Michael Jordan and the 1990s Chicago Bulls, with unaired footage from an unforgettable 1997-98 season. Watch trailers & learn more.

www.netflix.com

Ownership: Core Team

1. 💙 Stephen Tse: project vision, market strategy, team culture
2. 🛡 Rongjian Lan 💙: protocol, staking, crytography
3. 🏃 Leo Chen 💙: system, technical partners, NFT
4. 🎽 Li Jiang 💙: operations, roadmap, DAOs
5. 🛹 Peter Abilla 🎽: gaming, defi, partnership
6. 🌲 Sam Harrison 🎽: DAOs, events, community partners gamefi
7. ☁️ Giv Parvaneh 🎽: products, grants communication, operations
8. 🚗 Boris Polania 🏏: cross-chain, fixed-rate, events ZK scholars
9. 🐉 Jack Chan 🎽: validators, product partners, grants
10. 🎥 Adrian Robison ☁️: videos, brands, storytelling
11. 🔭 Daniel Pagan ☁️: community, technical content, communications
12. 🎥 Danny Carranza ☁️: video production, content distribution, events
13. 🎤 Matt McDonald ☁️: people operations, events, DAOs
14. 💃🏻 Esther Arey 🐉: team ops, event partners, community
15. 🦒 Brian Felsen ☁️: metaverse products, music partnership, marketing
16. 🐯 Tom Zhang 🎽: talent acquisition, technical partnership, investor relations

Ownership: Fellows/Contributors

1. 💊Sahil 🎽: product strategy, wallet adoption, user experience
2. ⏳ Zi ☁️: social wallet, creative campaigns, product marketing
3. 💻 Aaron 🏏: smart contract, wallet security, zkproof research
4. ⚛ Jackie 🦒: metaverse tools, webxr prototypes, emotive experience
5. 📖 Devin 🌲: DAO operations, business development, events
6. 🐇 Rachel 💃: DAO tooling, business development, events
7. 🐐 Mikey 🦒: DAO operations, grants, communications
8. 🚜 Demetre 🐉: DeFi products, asset growth, liquidity partnerships
9. 💿 Kelly ☁️: graphic design, content communications, media strategy
10. 🤖 Eric 🦒: NFT marketplace, metaverse identity, social experience
11. 🍄Darren ☁️: product design, presentations, user interface

Ownership: Unavailable for Offsite

1. 🏏 Ganesha Upadhyaya 🛡: bridges, SDK, research
2. 🌻 Yuriy Menkov 🏏: BTC bridge, staking, Javascript
3. 🎸 Jenya Piskunov 🏏: wallets, explorer, indexer
4. ⚔️ Nita "Soph" Neou 🏃: nodes, services, network releases

5. ⚽️ Abhishek Purushotham 🔭: content marketing, social media, newsletters
6. ⛵ Hakwan Lau 🏏: ZKProofs, fixed-rate income, university engagement
7. 🛰️ Max Mustermann 🛡: staking, consensus, SDK
8. ⛓️ Konstanin Potapov 🛡: p2p security, node system, RPC
9. ♒ Nick 🔭: Eastern Europe, product partnerships, regional DAO
10. ✅ Rob 🎤: human resources, employment payroll, Basic DAO
11. 🎯 Hochung 🎽: wallet operations, project management, user onboarding
12. 💣 Paola ⏳: social wallet, product marketing, music industry
13. 🌟 Novell 🎤: Blu3 DAO, womxn hackathons, social tokens

Harmony Talks & Events

‎Harmonize on Apple Podcasts

Harmonize is the Harmony Protocol community podcast designed to help educate individuals about all aspects of cryptocurrency, NFTs and blockchain. You can count on each episode to be informative, exciting, and packed with interviews with leaders in the web3 blockchain space to help you understand wh...

podcasts.apple.com

Market Analysis

The Future of L1s Is NEAR: An Analysis of an Emerging Protocol

Layer-1 blockchains have become a crowded and competitive arena. When Bitcoin was first introduced in 2008, it had the space all to itself for years before any real challengers emerged. Today there are over 100 different Layer-1 blockchains competing for the nearly $2 trillion dollars allocated across the broader crypto ecosystem.

