Creator-Fans Economy: Domains, Profiles, Videos & Commerce
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Creator-Fans Economy: Domains, Profiles, Videos & Commerce

Harmony is an open platform for creators to grow digital economy with their fans. Four tiers of products: First, $10 per year for leasing Internet domains .country (crypto names .1, wallet addresses, digital collectibles). Second, $100 per year for curating social profiles (vanity URLs, customer emails, growth analytics). Third, $1000 per year for hosting video content (monthly subscription, pay-per-minute payments, referral earns). Fourth, $10k per year for making retail commerce (fan merchandise, loyalty programs, collective initiatives).

🚀 Q1 goal: 1000 sales for domains & profiles. First: $50 merchandise (t-shirts, hoodies, totes), 1000 each, $50k sales ($25k profit) – targeting Vera’s Pink Apes, Harmony’s Blue Apes, Claire’s travel logs, Miss Excel. Test run: Harmony t-shirts (100 to community). Second: Video content, $10 per month, weekly videos, 2500 subscribers, $25k sales ($25k profit) – targeting Shamir’s videographer community, Bay Area’s high school sports teams streaming, fitness gurus.

👩‍💻 User experience: Go to 1.country to register a new name, use your meme-worthy URL on TikTok as “Link in Bio” for discovery, start posting videos from mobile, charge $9 monthly on your 10k followers for gated access, one-click for fans to ship $29 t-shirts worldwide.

  1. Domain Names (Discovery)
    1. Link Internet Web2 domains under .country with crypto Web3 names.
    2. Provide vanity emails, group accounts, burner targets, private aliases.
    3. Automate custom domains for content publishers (Notion, WordPress) and commerce platforms (Shopify, Wix).
    4. Aggregate sub-accounts for wallet addresses and digital collectibles on multiple chains.
  2. Social Profiles (Branding)
    1. Customer relations management (CRM), URL shorteners, vanity bookmarks via browser extension.
    2. Provide a default, uniform and light design.
    3. Manage customer emails and growth analytics.
  3. Video Content (Engagement)
    1. Provide gated access via monthly subscription.
    2. Use SMS wallets for metering pay-per-access payments (per piece, per minute).
    3. Support onchain referral earns.
  4. Retail Commerce (Transactions)
    1. Ship fan merchandise with fiat checkout, loyalty programs, sales analytics.
    2. Collective assets and initiatives under multi-signatures.
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Launch Plan: Domains
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Q1 Milestones & Deliverables

🇨🇭 .1 and .country for Creator’s Web3 Nations

Harmony’s .1.country unifies Internet domains and crypto names as Web3 nations. Short, onchain names like s.1 store your wallet addresses, digital collectibles, social reputation – on Harmony across multiple blockchains. Proper, browsable domains like s.country displays your career metrics, vanity links, embedded content – for fans to tips with emojis or buy from videos. Yet, s.1 is magically the same as s.country – your creator economy as ONE nation!

See our deck, blog – and videos on the annual talk, platform features, adoption roadmap: Harmony’s 2023 plan on economics games on our .1.country as Web3 identity. First, Internet domains (.country): Custodial auctions (GoDaddy), Identity profiles (Linktr.ee), Talent reputation (Linkedin). Second, crypto names (.1): Social governance (Ethereum Name Service), Onchain incentives (Unstoppable Domains), Interoperable memes (Soulbound society). Third, radical markets (ONE): Sustainable rent (Axie Infinity), Quadratic tax (Gitcoin), Fair price (Uniswap).

Write from scratch a video player on mobile web – immersive like TikTok (full screen, auto play, one-click upload), minimal like Tinder (touch pause, touch mute, swipe navigate), optimized like YouTube (multiple sizes, edge network, offline cache), actionable like Shopify (shoppable links, Apple Pay integrated, merchandise checkout).

First, uniform scaling on our Shard 1 – versus Layer 2 (Arbitrum), App chain (Cosmos), ZK Proofs (0xPARC). Second, economics games on our .1.country Web3 identity – about Internet domains (.country), crypto names (.1), radical markets (ONE).

Which apps satisfy these Web3 critieria? Decentralized on open blockchains, financialized with staked tokens, nonfungible with soulbound collectibles, social with seasonal humans, and cryptographic with zero-knowledge proofs.

🧚 Fair prices? Radical Rent & Quadratic Tax

How to sustain an economy of nonfungible resources such as land assets, domain names, or social ranks? What are the optimal parameters with demand-based recurring fees or single land value tax as radical solutions? Can price, tax and rent be FAIR to all 3-body of owner, renter and stakers?

