By PJ Conley

Harmony’s September is in the books! We made a large presence in the metaverse this month. As our $1M Hackathon comes to a close, we are just getting started with making our mark. Read below to find out what amazing things have occurred this month.

But before we dive in, make sure to follow @harmonyprotocol on Twitter to stay updated on everything Harmony related.

$300M Ecosystem Fund: Harmony has launched a $300M fund to enhance the growth of our ecosystem. If you have a ready-to-launch project please see the guidelines here for more information. You can apply for a grant here and a member of the Harmony team will respond to you directly on that forum.

Harmony threw a kickoff event to get the word out about this $300M fund. This event helped developers and creatives learn how to build on Harmony.

$1 Million Hackathon: Harmony has officially closed the hackathon. This Hackathon was an opportunity for web3 and web2 developers to get together and build exciting apps, protocols, and tools. We want to thank all of those who participated in this hackathon and our amazing prize partners.

Congratulations to each of the winners of our $1 Million Hackathon! The winners of each track were announced and can be found in this Tweet thread:

Curve Launched on Harmony Mainnet: Harmony’s proposal for Curve to launch on Harmony was passed in September and on October 12th Curve officially launched on our mainnet. Harmony is providing $2 million in ONE tokens to bootstrap the initial usage.

Community Proposal for Aave Launch: The vote has been passed to deploy Aave v2 on the Harmony blockchain to expand lending to its community of users and provide incentives to bootstrap the launch of Aave to a new ecosystem. Harmony will start with $5 million in incentives to bootstrap initial usage of Aave on Harmony.

Anyswap Brings the Bitcoin Bridge to Harmony: Anyswap and Harmony came together to support bridging native BTC directly to Harmony. Now Bitcoin holders have a direct way to bridge and access decentralized finance products on Harmony and earn yield on their Bitcoin while holding on to their full balance. Then we announced that the community can bridge assets between Polygon and Harmony with Anyswap, read the article here.

DappRadar Now Tracking Dapps on Harmony Blockchain: The number one dapp marketplace, DappRadar, has integrated Harmony Protocol in its services. At launch, DappRadar begins tracking 15 dapps in the Harmony ecosystem, giving consumers insight into individual dapps. Users of the dapp discovery platform can use the Harmony Rankings to easily see which dapps have seen the most activity in the past 24 hours, 7 days or 30 days.

FTX has listed Harmony (ONE) perpetual futures: With over 1 million users and averaging over $10B of daily trading volume, FTX has grown into one of the world’s leading crypto exchanges. The platform serves the entire chain of cryptocurrency trading participants from retail and crypto-native investors, to sophisticated day traders, family offices, and experienced institutional traders.

Harmony and Stake DAO Announce Strategic DeFi Partnership: Stake DAO will soon be launching it’s ONE validator and offer staking-as-a-service to the ONE community. We will now be working together to create innovative strategies and bring the best of DeFi to the Harmony ecosystem.

Harmony at September’s Events: Harmony ventured across the country to join fellow crypto enthusiasts in Denver, New York, and Wyoming. MCON, Mainnet, and WyoHackathon were events where Harmony was able to create new connections with those in the crypto, DeFi, and DAO spaces. View all the video content from these events here and keep reading below to find exclusive interviews with Stephen Tse and other great minds at MCON 👇

We also sponsored an event held in Los Angeles hosted by Praise Token on the 8th of October. This was used to help foster new relationships with those in the NFT space and grow our Harmony LA telegram group.

Harmony’s founder, Stephen Tse, sits down with attendees of MCON to engage in meaningful conversations about their projects. Watch them here.

ETH Lisbon: Harmony is heading all the way to Lisbon, Portugal to engage the community at ETH Lisbon. ETH Lisbon’s mission is to foster the ecosystem by bringing together startups, investors and stakeholders to be the catalyser for innovation. This will take place from October 22nd to the 24th.

DAO Global Hackathon: 2021 has been called the ‘Year of the DAO’ and Harmony is proud to see out the year by Co-Sponsoring the DAO Global Hackathon. This will be taking place October 25th through December 13th. Register here.

NFT NYC: We are headed to New York City at the beginning of November from the leading annual non-fungible token event. This conference connects leaders, influencers, developers, and fans of NFTs in NYC. It focuses on the companies and individuals using NFTs to advance the adoption of blockchain beyond its current use cases to a mainstream audience.

Harmony is going to be hosting events in many major cities around you! To get connected and stay on top of these events please join the following links for the city nearest you (more will soon be added): San Francisco – Miami – Salt Lake – Los Angeles – New York – Denver.

