We had an amazing power-packed AMA with Harmony Team on 3rd June, 10:00 AM IST. This was certainly one of the most fun and candid AMA we had with any project so far. CoinDCX’s Head of Marketing and Branding, Ramalingam Subramaniam hosted Sahil Dewan, Co-Founder, Harmony Protocol and Nicholas Kostopoulos, Digital communities, and Market Adoption, Harmony protocol.
Tl;dr — This blog is a record of candid conversations with Harmony protocol. Sahil and Nicholas from the Harmony team answered many questions asked by the community.
Ram: Good Morning Everyone !!!
This is Ramalingam a.k.a. Ram. I Head Marketing at CoinDCX and would love to host you all to yet another exciting AMA session. I would love to start by welcoming all of you to our group this lovely morning. For those of you in Mumbai and nearby districts. Stay Safe.
As CoinDCX, we have all taken a joint promise. To bring the next 50 Million Indians to crypto through our initiative #TryCrypto. The #TryCrypto initiative envisions creating a safe, secure, and simple environment for people to adopt cryptocurrencies. By partnering with esteemed industry players who have a shared vision, we intend to take this initiative to the masses. $ONE as the name suggests, is surely one of it. With Harmony protocols’ vision of scaling trust, our goals are aligned. With immense pleasure, I would love to welcome our Guests from the Harmony team.
Guys, how about a quick round of introductions?
Sahil Dewan | Harmony: Thanks so much Ram!
I’m personally so excited to see such a vibrant crypto community in India!
Thanks so much Ram! First of all, I hope everyone is staying safe due to covid, but for our friends in Mumbai, I hope the weather remains kind, stay indoors!
I’m so excited to be here 🙂 let me give a quick intro
I am originally from Chandigarh (land of butter chicken), born and brought up there. I am a Computer Science Engineer by background and did an ed-tech startup in India before I moved to the US for business school. I am one of the cofounders of Harmony and currently head of product. I got excited about bitcoin in 2015 and was leading the blockchain club at my business school in 2016–2018 before deciding to jump off the cliff to challenge Ethereum to solve the scalability issues 🙂 I’ve had a great time at Harmony over the past two years, taking care of business operations. I work with the engineering and business teams in coordinating our network and product launches (staking tools, block explorer, wallets, etc). I’m also leading Harmony’s expansion into India.
Btw, Ram, I love the #TryCrypto initiative. We should start with 50M people but later take crypto to the 1B+ people in India!!
Ram: For sure Sahil!
Would like to hear from you too Nikolas.
Nikolaos Kost: Thanks a lot Ram for hosting us!
My background is coming from EU law and economics, I have created the first entrepreneurial organization in Greece, built one of the biggest libertarian organizations in Europe to promote equal rights, and since 2016 I am working in the blockchain industry. I have been involved with a couple of products, nurtured the first dapps, and the last year I am working for Harmony, focusing on market adoption. Over to you @watsubram
Ram: Fabulous for that amazing introduction guys. We are excited to host you both and our community is privileged to listen to you.
Harmony protocol needs no Introduction but as we scale crypto adoption we have a lot of newbies to crypto on our group too. We request you to give us a quick introduction to Harmony.
Sahil Dewan | Harmony: Sure!
Harmony is the first Proof of Stake, sharded scalable blockchain. The pain point we want to solve with this glittering technology is to help blockchains scale so that Billions of users can conveniently use trustless & decentralized applications.
Bitcoin and Ethereum have been amazing pioneers in showing us the early use cases of blockchain technology, but for us to truly ensure real-world applications can be built on top of blockchains, we need to create scalable blockchains. Harmony scales its blockchain by sharding — which means running multiple blockchains to parallelize transactions, so that we increase our capacity to process millions of transactions.
If anyone was playing with crypto kitties in 2017, you would’ve experienced the big problems due to limited scalability on Ethereum.
But now you can expect for your transactions to settle instantly. So if @watsubram were to send me 100 INR right now using the Harmony wallet, I would receive it in just a few seconds across the globe.
Nikolaos Kost: This has been a great introduction by Sahil. I will add a couple of important points on it.
We are the first public blockchain to successfully launch staking on a sharded network. Even mentioned, it’s an important point, since it’s something complex. Ethereum (multiple teams) are working on it, but Harmony is the first to release, giving the opportunity of the first, while a couple of other blockchains tried, but couldn’t release it.
Let’s also give some metrics, Harmony has one of the most active communities in comparison to our competitors (outside of Ethereum), and our initiative called P-OPS (tech ambassadors) is growing exponentially.
The 2 key products we are targeting post the launch of OpenStaking are Cross-Border Finance, and Game Collectibles working with Quidd, the biggest game marketplace with 1 billion annual transactions.
Ram: That’s amazing to hear!