Harmony’s goal is develop economics games that are fully onchain and sustainable for more than 100K users and $100M assets in years. Our focus is building a platform-native marketplace for domain names with .country (Internet Top-Level Domain, TLD, with native Web2 integration), music creator NFT with merchandises, and onchain board games with lands.

Let’s explore Vitalik Buterin’s fee proposal on Ethereum Name Service (ENS), Lars Doucet’s tax proposal on game lands, and Will’s onchain proposal on 18xx board games.

Follow the Principles of:

  1. TIME vs entrophy: Force engagement via seasonal changes or elections; drive volume via capped the spending period of budgets.
  2. SPACE vs cold start: Bootstrap ecosystem via hyperlocal development; break through saturation via hierarchical economics.
  3. SOCIAL vs centralization: intensify people’s preferences in collective decisions; reduce tyranny-of-the-majority and factional control problems.

🔢 Platform: Uniform Scaling & Onchain Security

Harmony is a scalable and secure blockchain. Our mainnet is live with state sharding since 2019 June and with open staking since 2020 May. Harmony achieves 2-second transaction finality with 4 shards, 250 nodes each, 25.3K onchain delegators, 60% liveness slashing, and sub-second leader rotations.

Toward 2023, we are developing 1-block composable cross-shard transactions; validator resharding every 18-hour epoch with gradual state sync; and, account abstractions for smart wallets with social recovery but no central custodians or fee forwarders.

In 2023, besides protocol development mentioned above, Harmony is driving adoption via games (desktop-mobile wallet sync, tournament escrows, embedded marketplaces) – as well as impact via community (social curation, creator-fan economy, seasonal governance) and cross-chain via partners (chain-agnostic toolings, zero-knowledge-proof bridges, modular data availability).

On gaming strategy, Delphi Digital recommends soulbound NFTs, seasonal engagement, and e-sport tournaments. In particular, Project NOR, as the new PlayFi (play-then-finance) narrative, is building games for plays as new and free experience toward increasing skills – before building payments, tokens, collectibles, markets as financial infrastructure around those plays.

On gaming tools, Game7 identities wallet integrations and NFT standards as key technical problems after interviewing 100+ developers. Along with Leon Do’s SDK, Harmony shall focus developing a comprehensive offering with random number generators, NFT indexing, fiat on-ramp, mobile authentication – then soon metadata updates, social wallets, tournament escrow, and embedded marketplaces.

🪘 Market Fit with Utility NFT for Creator Economy

Top Goals: NFT mints, Fiat buys, New users. To thrive as a platform, we must achieve 20% monthly growth per Market-Product-Team Fit. In this Q3 and Q4, rather than spreading thin, the team needs a single focus and going deep. Our theses are:

  1. NFT Mints. Primary sales of tokens are the most disruptive use case of blockchains. These sales as fundraising are also the most critical driving force of a new market. For examples, network tokens for funding protocols in 2017 and 2018, governance tokens for decentralized finance in 2020, non-fungible tokens for community engagements in 2021, and land tokens for Metaverse games in early 2022. We claim that NFT mints for artists, musicians, writers, athletes and performers will soon dominate the Web3 market as the creator economy. These mints are mostly intended for true fans to be funding creators with social collectibles rather than for secondary sales or speculative investments.
  2. Fiat Buys. An ecosystem grows by inflow of assets and by layering of services. For example, NBA Top Shot basketball NFT purchases were through credit cards, and exchanges heavily promote recurring buys through small but regular bank withdrawals. Users must deal with fiat gateways, bank limits, regional restrictions… as well as wallet custody and security. Native Web3 products, however, must use tokens as utility and incentives. Users must also deal with stablecoins, token conversions, bridging assets across networks… as well as treasury dashboard and portfolio management. We claim that solving these challenges for fiat buys and token management will be our most critical customer service.
  3. New Users. Anyone can participate in the Web3 economy but only tens of millions users so far. Hundreds of millions are creating content, commerce, games from the support of merely a thousand of true fans each. In contrast, tractions on decentralized finance and profile-picture NFT are mostly limited to crypto natives or influencers. We claim that, by onboarding a creator via new campaigns, many of their community will be joining our platform. For fast iteration, our focus should be creators with monthly production and consumers with weekly engagement – such as musicians on iterative mixes or writers on regular newsletters.

🚀 Leadership & Launch Roadmap

A lawyer turned a $50M-debt startup into a $7.4B acquisition with Steve Jobs: 1. staying with the seemingly-impossible pillars (building a worldwide entertainment brand), 2. excruciating depth in partnership agreement for mutual success (a year-long negoitation for a 10-year Disney-Pixar deal), and, 3. preserving the “from the heart” creativity as culture (enough process but always the good people to ”just keep swimming” in new eras). How about us?

