5-Second Finality, BUSD & Rupiah Token, July Update
- ⏳ Achieved 5-second transaction finality on mainnet
- 🚀 Launched official Harmony #1wallet with HRC20 support
- 🏗️ Building cross-chain bridges for Binance and Rupiah stablecoins
- đź“ş Published 3 #DeFi video series with Cami Russo at Defiant News
Before we unpack July’s progress, let us review the goals Harmony set out in January. Our goals in 2020 are cross-border utility and decentralized development. What did we do in July that got us closer to accomplishing our 2020 goals?
🇮🇩 Partnered for Indonesia Stablecoin
We announced a partnership with Rupiah Token, a non-US stablecoin representing the Indonesian Rupiah with one-for-one custodial backing. This builds upon our stablecoins strategy with our previously announced BUSD.
Providing cross-border payments between the US and Indonesia and other parts of Asia is just the first step. We’re very excited for the chance to provide utility to the millions of individuals and families who need to send money to and from the US to Indonesia and the rest of Southeast Asia.
⏱ Mainnet with 5-Second Finality
Two of the biggest problems in blockchain are getting users and scalability. These two are related as nobody wants to use slow dapps, and because dapps are slow, blockchain doesn’t have a lot of users yet.
At Harmony we are solving for this. We improved our block finality from 8 seconds to 5 seconds, a 38% improvement — faster than 99% of the public blockchains. Kudos to our engineering team for this huge milestone.
đź’° Funded 7 Grants
Our community has been busy building, kickstarted by our open grants. In the first month of the grant program, we awarded 7 teams for a total of $130,000 in awards. The grantees for July are:
- Ript.io: interaction tool for beginner developers working with HRC20 contracts
- Jelly Swap: bridge for swapping ONE/BTC/ETH token pairs
- Money Home: remittance app for USD-Indian Rupee stablecoin pair
- Vivo: app to send and request HRC20 tokens with your friends & contacts
- Ibriz: mobile wallet for HRC20 staking, delegating and rewards
- SesameSeed: decentralized exchange for HRC20 / ERC20 tokens
- SmartStake: staking performance dashboard & analytics
🙌🏼 30 New Validators and 25 New Angels
In July we grew from 49 to 79 elected validators. This continues our decentralization progress in three ways:
- Economic: a diverse group of token holders will act in the best interest of the protocol (governance).
- Technological: a mix of advance and new validators helps the ecosystem grow. Moreover, more validators means that the network is more secure and reduces single-failover risks.
- Geographical: growing the community in various locations helps us become more decentralized.
👍🏼 640 Mainnet Slots
On May 16, 2020 we launched the first sharded proof-of-stake public blockchain with 320 external nodes. Then in June, we grew that to 480. And on July 31, we upgraded mainnet to 640 external validator slots. The quest to become more decentralized ultimately means that Harmony represents less of the network and the community represents more. We’re deliberately taking the steps to get there and accomplished a big milestone toward decentralization in July.
Looking Ahead
We are in the midst of a team hackathon, focused on all the building blocks we need to create so that there’s seamless transfer of assets between Harmony and Ethereum, leading to cross-chain composability & liquid stablecoins in August, then cross-border utility (remittance & e-commerce) with fiat gateways & regional partners in September.
We look forward to building utility with our community and partners.
Stephen Tse
Harmony CEO
Don’t Miss
Stephen spoke at Tsinghua University, the most prestigious university in China, at the invitation of Tsinghua Professor Kevin Xiaokang Mo (Stanford PhD, Distinguished Research Professor on Advanced Cryptography and Blockchain). Read our lecture “Ethereum 3? Scaling Cryptography in Blockchain”.
We also shared a Periscope video for the community. You can view it here.
Watch our yearn.finance video on the Defiant: What’s up with $YFI and yEarn?