With your permission, moving on to my next question
We have a great bunch of traders who are excited with $ONE now being listed on CoinDCX. We would like to understand some basics behind $ONE and also the future plans with $ONE.
Sahil Dewan | Harmony: Sure!
ONE is the native token of Harmony Blockchain. It’s a token that provides utility to the network participants of Harmony. ONE has many utilities
- Users can pay transaction fees in ONE token to send any transactions on the blockchain.
- ONE holders can Stake their ONE tokens to any validators and receive block rewards and a share of transaction fees for processing all the transactions on the chainONE will also be used to vote for various types of governance proposals on chain.
ONE started with a supply of 12.6 Billion at genesis. And we see the total inflation of ONE come down to potentially 0% if enough transactions occur on ONE.
We’re planning to use the Harmony blockchain for cross-border payments, where ONE token and related stablecoins can become the global settlement currency for payments which was Bitcoin’s original vision.
I can go on, but I’ll let community ask more questions instead 🙂
Nikolaos Kost: As of now more than 55% of the tokens (circulating supply) is already staked just within a short period from our launch, while our novel economic design offsets transaction fees from issuance for staking rewards, leading to zero “inflation” as the network is becoming successful.
Ram: Thank you Sahil and Nikolas for the answers
One last question before we jump onto a round of audience questions.
$ONE was one of the biggest IEOs launched last year. We also completed 1 Year since the IEO. Would you like to share a harmony protocol 1-year recap with our audience? Like the day since the IEO to now?
Sahil Dewan | Harmony: For sure!
I remember the night of the IEO I was up till 3am, and at the 1 year anniversary also I was up till 3am. So not much has changed haha!!
Harmony did the IEO 1 year ago, and then almost became a public project, opening up to the larger community and not just run & managed by the 20 people in our office in mountain view. We realized that being a startup, we needed to keep on moving fast with our launches.
We launched our Mainnet Version 0 on 28th June 2019, where we deployed a network of 1000 nodes with 320+ external Nodes/Validators on our public network.
Over the next few months we understood the key pain points we needed to solve and cross-border finance and digital collectibles became evident, so we ended up acquiring a digital collectibles company (Quidd). We also travelled to China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and India to understand the local blockchain environment
In January 2020, we launched the native ONE token, swapping out of the BEP-2 token that we started with during our IEO.
And recently, after mining 13 Million+ blocks, we launched Open-staking with 190+ validators and 1000+ tokens holders delegating their ONE tokens to be staked on the network!
We’ve been focussing on expanding in the India market over the past 3–4 months and are so excited to get a chance to partner with CoinDCX and also some Indian blockchain and fintech startups
I guess that wasn’t short as my excitement let me go on for a while, But i promise to keep it short from now on :p
Ram: Some amazing stories there.
Now let’s open up for some amazing questions from the community.
Let’s get the questions rolling
Group was open for 2 mins. Around 72 questions were asked by users. As it was not possible to answer all the questions. Sahil and Nikolas picked 5 questions each to answer.
Sahil Dewan | Harmony: Wow, so many questions, loving the curiosity
Ram: WOAH! Sahil, That’s an amazing set of questions. Why don’t you go ahead and pick a set of top 5 questions.
Sahil Dewan | Harmony: Wow I wish I could answer more but let’s get started
Q: As You launched the Staking on as Sharded Network, Can you talk about its Positives?
A: Staking or POS is actually an efficient way to ensure economic security of the protocol. It is way less costly than Proof of Work and quite resource effective. It also gives the ONE token holder the power to vote in various on-chain governance proposals. Sharing helps us scale our transaction handling capacity.
Q: What has been the performance of libp2p for fast blocks and what can you tell us about the recent renovation that was applied to it?
A: I love this question! libp2p is basically the library we use to drive optimizations in the network layer of the technical stack, it helps us reduce transaction latency. Right now our block time is 8 seconds but as soon as we merge our latest libp2p code, it can come down to below 3 seconds. Libp2p basically helps different nodes in the network communicate with each other or their peers.
Q: Many investors only care about token price and their profit in the short term while only a small part of them cares about long term and project health as well as tech. So, does $ONE team have a solution to balance this?
A: We have to keep on building for the longer term. No breakthroughs or innovations happen in the short-term or with shortcuts. We want to build a community of BUILDERS and hope people can believe in the value of Harmony and blockchain.
Q:Will you launch a stable coin backed by ONE after your ecosystem has achieved significant development?
A: Absolutely on the near term horizon. We are soon going to also bring existing stablecoins on Harmony, and then launch a decentralized stablecoin backed by ONE, just like DAI.
Q: How do you plan to spread cryptocurrency in Community? Do you plan to develop a project in this direction ?
