Poll Results on Strategies: Peers

The project that has the closest offering from ours is Near. Polygon is tagging along with the ethereum ecosystem, which we are not part of, so it’s not a fair competiiton. Ava and solana are not using sharding, so less similar compared to Near. Terra is a application-centered blockchain, and that’s not what we are doing. Polkadot is a very different ecosystem and seems it’s not what our developers are considering as a alternative.

🛡Rongjian

Near is our closest competitors in terms of technology. However, the subnet architecture of Avax and their EVM compatibility can put real threat to us.

🏃Leo

🎽Li

Technology wise, Near is the closest. Polygon and Avalanche in terms of developers. Solana will be difficult as both technology and ecosystem are different from us. I don't think Terra is a competition, as they only target a niche market. Polkadot is not a competition in the near term. So, my pick are the Polygon and Avalanche.

🏏Ganesha

🛹Peter

As a platform - feature v feature - Near is the clearest competitor. Solana has a huge war chest and they have the highest transactions. Polygon is where people who are tired of Eth problems go. We NEED to meet Near in the technology battlefield. We can up our marketing game to complete w/ Solana and we have to win the hearts and minds of the builders on Polygon.

🌲Sam

Near is the closest competitor in terms of tech. Polygon is now the obvious choice for most on how to scale Ethereum. The rest are using the same narrative with fast finality and lower fees but no substantial tech to back it up.

☁️Giv

We shouldn’t compete but foster collaboration, build bridges, understand their tech and improve ourselves where it make sense

⚔Soph

With 90% of the potential market still untouched, I think we can only compete with ourselves. I do not think it is even clear what it means competition in crypto. Developers? Users? Projects? employees? The first too are far from being a zero-sum game, since developers and users can (and do) use multiple platforms. Projects, the way we can bring new projects and keep existing ones, is not by competing with NEAR or Solana, but by making sure we have a robust platform, and that’s completely independent of what other protocols do or don’t do

🚗Boris

I’m not a fan of competing, so I’ll abstain against competing with any chain. I’d play a strong defense and our offense will win without actually calling out others. #wagmi

🐉Jack

I think the big three in the coming quarters will be Near, Polygon, and Harmony... I also think Solana will continue to have problems scaling.

🎥Adrian

Avax subnets are looking to be competitive to our sharded architecture. NEAR is also our closest competitor as Leo mentioned

🔭Daniel

From an events perspective, Near has had successes with NearCon and Avalanche has had popular summits, most recently earlier this year in Barcelona. Since these 2 seem to be our closest competitors (along with Polygon) based on reading the teams responses, I think our ONE conference at the end of the year will be great for our brand.

🎬Danny

at this stage of crypto adoption, don’t we only have ourselves to compete against?

⛵Hakwan

Our primary competition is with ourselves, as the majority of the population is still untapped

🎤Matt

💃🏻Essa

Compete w NEAR for easy onboarding, developer-friendliness (WebAssembly + grants/hackathons) and win by getting on more exchanges and having more key differentiators (& carve out a niche for segment/demographic/purpose). Try to chip at MATIC Studios, dapps/mindshare, venture fund partnerships despite smaller budget. Best SOL in tech, Magic Eden NFT marketplace, and chip at partnerships (FTX, Circle, Moonpay USDC support, Rally, and esp. Krafton). Watch out for AVAX for GameFi and DOT for crypto fund holdings.

🦒Brian

I think NEAR and Avalanche are our top 2 competitors.

🐯Tom

⚽Abhishek

NEAR is the closest to us - sharding Polygon is not generally trustworthy, at least that’s the sentiment I have heard Avalanche’s subnets are killing it Terra’s stablecoin approach has led to a strong uptick Solana’s centralized (non-custodial) exchanges are something I personally love, and if we can capture some of that market, why not? Polkadot is too confusing an ecosystem IMO

🛰️Max

Actually all of them look promising, but i like the model of stablecoins in terra, and polkadot seems very unusual and interesting.

⛓️Konstantin

🪙Gheis

💊Sahil

S.W.O.T; instead of generic competitive overview

⏳Zi

💻Aaron

Games like NFTWorlds are using Polygon. OpenSea supports Polygon. Polygon suffers a confusing name change (i.e., MATIC/Polygon). Harmony has the potential to become a brand for games and NFTs (both are welcoming the next 10M users). Besides, non-EVM chain usages will be low. All-trader chains are interesting and competitive if next 10M users are traders.