messari.io

Guilds are a somewhat unique feature of NEAR though they operate in a similar fashion to a DAO in that they are organized, decentralized parties rallying around a common cause. Guilds are different in that they really focus on uniting under a common skillset or passion and then leverage that to contribute to organizations or to complete some goal. A guild can contribute to multiple DAOs. They operate a bit like different departments of a company (i.e., accounting, marketing, HR). *On Near’s homepage: NFTs, DAOs and Open Finance will change the world for artists and their communities. The best way to stake your claim in the NEARverse is by creating an account (wallet). Then, choose the first step in your journey. [Also: Guilds’ Tiering System: An evolutionary Path for Community Development, Life Changing DAOs, 45 DAOs and 36 Guilds.]

The Health of DAO Treasuries

There is about $11 billion locked up in DAO treasuries - 60% of that belongs to the top 15 largest treasuries. Omitting the native asset from the treasury reveals how DAOs are diversifying their holdings and reducing risk; however, most DAOs continue to hold a majority of their own tokens.

messari.io

4834 DAOs, $10.3B Treasury, 659K voters – DeepDAO

63.9K total safes (1.34K weekly, 800 daily active safes), max $107B (on 2022/02/08) in custody, 553K total transactions (12.1K weekly) – Gnosis Safe

Polygon: A Multi-Sided Approach to ZK Scaling

Most people know Polygon for its sidechain, which they've likely transacted on for lower fees. But Polygon has a whole suite of ZK based products, many of which will be released this year. Read on to learn more about the company and see what's in the works.

messari.io

... an emerging consensus we’re seeing amongst investors is the need for a cross-chain ecosystem... building a cross-chain world is the way to achieve the type of scale needed to onboard the first billion users. Polygon announced it acquired Hermez for $250 million... Polygon announced an acquihire of the Mir Protocol team [at around $400 million]. Polygon Zero is able to do this through Plonky2, a recursive ZK Proof generator capable of generating a SNARK proof every 0.17 seconds, making Plonky2 the world’s fastest recursive ZK prover. [Polygon] Miden VM, a ZK-STARK compatible with EVM [with full Turing completeness]... took shape with Distaff VM (early generation STARK-based VM) and Winterfell (upgraded iteration of genSTARK) and was launched in November 2021. [Polygon] Avail network will focus on ensuring full transaction data is posted rather than verifying state changes. Unlike full nodes, light nodes do not download the entire block data but instead prioritize sampling a random group of data from each block to evaluate for completeness... can be completed at a constant resource cost, regardless of data scale.

State of Avalanche Q1 2022

Watch the full replay of the analyst call featuring John Nahas, Luigi DeMeo, Ed Chang, and Nick Mussallem from Ava Labs or read the transcript. Q1 2022 consisted of continued growth and the stabilization of network usage, financial performance, and network infrastructure.

messari.io

Pangolin: Avalanche-based DEX with a Cross-Chain Vision

Pangolin Exchange is a top two AMM-powered DEXs on Avalanche by trading volume Pangolin is community-driven, as is reflected in the 100% token distribution to its community. The protocol is currently building out a cross-chain ecosystem, starting with NEAR Protocol. The team plans to operate on multiple chains and support various multichain wallets.

messari.io

Avalanche Foundation and Web3 social media platform Op3n announced a $100 million creator fund called Culture Catalyst. On aggregate, Avalanche's average daily transactions rose from 473,000 last quarter to 865,000 in Q1, which is ~ 74% of Ethereum’s roughly 1.17 million. Daily transactions continued their upward trend with additional DeFi application launches and the rollout of GameFi subnets such as DeFi Kingdoms Crystalvale and Crabada. Crabada would become the top transaction driver on Avalanche during Q1. Beyond DeFi and GameFi, total 24 hour NFT volume surpassed $1 million for the first time, while the NFT market cap broke $110 million. Platypus Finance is a stableswap protocol that was the fastest growing DeFi application over the quarter, having grown from just $10 million to over $750 million in TVL, representing a ~7,500% increase. Ava Labs announced details about Core, a free, non-custodial wallet explicitly created for applications on Avalanche with native support for subnets... Ava Labs also announced that the Avalanche Bridge will enable support for Bitcoin, allowing BTC holders to transfer their BTC onto Avalanche securely. Anchor Protocol, the largest DeFi protocol on Terra, proposed and passed a UST borrowing strategy whereby sAVAX entered the platform as its newest collateral asset. Celsius Network announced support for Avalanche, allowing users to borrow against AVAX from a centralized provider. Further, 1inch, a widely used DeFi aggregator, was deployed on Avalanche.