A: Grants and educational campaigns. You should see us launching a $7M grants campaign very soon. We’re also excited to launch educational campaigns with CoinDCX which helps community to stake their ONEs and earn block rewards.
Q:Trust wallet doesn’t support your network completely yet because of sharding, will ONE tokens received from other wallets that support sharding into my Trust wallet be accessible and transferrable?
A: Right now Trust wallet only supports Shard 0, but over time we’ll have a way where users won’t have to worry about shards. If you want to send cross-shard transactions, you can use Mathwallet.
Q: How soon will I get my tokens back if I decide to un-delegate from a validator before the next epoch?
A: 1 epoch
Nikolaos Kost:
Q: If we compare Harmony with Cosmos, we might think that Cosmos is a good option compared to Harmony. Why should we use Harmony instead of other protocols?
A: In regard to Cosmos we also have a comparison in our website. Harmony is much more decentralized, operated by 1000 validators. In terms of fees the structure is similar, along the speed. There is a big difference in the issuance, Harmony has 3% while Cosmos 7% which is more related to the economic model, and inflation, but affecting token holders.
Also from user feedback, it’s much easier to build on Harmony, rather on Cosmos.
Q: Can you list all the “Social Media Links” of Harmony So I can follow it and then-campaign Harmony to my friends?Can you also share your Updates and Developments so I can add it to my Campaign of Harmony?
A: Yeap please engage with us across our social media:
We also have a couple of groups available:
This one is dedicated to our staking community: https://t.me/PangaeaVolunteers
While if someone wants to subscribe to our announcements channel: https://t.me/harmony_announcements
Q: Why are the rewards from validators different? Why do some validators have very high fees?
A: Fees of Harmony validators are very competitive- compared to other chains, though it’s a free market. There are validators with great performance who charge only 1%.
Rewards of validators are different based on their stake, their performance, uptime, and the Effective Proof of Stake. You can check our staking dashboard, and select one of your preferences.
https://staking.harmony.one/
India is a strategic market for us, and we are working with many accelerators and enterprises to build adoption. India has very talented human resources in the IT industry, so it’s one of our target markets. As Sahil mentioned, we have grants available, so if you are an entrepreneur, or a dev, please reach out to team, and mention that you have learned about this opportunity from our AMA: http://harmony.one/grants
We will appreciate it if you could share with your friends, and let them know about this opportunity!
Q:Trust wallet doesn’t support your network completely yet because of sharding, will ONE tokens received from other wallets that support sharding into my Trust wallet be accessible and transferable?
A: Yep! Trust wallet is supporting the Shard 0 as of now. Multi-shard approach is something new for most wallets and exchanges, so they don’t have the infrastructure to support it. Your tokens are safe, and you can access them anytime through Math wallet, or Harmony CLI. Please reach out directly if you need help, or join our Telegram harmony.one/telegram
Ram: Amazing!
These were some amazing sets of questions and great answers.
Before we wrap this up! I would like to hear from Sahil and Nikolas some exciting plans with Harmony for the community, especially the Indian Community.
Sahil Dewan | Harmony: The whole Harmony team is super duper excited about India. In fact, I’m Punjabi and I taught my team the phrase ‘Chak De Phatte’ and now it’s become a team slogan. As for our India plans, we’re looking to build a strong community of true blockchain believers who want to be a part of the growth of the blockchain ecosystem in India. We’re heavily investing in educating the community about Harmony and how our technology works. We want our community to run a node and become a validator, stake their ONE tokens and become an ‘active’ participant in our ecosystem. For all the super talented technical folks here, we’re inviting you to apply for grants — build an Ethereum-Harmony Bridge, or help us find fiat gateway partners in India. At a product level, we see India as one of the top players in cross-border payments. Imagine if we could bring down the costs and time for sending and receiving money to/from abroad to just a few seconds? That’s the kind of use cases we want to enable for Indian users by partnering with cryptocurrency infrastructure projects as well as India’s fin-tech startups.
Nikolaos Kost: Thank you, looking forward to next initiatives with CoinDCX, which are coming shortly. Stay tuned!
Ram: Amazing! Thank You, Sahil & Nicholas for this amazing opportunity for an AMA session with our exciting community. We would love to host you guys again soon.
With this we wrap this AMA session and guys don’t forget to check out $ONE
https://blog.coindcx.com/coindcx-lists-harmony/
Good Day Everyone !!
Sahil Dewan | Harmony: Thanks so much for having us. We really look forward to meeting your team and the community when we’re in India next. I plan to be there around Oct-Nov. Excited about CoinDCX launching amazing products for bringing Indian users to blockchain and crypto.
This wraps up the power packed AMA session with Harmony Team, We have such events every week with some amazing blockchain projects. Follow us on twitter and Join our community on telegram to be part of such amazing events.
