HARMONY — CRYPTOVERSE AMA
23th October 2019
Guest: Garlam Won — Head of Marketing
Q — How do you assess the blockchain market in Asia? Where is your target market?
A — China & Korea
I’ll be transitioning into more of a “Head of Asia” role but at the same time, Head of Asia means nothing because if your focus is scattered it’s doomed for failure.
We currently have the strongest partners and most legitimacy in terms of existing momentum to enter these 2 markets (not to mention the biggest ROI in the Asia market).
So after these markets have been well setup we’ll be moving into other countries.
I’m currently focused on 3 core initiatives in Asia:
1. Developing niche-specific industries
We believe that these 3 pillars will give us the most ROI in terms of expanding our ecosystem
- Gaming
- Defi
- Data Sharing
As you’ve seen with Quidd and Lympo, we’re actively acquiring and onboarding the players who are showing high growth and have a high number of an already existing user base.
2. Community-building via exchanges
We believe that exchanges aren’t just a liquidity pool but also a basecamp to start operation in specific countries. We currently have ongoing conversations with the exchanges we believe will have the highest concentration of country-specific users.
3. Korea entity
I’m currently here in Korea building the Korean entity. The aim is 2 fold:
i. POC — The Korea government spends about 400 million per year in tech POCs. We have a partner (Big Bang Angels — second oldest angel firm in Korea — who has all the connections to system ‘integrators’ in Korea that will help us break into the lucrative POC market.
ii. Protocol Consulting — We’ve been seeing enterprises demand faster and protocols who can cater to their needs — I’m having ongoing conversations via our strong partners to start earning revenue from these integrations.
Bit of a doozy but sums up our initiatives in Korea — I might have new ones after KBW judging how fast crypto moves.
Q — Does Harmony mainnet have sufficient security and stability? Are you thinking of going to the Mainnet change in the future? Nice a chance to show our stability and how our network has been doing.
A — Yes since our mainnet we’ve successfully produced 4.5 million + blocks. Check out our block process here — https://explorer.harmony.one/
Also our EPoS Staking model focuses on Decentralization and spreads the risk of a single point of failure by preventing validators to become too big. We do this by reducing block rewards for validators when they get too big and incentive people to delegate to smaller validators (with higher block reward yield) so that they can grow in size — For more details about our staking model that Vitalk was intrigued by — https://medium.com/harmony-one/introducing-harmonys-effective-proof-of-stake-epos-2d39b4b8d58
Q — What is your progressive plan to ensure that project Network remains relevant & valuable in the next 5 years, in terms of adoption and use-cases ?
A — Our focus is towards three directions: DEFI, gaming and DAOs. Our key markers are emerging economies with underdeveloped infrastructure and high growing economies which are more highly likely to innovate to adopt to the current challenges.
Ultimately I think it does come down to 2 things for protocol’s survival
1. Ecosystem Growth — Having variety and enough transaction on your network so the network can self sustain itself — in order to do this you need to build a scalable enough chain that can handle not just payment but various aspects of our lives (ex. pining for price on different products, auto and real-time update of medical records as you travel from one hospital to the next, etc) — Visa processes about 1700 tps but this is doable because it’s only payments — if Blockchain were to be much more than just payment layer and become the digital record layer where all things in digital start going through blockchain we need a sustainable and scalable solution — hence Harmony
2. A focus on a specific niche that fits blockchain and killer usecase — We believe this will be data in the long term — At the moment people liek you and me can’t monetize or earn income from our data because all that network is owned by private companies like google and facebook. And this is big big market (ex. google made 90%+ revenue from their Ads — billions of dollars — and it’s all focused on targeted search ads that grows out of your own data) — So Harmony is trying to build a protocol where we become the public infrastructure for THE PEOPLE. Where the process of requesting data, validating data, using data, permissions, confirming the usage and payout distribution can all be automated — hence low cost — hence more incentive and income that’s flowing into people instead of private companies
Q — What were the major difference between Shard Chain and Beacon Chain ?How they were helpful?And their main role? Sharding allows parallel processing of transactions.
A — So instead of 1000 computers all processing the same transaction (ex. bitcoin, ethereum) which makes it slow regardless of the number of nodes that are processing them (actually it becomes slower with more nodes as more nodes have to be synched for the entire network)
Sharding breaks up transaction into diff segments so that multiple transactions can be processed by multiple nodes in the network (making the processing exponentially fast)
Now in the process
Beacon Chain — Acts as a control tower distributing transactions to different shards so that there are no overlaps betweens shards processing transactions
Shards — Have their own leaders (almost like it’s own chain in itself) that split transactions in the network and process them side by side with other shards
Q — How Harmony Project is different from other project ?As Zilliqa also uses Shard Chain? Uniqueness feature?
A — 2 things that are different
1. PoW vs PoS
Zilliqa is a PoW Sharded chain so the underlying consensus has it’s limit. Zilliqa tried to solve this with sharding but it’s proven to be very very difficult hence why they are still trying to figure this out.