State of Osmosis Q1 2022

(NOTE: This report was commissioned by Osmosis and written prior to the recent market crash of the Terra Protocol and its LUNA token and the depegging of the UST stablecoin. All data utilized refers to the Q1 period ending March 31st. For Messari reactions to recent events, please refer to this piece here.)

messari.io

Columbus-5: An Overview of Terra's Latest Upgrade

Columbus-5 has been the most impactful Terra upgrade to date and has resulted in the rapid acceleration of UST growth as well as the significant improvement of value accrual to LUNA holders. Learn more about the details of Columbus-5 and its results in this report.

messari.io

Wormhole suffered the largest recorded DeFi exploit in which over $326 million of ETH was stolen from the bridge. Wormhole operates as a decentralized oracle network that relays messages between chains, relying on the consensus of the connected chains to accept state changes between them... $755 million UST... [and] over $2 billion locked. DAI was the largest decentralized stablecoin by market capitalization... [but] UST’s supply is now 17% larger than DAI as it continues to grow at a rate faster than its more centralized peers. $1.4 million in incentives to leading protocols on Avalanche, Fantom, and Moonbeam. Terra has aligned their interests with decentralized stablecoins MIM and FRAX to bolster decentralized stablecoins' share of the stablecoin market. Because the majority of stablecoin liquidity on Ethereum resides on Curve, LUNA holders recently voted to deploy a large amount of capital to incentivize deep UST liquidity on Curve. These incentives entail the deployment of $12 million in LUNA for Convex incentives, $250 million in UST to farm CVX/CRV via Curve’s USTw-3CRV pool, and $2 million in LUNA for Tokemak incentives. Columbus-5 activated [Inter-Blockchain Communication] IBC functionality on Terra, enabling the seamless transfer of assets and data between Terra and other IBC-enabled chains such as the Cosmos Hub, Secret Network, Akash, Thorchain, and many more. Prior to Terra’s IBC integration, the IBC lacked a highly liquid stablecoin. Enabling IBC has enabled UST liquidity to flood into other IBC-enabled chains, and as hypothesized, UST has since become the dominant stablecoin pair on Cosmos’ most liquid DEX, Osmosis. As the Cosmos ecosystem continues to grow, UST’s growth stands to benefit immensely.

State of Solana Q1 2022

Solana experienced continued growth in network usage, developer activity, network infrastructure, and overall ecosystem during the quarter. Solana also experienced network performance challenges and declines in financial performance. After an exploit of the Wormhole bridge in February, there were further instances of degraded network performance throughout the quarter.

messari.io

For perspective, Solana had more unique fee payers during January than in all of Q3 2021, when the network also experienced triple-digit percentage growth in market cap and revenue. The network averaged around 160,000 unique fee payers during Q4 and stabilized at about 205,000 during Q1.

Layer-1 of The Rising Sun: Solana NFTs

While Solana's initial dreams have been to compete with Ethereum within the DeFi realm, it has already started to branch its scalable tentacles into other Ethereum dominated sectors, specifically NFTs. As the Solana ecosystem continues to expand, NFTs on Solana have similarly witnessed formidable growth as a category.

messari.io

Total volume for Sol September pinnacled at nearly $247 million predominantly on the back of Solana Monkey Business(SMB), Degen Ape Academy, Aurory, and Galactic Gecko Space Garage.

