Wear Your Ambitions Bright on Sleeve

Overall, we must realize a scalable network and bring active users to Harmony. High throughput (at 100 thousand transactions per second) is achievable as our architecture is fully and securely sharded. User-perceived latency (and finality) in seconds, rather than block confirmation latency, is critical to many financial and interactive applications. Harmony follows Bitcoin’s vision of permissionless participation, securing our network with tens of thousands of geographically-distributed nodes.

Harmony’s communities of developers and users are critical for the utilities of our network. We’re fully opening our code and development, educating developers and engaging contributors, for a vibrant ecosystem. We’ll partner with enterprises and fellow decentralized projects to bring real impacts to million people’s lives.

Our approach is to “Bring 10X Research to Production.” To scale to unlimited capacity as Harmony grows, we are implementing a fully peer-to-peer and failure-resilient gossip network. Inspired by Rapidchain and libp2p, our network will bootstrap with secure randomness and re-shard with fast state synchronization. Our networking sub-project libunison will form the foundation for many peer-only applications beyond cryptocurrencies.

Ethereum 2.0 is our role model for innovations. Harmony aims to be the first scalable network in production with proof-of-stake. We will employ formal verification for our security in terms of consensus, propagation and smart contracts to avoid catastrophes from human errors.

Harmony will also bring many research results from cryptography and formal systems to our global-scale infrastructure. Solving data availability with fraud proofs (using two dimensional coding and interleaved challenges) is the key to scaling communication. Overall, our design and security must be correct-by-construction.

Crypto Winter & Invincible Summer

We echo the optimism from Whittemore’s market narratives, Coinbase’s Future of Money video, and Visions of Ether. Despite the crypto winter (competitive pessimism, detokenization, exchange manipulation, dex skepticism, stablecoin mania, state power crypto), our journey is energized by many fundamental impacts decentralization already make.

Zero-knowledge proofs for privacy and scaling are recently made fast enough for interactive applications on mobile. There’re sustained developer interests and ecosystem metrics are strong. Generalized mining, plug-and-play nodes, usability focus, product distribution are bringing in broad participation of network operators.

The future of finance and governance is already here, but unevenly distributed. Crypto-collateralized loans amount to $28M in Nov; for governance, forking vs captures is critical in this era of open research, open source and open protocols. Institutionalization like Yale/Harvard’s endowments and custodial services will integrate with existing systems for mainstream adaption. Technology is empowering people against authoritarian in Venezuela and for human rights.

A global currency incentivizes talent everywhere to create wealth without a single point of failure (banks, authority, government). Like Internet and mobile phones in the last decades, crypto protocols are democratizing resources, but now for money and trust.

Harmony will experiment self-assessed property taxes and quadratic voting for radical markets. Decentralization will transform allocative efficiency, data marketplaces and stake deconcentration.

Together with you, we look forward to building a liberal society for billions!