Dear investors and friends,

Since our last newsletter, we have launched devnet.harmony.one and set our 2019 roadmap. Our monthly highlights are:

• Our devnet with wallet & explorer running on multiple shards.
• Adaptive RaptorQ gossiping 1MB blocks in 1.36 seconds.
• Community Forum talk.harmony.one hosting discussion on consensus & sharding.
• Partnership with Timeless Platform, 8 events and 8 interviews.

Bring 10X Research to the Community

Our community forum is fired up. We debate combining VRF+VDF for secure randomness, peer discovery & Kademlia routing for sharded communication, and fixing the probability of cross-shard transactions. We welcome early contributors including Andy Manoske, a distributed cryptography researcher implementing Raft, and John Whitton, a technical architect diving into evaluation frameworks of high-performance protocols.

Moreover, for strategic investors and node runners, we will be using Coinlist’s Token Sale Manager that helped Filecoin and Blockstack. Our Telegram channel is now open for all — tell us in our community survey on how we can best engage you!

“Need for Speed” on Our Devnet

We launched devnet.harmony.one on December 15th. Experience our wallet, tap into our faucet and cruise through our explorer. Our devnet is running live on multiple shards to demonstrate our architecture of proof of stake and secure sharding.

A key challenge of scaling decentralized protocols is propagating blocks despite the presence of Byzantine nodes. In our post “Block Syncing in 1.36s with Harmony’s Adaptive IDA Protocol,” we describe our approach and breakthrough in detail. In particular, RaptorQ’s rateless coding allows us to overcome the fixed communication overhead and instead adapt our code rate to optimize for actual network conditions.

Wear Your Ambitions Bright on Sleeve

When Harmony officially started in May, we shared a detailed “2018 Roadmap” widely with our collaborators. We received lots of feedback, strongly aligning the mission for the team and the project. Our “2019 Roadmap” aims to reinforce our efforts and to build a broader Harmony community; here are the snippets:

• Overall: 100k tx/sec @ 1s latency, open dev, 10M users, 100k nodes
• Rapidchain (p2p, bootstrap), ETH2 (PoS, wasm, security), libunison, ETH3 (fraud, cbc, starks)
• Community, listing, mainnet, 1000 operators, 100k wallets, radical markets

Our vision “Open Consensus for 10B” remains unchanged since Harmony started last year. Overall, we must realize a scalable network and bring active users to Harmony.

Also, see the slide “Hungry and Foolish in Cupertino” of our devnet launch. Every day, 12 of us in Cupertino execute this plan full-time; every month, we set tough metrics and report milestones in the newsletter.

Timeless Harmony & Active Users

We’re excited to partner with Zi Wang (Android creative director, Google [X] lab founder) to bring millions of users to Harmony. Timeless Platformmatches people’s time with services. Zi’s team and Harmony believe that a “service marketplace is the next frontier, which makes a calendar the ultimate platform to actuate the exchange of services.”

Hyperion, one of our other partners and a decentralized mapping protocol, has launched its prototype. NYTimes writes “over 75 companies receive location data from apps in the $21 billion location ads market.” Hyperion shares our mission of privacy-preserving decentralized economy. Let’s build and ship together!

Our Community Energized in Winter

We had a fruitful discussion with BlockchainBrad on horizontal scaling. Watch our talk at San Francisco Blockchain Week on scaling via system and languagedesign.

We spoke in San Francisco at WDAS on a panel titled “Improving Scalability and Performance in Blockchain” (see the video) with the CEOs of Thunder, BloXroute and Celer on reducing user-perceived latency.

Also, we stepped into a studio interview with INSEAD Deputy Dean Peter Zemsky for his upcoming Coursera class. Our AMA with TokenGazer centered around scaling via full and secure sharding. Coindesk featured our co-founders jumping off the cliff from Apple & Amazon.

Blockleaders featured a long interview on the inspiration of founding Harmony. We hosted many events with our evangelists Xoogler.co (5,000+ ex-Google team members), Starfish Mission (an anchor of San Francisco’s blockchain community), and Genesis Block Hong Kong (original HK blockchain hub) and Bitpush.

Of course, no month is complete without our TGI-blockchain on Saturdays! We thank our investors UniValues (investors of Dfinity, Pchain) and our friends Queschain & Neutrino (investors of Brave, Ethereum evangelists) for bringing 80 new collaborators.

Looking forward, we’ll be giving a guest lecture at Stanford on distributed trust. We also echo Coinbase’s mission in this inspiring video on “building the financial future,” this illustrative post on the visions of Ether, and the strong metrics of its ecosystem. Check out this fun video “Dawn of the Dapps” on how the future is unevenly distributed.

Lastly, our team is believing and building in all weather. Come to talk.harmony.one and introduce yourself to our community!