Fixing Harmony is all about execution – serving developers, gaining users, and driving transactions. Below are the top 3 items per initiative that are fixable and must be fixed in coming 6-12 months – towards 100% Shard-1 traffic (uniform scaling), Harmony 2023 whitepaper (Sharding Fellows) and 20% monthly transaction growth (developer incentives).

🦋 Goals, Tasks, Jobs, Bugs

In 2014 Whatsapp was acquired for $19B with only 32 engineers and 22 business persons, but already with 450m monthly users. Let’s not just read news (market analysis) or discuss ideas (product strategy) – but measure and get obsessed with numbers – that is, user and developer growth!

Does Harmony have a unifying vision that serves as our purpose in the coming decades? Why is our mission worth sweating for years? Are our annual strategies consistent amid changing markets? Do we write quarterly execution plans with measurable impact? How sufficient is our bandwidth for timely milestones? Have we been telling a good story to potential users?

10y ago I thought that the market of resources, property rights, trade, etc are the most important processes in the world. Today I think much more about the ecosystem of discussion and spread of memes / culture / ideas. The latter follows quite different laws from the former! (via stse.eth)

  • Emoji reactions: 1 token for☝️ (one above), 10 tokens for🥇 (first prize), 100 tokens for 💯 (100 percent). Each emoji icon and its counter – similar to Discord’s post reactions but with payment like Only Fan’s tipping – are displayed under its embedded tweet. User clicks the emoji icon to pay the token amounts (1, 10, 100) to increase its counter.
  • Contact info: 200 tokens for 💬 (Telegram handle), 400 for 💌 (email address), 800 tokens for ☎️ (phone number). Later: encrypted on chain (versus currently stored plain text inside the smart contract), 1600 tokens for 💰 (portfolio wallet). Owner optionally clicks the emoji icon to enter their contact info. User clicks the emoji icon to pay the token amounts (200, 400, 800) to reveal the contact info.
  • Support vanity URL on .1.country, like harmony.one/1 or /build, using only browser URL (no design or control necessary): set for the vanity URL “x” and the redirect target “y” via /x=y, delete via /x= (empty “y”). For example, s.1.country/b will redirect to harmony.one/build after visiting https://s.1.country/b=https://harmony.one/build. Store mapping onchain with ENS resolver mapping for social media links (see stse.eth). Build on top of smart contracts and frontend of this github repo.

Costs: $0.25 price (Enom) + $0.26 ICANN fees. Reserve as many as possible premium domains (as parked or blacklisted domains), including 0-9999 digit domains, 17576 three-letter domains, and 456,976 four-letter domains (or even 11,881,376 5-letter domains). Selling prices: $1000 for 3 months on single digit or single letter, $100 for 2- and 3- and 4-characters. $10 for the 5- and 6- and 7-characters. $1 for the rest.

👛 SMS Wallets & One-Time-Password Security

From our collaborator Dionysis Zindros's research paper "Keyless Cryptocurrency Wallets”: We put forth a keyless wallet, a cryptocurrency wallet in which money can be spent using a password alone, and no private keys are required. It requires a smart contract blockchain. We propose two schemes. In the first, the user sets a short wallet password and can spend their money at a prespecified maturity date using the password alone. Using this as a stepping stone, we propose a second scheme, in which the user uses an OTP authenticator seed to generate a long series of time-based OTP passwords for the foreseeable future. These are encrypted and organized in a Merkle tree whose root is stored in a smart contract. The user can spend funds at any time by simply visually providing the current OTP password from an air gapped device. These OTPs can be relatively short: Just 6 alphanumeric characters suffice.

Our OTP scheme can work in proof-of-stake as well as static and variable difficulty proof-of-work blockchains. The low-entropy in the passwords and OTPs in our scheme is protected from brute force attempts by requiring that an adversary accompany any brute force attempt by a transaction on the chain. This quickly incurs enormous economic costs for the adversary. Thus, we develop the first decentralized rate limiting scheme. We use Witness Encryption (WE) to construct a timelock encryption scheme in which passwords are encrypted from past into future blocks by leveraging the NP-language expressing proof-of-work or proof-of-stake performed as the witness. Witness Encryption is a currently impractical cryptographic primitive, but our scheme may become practical as these primitives are further developed.