We are still looking to expand to every major city and everywhere that has a presence in the crypto space. Let’s build this community to reach 10 billion people 🌍 If you want to host a Harmony event, please review the guidelines on harmony.one/300 for events and you can send in your proposal at https://talk.harmony.one/c/funding-proposals/42.

August has been yet another fantastic month for Harmony! From the $1M Hackathon to a range of developments, this newsletter is going to cover everything that has happened so far in August.

But before we dive in, make sure to follow @harmonyprotocol on Twitter to stay updated with the growing Harmony ecosystem.

$1 Million Hackathon and DAO: Harmony has officially started its hackathon with over $1M in prizes ending on September 30th. The Harmony team also plans to add over 1000 bounties on Gitcoin and scale to 100 DAOs, each with an initial fund of $1M to scale development. You can read more about the Hackathon and Harmony’s growth strategy from Stephen Tse’s Tweet thread here.

ONE Single-Sided Staking on Bancor: Bancor has officially whitelisted ONE (ERC-20) with a co-investment of 150,000 BNT, allowing for the token to be traded with liquidity provided. To mitigate impermanent loss, users will start receiving 1% daily (starting at a rate of 30%) thirty days after their deposit, up until 100% protection is reached. Find out more in detail here.

Community Proposal for Curve Launch: The Harmony Team has reached out to the decentralized governance community of Curve, offering $2 million in ONE tokens to bootstrap initial usage. A community team has already deployed Curve successfully on Harmony’s testnet.

Scalable DeFi Development with Chainlink: Price feeds for several trading pairs on the Harmony testnet have been integrated. These oracles will help power dApps on the Harmony blockchain and secure these assets.

August Ecosystem Map and Newsletter Contest: We wanted the community to get more involved this month with our monthly graphics and newsletters. The results were amazing! Thank you to everyONE who participated, it was a difficult contest to judge. Congratulations to these August contest winners:

Harmony’s August Ecosystem Map by bigwhle

Horizon Reaches Over $100M in TVL: The Horizon Bridge gives users the means to bridge their assets from Harmony to Ethereum and/or Binance Smart Chain. An impressive milestone of over $100M in Total Value Locked on the chain has been attained!

Freyala World App: Freyala ($XYA), an HRC-20 token focusing on gamified NFTs and dApps, has launched their world app. Providing a fantasy-style user interface and map, users can immerse themselves in lore while accessing all the projects in the Freyala ecosystem. Learn more on theirwebsite.

DeFi Kingdoms Launch: DeFi Kingdoms is a gamified platform with a DEX, liquidity pools and a variety of different NFTs. Users can purchase the native token JEWEL for utility with daily quests, games and other features coming in the future.

Harmonauts Force ONE NFTs Supply Reach 2/3 Minted: Harmonauts are NFTS with a mint cost of 450 ONE that have unique attributes, including helmets, suits, accessories and more. Holders can earn passively from 10% minting reflections and 2% of perpetual trading fees.

TokenJenny Pool Parties: Putting a creative twist on traditional DeFi pools, pool parties on TokenJenny offer minimum APR and staking information, with a calculator that works out variables such as tax rate and minimum stake amounts.

Openswap V2 UI: Openswap continues to impress with its new v2 UI release, making using a DEX on Harmony an extremely easy-to-use and intuitive process.

Viperswap Community Pools: Viperswap will support pools for projects with a 30, 60 or 90 day duration. There is a calculated block reward emission rate for each pool and 100% of the listing fees (VIPER) are burned. Viperswap also continues expanding with news of its next community initiative ViperPad, which will act as a launchpad for new tokens.

FATExDAO: FATExDEX mainnet launches on Harmony as a traditionalliquidity pool emitter of the FATE governance token. “DLT-tokenization correctly deployed will revamp all financial systems and provide exponential, sustainable wealth.” Check out their green paper.

Crypto Bank Africa: Cross-chain integration with Crypto Bank Africa, allowing for the purchasing of crypto with low gas fees and receiving local fiat with ease.

DefiLlama: Harmony’s TVL of over $111M is now shown on DefiLlama’s ranking and metric dashboard.

Rubic: Trading competition of up to $10,000 in rewards for instant swapping on the Harmony network.

Tin Network: Full support for integrating Harmony and its projects on the DeFi dashboard.

Pledge Finance: Run Pledge Finance natively for crypto-asset lending on the Harmony blockchain with fast confirmation times and low-cost transactions.

Guardarian: Purchase ONE using 50+fiat pairs (EUR, RUB and more) with no account creation needed.

NowPayments: Harmony Community Store now utilizes the NowPayments plugin to accept ONE as a payment method. Anyone can use NowPayments for purchases and donations.