State of Polkadot Q1 2022

State of Polkadot Q1 2022 Key Insights After five years of research and development, Polkadot parachains are now live. At the close of Q1 2022, 13 parachains won parachain slots bonding 127.8 million DOT (11% of the total supply; worth $2.9 billion).

messari.io

Polkadot Ecosystem Overview

"The parachain model was created with the belief that the future of Web3 will involve many different types of blockchains working together. Just as the current version of the internet caters to different needs, blockchains need to be able to provide a variety of services. Parachains solve this."

messari.io

InterBTC is a fully-collateralized and interoperable BTC pegged derivative. To mint interBTC, users lock their BTC in a vault. The vault can be an existing one or one the BTC owner ops to create. All vaults are over-collateralized with a specific asset. The over-collateralized asset acts as insurance should malicious activity occur within the vault. If malicious activity does occur, the BTC depositors are reimbursed in slashed collateral at a premium rate. The first vaults will be collateralized with DOT. InterBTC is a decentralized and trustless BTC pegged derivative. How? Anyone can become a vault in InterBTC (decentralized), vaults cannot prevent users from minting InterBTC (censorship resistant), vaults lock collateral in different assets (capital efficient), and if BTC is lost or stolen users are reimbursed in collateral at a beneficial rate (trustless). The Interlay Token (INTR) is a utility and governance token used for participating in governance, transaction fees, and incentivizing Interlay collator nodes. The team plans to tightly integrate INTR into interBTC to enable premium features, better rates, and higher insurance coverage. Additionally, Interlay plans to add new vault collaterals and connect with other blockchains including Ethereum, Cosmos, and Solana. Interlay is aiming to become a decentralized Bitcoin bank enabling vaults to re-use custodied BTC and deposited collateral for structured financial products.

Harmony’s Theses

ONE on Messari's 2022 Theses

Messari's Crypto Theses report is a must read for everyone. The extracted passages below show how Harmony's strategies align with the market potential and the industry leaders - in particular, Web3 Economy (NFT, DAO, Wallets) and Infrastructures (Bridges, ZKProofs, Privacy).

harmony.one

If 2020 was all about DeFi, and 2021 was all about NFTs, 2022 will be the year of the DAO. Invert the talent sourcing model... earn bounties and display your proof of work to earn reputation points with the community’s decentralized HR, community vouches. You can apply for grants or submit proposals for full-time employment directly to the DAO membership. Bullish on governance infrastructure, improvements in protocol treasury deployment, and ongoing DAO distribution models that pay users, individual contributors, other businesses and DAOs alike. It’s foundational tooling that will lead to DAOs replacing most companies.

Messari's Report on ONE

as an EVM-compatible, sharded Proof of Stake smart contract blockchain. Harmony's Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerant (FBFT) consensus protocol, combined with random state sharding and Boneh-Lynn-Shacham (BLS) constant-sized signatures allows Harmony to achieve finality in one block or roughly two seconds - compared to optimisitic finality in Solana or Avalanche, or 6 seconds for Cosmos, or 60 seconds for Polkadot.

harmony.one

Bridging BTC to Harmony's Ethereum Virtual Machine

Harmony is also home to a burgeoning DeFi ecosystem, with TVL increasing more than four-fold in the past two months to reach over $1 billion . The majority of the TVL (60%) comes from game/DEX/NFT marketplace . The next biggest application by TVL is DeFi Kingdoms , commanding nearly $500 million.

harmony.one

Harmony in 2026: Scaling Web3 via ZKP & DAO

Below is Harmony's vision for Web3. We started the project 4 years ago with a mission of scaling trust and creating a radically fair economy. Looking forward to the next 4 years, Harmony is scaling Web3 infrastructure of DeFi and NFT.

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📅 2022/12/09, San Francisco, “100 DAOs & Cross-Chain Web3” Today I am proud to report that our 23 DAOs are now funded with Gnosis Safe multi-signatures and Snapshot votings. Our Research DAO already has multiple top professors as governors and giving travel grants to students; our Wallet DAO spawned three mobile clients and pushed through many security audits. What are the Web3 theses for 2022? As Messari claims: NFT infrastructure, DAO tooling, and inter-protocol bridges. How? Harmony…

📅 2021/10/18, Lisbon, “100 DAOs and Top-Level Domain .country” Harmony has already started tens of DAOs. Decentralized autonomous organizations, or what I call on-chain clubs with assets and actions, are the future of work. People stake with tokens to join a club, poll together assets and drive actions together – all on blockchains with open development and immutable contracts. Builders in DAOs as the future of work prefer fluid commitment, exploring multiple opportunities and producing work upon the passion of the moment.

📅 2021/08/08, “Harmony’s $1M Hackathon & DAO on Building Bridges” 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.

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.