Bridges, Cross-Chain Roadmap & Band Integration, September Update

September was another month where the Harmony team, along with help from the community, focused on building and growing our ecosystem. We want to highlight a few notable items:

🌉 Bridge-building is Hard Work and it Continues
🔗 Ecosystem Growth and Partnerships
🛣️ The Harmony Roadmap and Vision — Updated
🕸️ Mainnet Upgrade
📰 In the Media
🔭 Looking Ahead

🌉 Bridge-building is Hard Work and it Continues

Harmony’s vision is that there will be many chains with their own ecosystems. The successful chains will be the ones that can best adapt and play the nicest with others.

And to get there, we need several major components:

• Tooling
• Assets
• Bridges
• Protocols

In September, we made a lot of progress on both assets and bridges. Here’s what we did.

Harmony Bridge Testnet Launch

We launched an alpha version of the Ethereum-Harmony bridge on testnet. This bridge allows the user to move assets from Ethereum to Harmony. Specific assets we are testing is 1BUSD and 1LINK. This means that if you have BUSD or LINK on Ethereum, you’ll use the Ethereum-Harmony bridge to move it to Harmony so it can be used on applications on Harmony.

Currently this bridge is on testnet and we’re heavily testing it. Other assets we are planning on supporting and are building infrastructure for now are USDT and DAI.

Connext Network ONE-ETH Bridge

When you have two pieces of land with only one bridge connecting them, it can pose as a big risk. To mitigate this, we’ve awarded a grant in September to Connext Network to build another Ethereum-Harmony bridge based on their spacefold.io bridge. They will do it in a different way as the Harmony team and it will act as another bridge between the Harmony ecosystem and the Ethereum ecosystem.

Everstake Harmony-Polkadot Bridge

Another growing ecosystem is Polkadot. There’s a lot of activity and buzz regarding Polkadot and that’s also an ecosystem for which we want to interact. In September we awarded Everstake, a well-known team in the validator space, a grant to build a Harmony-Polkadot bridge. We’re excited for them to begin and deploy this bridge. They will be holding an AMA to explain what they’re thinking and you can find the details below.

Binance Indonesian Rupiah Launched

In September, the Binance Indonesian Rupiah (BIDR) and ONE pair was launched. As a reminder, BIDR is a regulated stablecoin representing the Indonesian Rupiah. This starts to form the infrastructure on which cross-border finance transactions can now begin to occur.

🔗 Ecosystem Growth and Partnerships

In September we announced two partnerships whose values and goals are aligned with ours.

The Sandbox

Early in the month we announced a strategic partnership with one of blockchain gaming industry’s leading projects, The Sandbox. NFTs are interesting because they are assets with properties that can be used in almost every other area of business. Right now, NFTs are mostly known for their in-game properties — buy assets and trade them within games.

But there’s a more recent recognition of other applications of NFTs beyond gaming, specifically, NFTs in DeFi. Go read our article above to see our point of view and why we think that NFTs will gain more and more attention as industries recognize their use beyond just gaming.

Band Protocol

We announced our partnership with Band Protocol, a cross-chain data oracle platform that aggregates and connects real-world data and APIs to smart contracts updates, and launched full mainnet integration with BandChain. Last month, we announced our partnership with Chainlink, another Oracle. So, why two Oracles?

The answer is simple: Developers.

As a layer 1, we want to create an ecosystem of technologies, services, and partners that support the developers who build on Harmony. We want devs to focus on building a great user experience and on acquiring users. So, we see it as our responsibility to build that ecosystem to enable them to focus.

Having two oracles on the Harmony mainnet gives developers options. Both are great oracles with some overlapping and other unique data sources and ways of integration. And, considering almost all apps on Harmony will likely need the aid of oracle data, we want developers to have options on which oracle they prefer to use.

🛣️ The Harmony Roadmap and Vision — Updated

Our Founder and CEO, Stephen Tse, published an updated roadmap to underscore our focus on fintech and decentralized finance. Specifically, he provides more detail on our work on trustless bridges and cross-chain decentralized exchanges. It’s very detailed, so it’s better if you read it directly from him instead of getting a watered-down version from me.

🕸️ Mainnet Upgrade

A mainnet upgrade happened at epoch 290 to restore the 7 epoch undelegation locking period with the support of redelegation. With the restoration of 7 epoch locking period, we are bringing back the security guarantee of the original EPoS model. In the meantime, redelegation allows stakers to easily switch between validators without having to go through the 7 epoch undelegation. For more details, please read this medium article

📰 In The Media

• Binance AMA between Stephen Tse and Catherine Coley, CEO of Binance US
• Through our collaboration with Camila Russo, author of the “The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum” and proprietor of The Defiant, we entered into an agreement to support blockchain education and DeFi through a media grant partnership.
• DSLA Protocol was covered in Cointelegraph for their work on helping reduce or eliminate slashing for validators through their service level agreement marketplace. Harmony is the first layer 1 to be supporting DSLA protocol
• An innovative team within the yield farming space announced they will be building a unique game on Harmony utilizing the Harmony-Ethereum bridge. The game? Baking Waffles on Harmony. Just be sure not to burn your waffles while using our Ethereum-Harmony bridge!

🔭 Looking Ahead

Our focus remains fixed on creating bridges from Harmony to other ecosystems, making sure assets between ecosystems work on Harmony, and having services and technologies available on Harmony so developers can focus on building. Expect more of the same, but with one addition — we’ll be working even harder every day to earn the trust and support of our community and to continue building Harmony into a rich, lively, ecosystem we know it can become. Until next month.

Become ONE with Harmony

Developers can build on Harmony today, a fast and open blockchain for decentralized applications. Harmony Mainnet supports state sharding with instant finality. Our staking mechanism reduces centralization while supporting delegation and slashing.

We ❤️ Developers.

Got an idea? Build it on Harmony and Apply for a Grant.

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