⚛Jackie

Let’s stay ahead of NEAR in terms of sharding but not forget to focus on EVM wins that will allow us to scale to new segments

📖Devin

From what I’ve gathered from our community & team members, I will agree with Tom that NEAR and Avalanche are our top 2 competitors. It is important to stay constantly improving & ahead of other chains, especially when it comes to NEAR regarding cross-shard communication.

🐇Rachel

I believe NEAR is our biggest competitor considering Cross-Shard technology and we should definitely get in front and stay in front.

🐐Mikey

NEAR and Solana are compelling but Polygon users will be the easiest to acquire in my opinion. When Harmony develops more DeFi functionality, we can attract all of their budget users with our lower fees. Harmony has a big edge over NEAR and Solana with transparency. Plus Solana and NEAR aren’t EVM compatible - Ethereum is where all the builders are. Is NEAR just going to run everything EVM through the Aurora side-chain and call it a day? If that’s the case - lets keep an eye on what pops up on Aurora.

🚜Demetre

Near communicates their work well. If they’re seen as our closest competitor, we need to see them as a benchmark for how we’re communicating. We need to study what works and what doesn’t work in the way they position themselves, and articulate Harmony’s unique value proposition more clearly.

💿Kelly

NEAR is similar to Harmony from a user perspective - with their sharding and focus on DAO. Their website is incredibly easy to understand and simple. They just went through a re-branding, which has served them well. Also, they have their Astro DAO (internally developed first and passed on to community/ other DAO) - Astro DAO has the ability to quickly launch a DAO from a few clicks, with the ability to vote, etc. They also have Mintbase for NFTs. These type of usability and tools are necessary to gain user acceptance quick (for something as new as DAOs). On the other hand, they are not EVM compatible and requires RUST to build which is a huge barrier to entry for Devs. If Harmony decides to collaborate with these other chains - Blu3 can also help bridge partnerships for Harmony. Because of what we are doing, Blu3 is getting visibility and many other chains and VCs have come forward expressing interest in potential partnerships.

🌟Novell

🦋Amy

Very subjectively, most of the developers / projects I talk to use Solana and Polygon. Polygon had a boost in visibility in being integrated into OpenSea early, but NEAR / Avalanche seem to be much more advanced tech-wise.

🤖Eric

near - tech similarity - we should be advanced than them; polygon - i don’t really like that tons of web3 projects choose polygon for their launches - we’re the chain, that has already provided a solution for eth issues, we must be the top evm compatible chain where devs/projects come to run dapps

♒Nick

Harmony should consider a ZK Rollup solution, Etherscan/Blockscout integration, enterprise and retail adoption, and backing from institutional investors. Blockchain is not a zero-sum game where we “win” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vX2iVIJMFQ) we should identify what our core strengths are and continuously build on the strengths with a strong belief in our vision and mission. We can consider what others are doing that are successful, but if Harmony is to succeed in the crowded market place we should consider pursuing our core values and deliver on our vision and mission. 1 second finality, a bridge to everything, and a billion users. Don’t be discouraged by the current sentiment and don’t lose focus. I saw a post from Stephen around mathematically provable programming somewhere; maybe its something we can incorporate into Harmony

🧑‍🍳 Victa

🐙Sergey

📱Tejassvi

Avalnche and Terra have great tech we could aim to compete with, a good set of stablecoins are vital for a healthy ecosystem. And a good DeFI and NFT tech are perfect for user conversion, and gives an excellent level of utility.

🏔Diego

Currently, I perfer to gourp Harmony, Polygon and Avalanche together, beacuse we both EVM compatible and have simliar dApps(or dApp developers). In the future, we may compete with Near and Solana. For complex DApps like ZKP, WASM has higher performance than EVM.

🏓Xiaopeng

🍩Bruce

🥤Jeremy

🚛Mohamed

🛫Tahir

🎯Hochung

I prefer to abstain as I only know the basics on these chains

💣Paola

To me, Avax and Near are our strong competitors. Tech aside, they do a great job marketing their features and brand. I would love to see us go toe-to-toe against them.

🍄Darren