Harmony is PoS sharding. Which means that the underlying Proof of Stake consensus is already much faster and efficient than the PoW and we add sharding on top of that making it exponentially more faster and scalable
2. Normal Sharding vs State Sharding
We go down a layer deeper than the traditional sharding. Meaning we try to split up the network so that consensus can be reached within individual network — making it much faster because it reduces the need for the entire network to synch up
Q — $one have recently some great partnerships ( @Lympo_io , @iSafePal ,@vitelabs ) . can you talk a little about them and how they help support the Harmony ecosystem ?
A — So yes we had couple of really great partnerships lately
Lympo, iSafePal, ViteLabs, Quidd
Let me get into briefly on what these mean:
Lympo — Many plays for Lympo. Lympo is a health app that gives you rewards if you build healthy habit — Try it! https://lympo.io/
They are invested by a famous VC — Mark Cuban (Shark Tank) and also been picked as the preferred health app for the Samsung Galaxy 10 Blockchain Wallet. They have over 300k users since starting oct last year and growing 250% month over month.
With Lympo being onboarded not only we become closer with some of the titans in the Korea market but also able to secure a incredible user base. DApps have a problem of gaining traction (even the biggest Dapps are around 3k-4k users which is nothing in the grand scheme of apps where you have 100–200 mil users) so we’re tyring to use leap frog strategy to jump start our userbase — starting from 300k is better than 300
iSafePal — Hardware Wallet — SafePal is one of the first partners to test our token SWAP from BEP2 to ONE Native Token (YAY) — Having many hardwallets will allow us to start putting ONE in the hands of the many and securely store ONE — Check out the video here — https://twitter.com/harmonyprotocol/status/1177567170282360832
ViteLabs — Decentralized Exchange — ViteLabs is long line of our decentralized exchange partnerships (Ex. Binance Dex being one of them) — Yes it’s a long term but I believe that exchanges will eventually become automated and more decentralized for total financial freedom — if we are able to reduce the transaction cost and reduce the margins i believe we’ll have lot of exciting micro-products and self sustaining financial product that can be engineered by individuals instead of big centralized investment banks
Quidd — Digital Collectibles — We were part of a aquisition with Animoca brands to aquire digital collectible company quidd — Quidd gets license from well known brands like (Disney, Ricky and Morty, NBA, Game of Thrones, etc ) and creates one of a kind digital collectibles like emojis, digital assets, stickers, etc that only few people can own!
We believe that this will be a big play in the future with blockchain’s inherent feature of really having undisputed and transparent ownership of assets online (without being copied) which was something that wasn’t possible before blockchain.
With quidd’s 200k users (another leap frog strategy! instead of starting out with 200 users) we hope to really grow the NFT ecosystem of harmony
Q — How does HARMONY DEAL WITH THE ISSUES OF SCALABILITY, SECURITY AND INTEROPERABILITY, SPEED AND PRIVACY ASSOCIATED WITH CRYPTO CURRENCIES?
A — Via PoS Sharing for scalability
- Security via our protocol design and ditributing validation via EPoS — our innovative staking model
- Decentralization — EPoS
There’s probably more to this answer but you’ll have to talk to one of our devs to really go down the rabbit hole
Twitter (https://twitter.com/harmonyprotocol)
Q — Your metamorphosis is a laudable one, how have you been able to survive this longest bear market and continue building and developing and to what extent have the recent bear market have on the project development?
A — Staying relevant through progress and BUIDL — If you take a look at our twitter (our central source of all progress updates and initiatives) you’ll realize how much progress we are making each day! Check out our twitter to see for yourself — https://twitter.com/harmonyprotocol
And mine too — https://twitter.com/GarlamWon (Who would i be if I’m head of marketing and i don’t even promote myself)
Q — Since Binance IEO, what major strides have harmony made?
A — Our Updates
- We are currently listed in multiple exchanges to build global community and liquidity (Huobi Global, Gate.io, HitBTC, Bitmax, Kucoin, and many DEX)
- Short listed on Coinbase
- Launched mainnet and tech for SWAP is done (just working with binance to complete the SWAP)
- Open Staking soon to be launched
- Various high traction aquisition and onboarding (Quidd, Lympo, etc)
Q — Why did you build Harmony, what is the motivation for you to start this project?
A — As I got deeper into the blockchain industry, I quickly realized that vision was not possible on the blockchains at that time. We needed to develop much more scalable and faster blockchains to actually reach the scale where we could take on the Googles and Facebooks of the world. And hence a super capable team of engineers and entrepreneurs have teamed up to go out and build the blockchain that could do exactly that.
Q — Harmony launched the Mainnet on June 28. So, what new improvements does the Mainnet have in the Harmony ecosystem?
