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.
This document is intended to thoroughly evaluate the current status of each product and outline a roadmap and strategy for each with the longer-term goal of decentralization.
*Written by Giv Parvaneh. (To be) Approved by Rongjian Lan, Leo Chen and Jack Chan.
Products
Harmony Block Explorer
Harmony Explorer is a critical tool that provides real-time insights into the Harmony blockchain. Explorer v2 was launched in Q3, 2021 with several major updates and improvements including contract verification, staking and NFT transactions, and much more.
Since its launch, the team has continued to work through a backlog of issues and feature requests. In Q1, 2022 we assigned 2 developers to further accelerate these improvements.
We have listened to the broader developer community and we recognize that there are still some major features that Explorer is lacking - including an Etherscan-like API.
Roadmap
As with all products created by Harmony, the longer-term goal is, of course, decentralization. We realize that for Harmony to become 100% community-owned, we must think about ways to hand off our open source products to our partners and the community.
However, this will take time and we have to do better to ensure our existing products receive the resources and the attention they deserve. If we are to provide a world-class platform for web3 developers to build on, we must ensure our tooling matches this expectation.
With a dedicated development team, our goal is to rapidly accelerate improvements and releases. This includes kicking off the development of a comprehensive Explorer API and several UI/UX features and improvements.
Path to Decentralization
While the team works on improving the current Explorer we are also working with partners to bring additional block explorers to Harmony. Projects such as Blockscout, Getblock, and EthVM are all coming to Harmony in the coming months - giving the community several alternatives to choose from. We are still in conversations with the Etherscan team to see if we can collaborate in the future.
We are also thinking through ways to hand off the current Harmony Explorer itself to the community. We are gauging interest from the community for an Explorer DAO and collaborating with external development teams to initiate the DAO and take over the development of the Explorer.
Finally, we can now consider the Harmony Incubator program as a way to spin off the Explorer into an independent startup.
Horizon Bridge
Horizon Bridge was launched November, 2020, a bridge for transferring any ERC20 assets between Ethereum and Harmony. With over $500M in TVL, Horizon bridge has become a pillar in Harmony’s focus on interoperability.
Roadmap
Since its launch, the team has continued to further refine and optimize the bridge. As we work towards a new trustless Ethereum bridge, the team will focus on giving the Horizon bridge a complete UI/UX overhaul which has been a constant area of criticism from the community.
Path to Decentralization
A Bridge DAO could be one option to fully decentralize the product. Of course, security will always be a concern but with the move to building more trustless bridges, this concern could be minimized. In reality, decentralization of the Bridge is most likely a year or so away from being realized.
Additionally, we can now consider the Harmony Incubator program as a way to spin off the product into an independent startup.
Staking Dashboard
Launched in May 2020, as of now, more than 4.4 billion ONE tokens from 26,000+ stakers are delegated to a total of 160 unique validator pools in the Harmony network. The staking dashboard allows token holders to easily stake their assets and collect rewards through an intuitive web interface. In Feb 2022, Harmony launched support for staking at the smart contract level, opening the ability to use MetaMask to stake ONE while offering a number of other benefits to developers and delegates.
Roadmap
The engineering team continues to work through various issues and improvements. As of now, there’s no clear roadmap for this product but being one of the most popular products on Harmony, it makes sense to invest energy into creating one. Starting with collecting feedback from the community on areas of improvement and feature requests - and beginning to think about a UI/UX refresh.
Path to Decentralization
One possible path to decentralization is to potentially create a Staking or Staking Dashboard DAO. The DAO would be responsible for ensuring ongoing development, bug fixes, hosting, and owning the entire roadmap based on community feedback and governance. The DAO could also consider strategies to generate revenue and become self-sufficient by offering premium services such as transaction exports for taxes and other useful features.
Bitcoin Bridge
Harmony’s trustless Bitcoin Bridge was launched in Feb 2022. BTC Bridge is completely permissionless and decentralized, allowing holders of Bitcoin to bridge their BTC to Harmony and participate in high-yielding DeFi products, putting their BTC to productive use.
Roadmap
The current roadmap consists of Bitcoin bridge vault incentives, Bitcoin bridge staking, and Vault liquidation for under collateralization. There are also plan to refresh the UI/UX to match the new Horizon Bridge interface.
Path to Decentralization
We can potentially consider the Harmony Incubator program as a way to spin off all trustless bridges into independent startups.
Gnosis Multisig
Harmony Multisig was released in April, 2021. Forked from Gnosis, the product has become an integral part of the ecosystem. The product has gone through a few iterations to work on Harmony with ONE support and integration with the 1wallet web app. The public repos for the project on Github are contracts, transaction service, and front-end.
One year later and the fork has fallen behind the latest Gnosis safe version. We are missing several key features and maintenance of the backend infrastructure has been challenging.
Roadmap
The low-hanging fruit right now is to refresh the Harmony fork to be in sync with the latest Gnosis repo and work through all outstanding issues. Additionally, we need to keep investigating ways to further stabilize and optimize the backend. With 2 developers focused on Harmony’s multisig product, we should be able to bring more confidence, reliability, and usage to the community.
Path to Decentralization
The ideal path is decentralization here is naturally to work directly with the Gnosis team to add official support for Harmony and sunset the Harmony fork. Unfortunately the Gnosis team has not been able to prioritize this integration but we will continue to work with them on this.
Another option is hand off the upkeep and hosting to a 3rd-party partner such as Protofire who have offered to take over the maintenance of the Harmony multisig.
There are also a proposal for building a brand new multisig product on Harmony.
Crazy.one
Crazy.one subdomain NFT was launched in May of 2021 with the goal of providing an ENS-like service to allow users to purchase subdomains that could be used as both wallet address and resolve via DNS to a webpage.
Roadmap
There has been little to no further development on this application in the last 12 months and it is lacking a product roadmap.
It is unclear if Harmony is still interested in building and maintaining this product. If so, then we need to map out a comprehensive roadmap with clear deliverable and onboard design and development resources to execute on the vision.
Else, this project should be handed off to the community.
Path to Decentralization
Crazy.one as a service can be decentralized in a couple of ways.
One path is to create a DAO with a specific mandate to nurture and manage this service. The DAO could receive initial funding from the Harmony foundation and it will be about to become self-sustainable through subdomain sales.
Another option is to hand-off the service in its entirety to the Harmony Community DAO. There is a proposal that outlines how Community DAO will takeover the service and further develop the product. This was, of course, the original intention of the product:
Please note: this is a ONE year RENTAL, not a purchase. This project is also a mechanism by which the Community DAO will be able to generate revenue. As the Community DAO stands up, it will take over the management and operation of Crazy.ONE subdomains and the Harmony Domain Name Service. We are eager to see how this project evolves based on the community aspirations.