1. Social (People)

  • Resilient. Funds are recoverable through time locks and multiple safety nets. No single point of failure such as thefts, cracks, loss, censorship or coercions is catastrophic.
  • Sufficient. All steps are well defined without delegating to hardware devices or seed phrases in safety boxes. Users do not need any passwords or rely on biometrics.
  • Anonymous. An account is a fresh cryptographic hash, not tied to existing systems or real-world identity. Derived paths support multiple public keys to protect privacy.

2. Smart (Code)

  • Composable. One-time or low-entropy passwords are useful for small funds. Multiple authentications can independently boost protection thresholds against brute-force.
  • On-chain. A decentralized network with high stakes and fast finality validates all transactions. Its platform has sustainable incentives and open governance to evolve.
  • Programmable. Operations can call third-party contracts, store history of states, or upgrade its code. Complex applications may use oracles of time, locations and events.

3. Hard (Math)

  • Self-Sovereign. No third parties, government documents, designated guardians, backup servers or hardware enclaves are necessary. Users have full custody and self control.
  • Air-Gapped. Key-loggers and man-in-the-middle attacks are minimized. The full parameters of transactions are easy to verify and approve without cables or cameras.
  • Verified. Trusted are only open source and hardened cryptography. Formal verification, through logical frameworks, assures end-to-end security beyond tests and audits.

From our collaborator Ivan Homoliak’s research paper “SmartOTPs: An Air-Gapped 2-Factor Authentication for Smart-Contract Wallets”: With the recent rise of cryptocurrencies' popularity, the security and management of crypto-tokens have become critical. We have witnessed many attacks on users and providers, which have resulted in significant financial losses. To remedy these issues, several wallet solutions have been proposed. However, these solutions often lack either essential security features, usability, or do not allow users to customize their spending rules.

In this paper, we propose SmartOTPs, a smart-contract wallet framework that gives a flexible, usable, and secure way of managing crypto-tokens in a self-sovereign fashion. The proposed framework consists of four components (i.e., an authenticator, a client, a hardware wallet, and a smart contract), and it provides 2-factor authentication (2FA) performed in two stages of interaction with the blockchain. To the best of our knowledge, our framework is the first one that utilizes one-time passwords (OTPs) in the setting of the public blockchain. In SmartOTPs, the OTPs are aggregated by a Merkle tree and hash chains whereby for each authentication only a short OTP (e.g., 16B-long) is transferred from the authenticator to the client. Such a novel setting enables us to make a fully air-gapped authenticator by utilizing small QR codes or a few mnemonic words, while additionally offering resilience against quantum cryptanalysis. We have made a proof-of-concept based on the Ethereum platform. Our cost analysis shows that the average cost of a transfer operation is comparable to existing 2FA solutions using smart contracts with multi-signatures.

👑 Web3 Ownership: Collectibles & Governance

“To Scale Trust and Create a Radically Fair Economy”. That means building a decentralized, scalable and secure blockchain to settle any transactions without trusted parties. Here, fairness in radical markets promises everyone opportunity for creating meaningful wealth. Or, “To create cooperation for global communities, and scale their digital economies”.

  • Scale Trust: A blockchain decentralizes coordindation among global communities – by enforcing contracts without trusting third parties or prior rules.
  • Radically Fair: A blockchain is fair if everyone has, if not fully equal chance and rewards, meaningful participation against the power of cumulative wealth.
  • Create an Economy: A blockchain, as a marketplace full of incentives, allows anyone to create tokens, secure transactions between parties, and accrue values from serving utility.

🌊 To Yearn for the Vast and Endless Web3

We are a Day-1 startup. Blockchains are becoming the foundation of the global economy, yet their adoption is at only 1%. That means that you as a pioneer and developer are shaping the future with 10X impact. Harmony is a community-driven project, a network with hundreds of applications, and a team wearing crazy ambitions on their sleeves. Because the invincible summer awaits!

For engineers, we value your deep understanding of how bytes work. You are a tool maker, a system hacker, and a math nerd all in ONE. Your typical day involves prototyping a top-conference research paper, debugging and profiling in hexdecimal, or writing updates to coordinate asynchronouly with tens of engineers in the open. Building a blockchain is like jumping off the cliff while assembling the plane engine on the fly – but, if you can thrive in chaos, why NOT?

For creatives, we approve your obsession with user experience. You are a product designer, a brand manager, and an industry analyst all in ONE. Your typical day involves studying what delights and what hurts through hard metrics, writing long-form narratives on the why's and the do's, or scrumming tasks for a product launch to iterate with millions of users. Building a community is like sharing your blue heart while keeping the culture alive for decades – but, if this is your dream of 50 years, start NOW?