A — We have gone even further launching our Mainnet 2.0 The current roadmap is enabling our own native token issuance along with open staking initiatives. Already build the first dapp- Harmony Puzzle using Harmony’s SDK.
Q — Can you please elaborate about Honest Mining and does Honest Mining support only PoS consensus coins or other consensus as well?
A — Honest Mining is a Staking as a Service infrastructure platform They shape staking pools for people who don’t meet the minimum staking prerequisites or they don’t have experience running a node. Tokens issued on our Protocol might have different attributes. There is no necessity those being POS
Q — What were the major difference between Shard Chain and Beacon Chain ?How they were helpful?And their main role ? How Harmony Project is different from other project ?As Zilliqa also uses Shard Chain? Uniqueness feature?
A — This is a great question. I addressed this a bit in a question above. Deep sharding is special because it does not just stop at sharding alone to reach scale and performance. We go well beyond sharding and optimize all the other aspects of the protocol and integrate them together into a cohesive whole.
You can think of sharding as providing “horizontal scaling” or the ability to parallelize the blockchain in order to increase capacity. But if you parallelize a slow blockchain to begin with you’ll still have a slow and low performant chain. So we take it a few steps further and do what’s called “vertical integration” which optimizes over all the layers of consensus, systems, and networking to squeeze all the performance out of the protocol. Since we go deep to optimize all these layers, we call it “deep sharding.”
You can think of it like an Apple product. Apple vertically integrates its products to optimize the performance and end-user experience. They control everything — the device, the software, the operating system and even sometimes the chip itself. That’s what makes Apple products so great. We take a similar approach to blockchains.
For specific ways in which we optimize our protocol, you should look into our whitepaper at harmony.one/whitepaper. Some to mention here are 1. FBFT, our consensus algorithm which uses BLS multi sigs to cut message complexity down to O(n) ^2. Adaptive IDA, which accelerates block syncing using fountain codes, and our unique randomness generator which uses VRFs and VDFs to create an unbiased random beacon. If you’re curious to learn more about the technical details, message us on our discord (harmony.one/discord) or post on our forum (https://talk.harmony.one/).
Q — Ethereum 2.0 is your role model for innovations and Harmony aims to be the first scalable network in production with proof-of-stake, how can Harmony do that?
A — Ethereum has enabled this revolution — programmable money and governance written on code! We are excited with the features of ETH 2.0 and the innovations is introducing which solve the most pressing issues in regard to governance and scalability of the network which are presented today. The key difference is that now Harmony is brining those features ( and even more competitive) two years earlier than ETH 2.0! Isn’t that exciting ?
Q — How many partners currently trust Harmony (ONE) technology and what benefits these partners bring to Harmony (ONE) and vice versa?
A — Already a number of projects have announced that will utilise the Harmony blockchain. The first one is Lympo — a health dapp which even partnered with Samsung, Troy Protocol, Carbon money which are now building the first solutions on Harmony. Already have in our pipeline numerous of partners which are not started to Buidl on our protocol
Q — Can you share me how many nodes you have now and how you were able to grow the node operator community?
Can you share me how many nodes you have now and how you were able to grow the node operator community?
A — Currently we have 1000 nodes which constitute harmony among the most decentralised Proof of Stake projects. 400 are currently owned by external individuals. The demand for staking on hArmony is tremendous — Key example our offering of 20 slots with our partners Honest Mining which sold out immediately. We now work on enabling open staking so we will become even more decentralised.
Q — After launching Binance until now, which achievements did Harmony acquire?
A — It’s hard to even recall all of those, every week we have numerous milestones that are being ticked off- hence the tremendous support from our community!
Just to raise a few from the most important:
Being the first Binance IEO got listed on Huobi. From exchanges we got Kucoin, BitMax, Gate and Bitcoin.com
Already numerous projects like prementioned Lympo, Troy, ViteX Labs, Carnomn are building DAPPS on Harmony!
The team is working already with governmental authorities and enterprise to build scalable solutions and contribute towards adopting blockchain tech.
Q — Since your launch in Binance, what balance can you do about it? positive or negative aspects?
A — We definitely see lot of impact and success from our listing on Binance. The support we got from Binance community has been tremendous and hence we are organizing many future initiatives and partnerships with Binance ecosystem pioneers. A notable example is our integration with SafePal which is the first hardware wallet integrated the native $ONE token.
Q — What is the Harmony Puzzle application launched on Contentos platform? Did it bring in revenue for Harmony? Why did you choose the Contentos platform to publish?
A- The goal was not to bring revenue for Harmony. We wanted to experiment with real users the limits of our first dapp! The dapp has become viral becoming the No1 in terms of active users and has showcased in real time the ability of Harmony to handle several 100ks of requests!
About Harmony:
Harmony is a fast and secure blockchain. Built by a team of engineers from Google, Apple, Amazon, Harvard, and Stanford. Harmony aims to solve the scalability issue using deep sharding. For more information visit https://harmony.one/ or join Twitter or Telegram
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