Cosmos Validators Brief #5: BHarvest

BHarvest

These Briefs seem to be gaining some traction now, or maybe it’s this temporary lull in action here between gaia-12001 and mainnet, but many Validators are responding back to me now with their Brief bio’s, so expect a flurry of these over the coming days….

This one covers the Validator known by the moniker ‘BHarvest’ (or ‘b-harvest’ in the “Cosmos Validators” Riot chat).

During the now-completed Game of Stakes, BHarvest ran a very strong validator operation, was a constant contributor/helper in solving other validators’ questions and, according to Castlenode’s unofficial results estimate, placed 2nd overall in accumulated stake.

In this Brief, similar to the prior Brief with the team at Validator.Network, the idea of currency-backed stablecoins is brought up. In addition they talk about how organizations might pursue their own blockchains as well as how Validators will have to find the balance between their own livelihood and balancing that with the common good of the network.

Also as far as I could tell, not much is publicly known about BHarvest beyond the Cosmos Riot and Game of Stakes, so hopefully this Brief helps shed some light on this 2-man team…

Tell me a bit about yourselves…as much/ little as you guys would like to share.

Lee Hyung-yeon (hyung):
Our validating team is currently composed of 2 members, Lee Hyung-yeon(myself, hyung) and Byun Dong-samb(dongsamb).

Hyung majored in Mathematics in undergraduate, Finance in masters degree. He worked at an investment bank as a algorithm trader and risk manager for about 10 years, specialized in quant driven algorithmic trading and financial derivatives. Experience on low latency trading development, big data analysis and machine learning applications.

Dongsam Byun (dongsamb) majored in Computer Science in undergraduate/masters degree. He has work experiences as a project manager in a blockchain project concerning data marketplace. He has deep understanding in information security, machine learning and Ethereum. He has contributed to Ethereum, Web3, Solidity, Bitcoin and Cosmos open source project.

Outside of Cosmos/Tendermint, how have you been involved with blockchain so far? What projects have you participated in? What projects do you find particularly intriguing?

hyung:
Both of us has deep knowledge and experience in solidity and EVM. But as a team, Cosmos/Tendermint is the first serious project to participate in. We are especially interested in legal currency pegged stable coins upcoming in the future. In future blockchain ecosystem, we believe most of the crypto-currency used by client users will be legal currency pegged stable coins except for staking coin such as Atom or Ethereum(in the future).

How did you get into blockchain space initially and what keeps you interested?

hyung:
I believe blockchain will open a new industry which is a combination of information technology, security, finance, big data and ultimately machine learning, and I think I am one of the best candidate to build useful service for mass people in the near future with Tendermint protocol and Cosmos SDK software because of various knowledge, quantitative skills and experience in traditional finance industry.

Where do you see the blockchain space evolving in the next 1-3 years?

hyung:
Many organizations such as giant global platform corporations, various local government, associations, private groups and etc. But we believe most organizations will not use exist blockchain but rather will build each of their own blockchain because most organizations are too big and powerful to believe in the stability and performance of currently exist blockchains and to be absorbed by the blockchains.

On the other hand, stable coins will arise as a dominant user-friendly currency in blockchain networks because holding volatile crypto-currency has more negative effects than positive effects for normal blockchain service users.

With regards to Cosmos, what do you think will be the biggest challenges faced by the project overall?

hyung:
As most blockchains are faced right now, centralization threat will be the biggest problem for Cosmos. Capitalism has natural gravity to centralize the power to one or several giant entities. Although Tendermint and Cosmos-SDK is well-developed software, raising the network up to a mature well-decentralized network is on the hand of community members. Therefore, in my opinion, on/off chain governance is very crucial for the future of Cosmos.

Also, active participation on further improvement and debugging of Tendermint and Cosmos-SDK is also important factor. In order to achieve the goal, there should exist proper incentives to be an enthusiastic developer for the network.

With regards to being a validator in Cosmos, what do you think will be the biggest challenges you will face?

hyung:
Balance between our firms incentives and whole networks welfare will be the most difficult thing to maintain. As a business, we should pursue for the greatest interest for the stockholders and employees, but in other hand as an important Cosmos community member, we also need to do our best for the successful future of the network. We will do our best to consider both of the aspects so that we can achieve the two important objectives.

The 2-person team at BHarvest’s official Twitter is: https://twitter.com/b__harvest

And their website is https://bharvest.io

2/22/19 edit: inserted their new website at the end here.

3/24/19 edit 2: added their Twitter