Harmony 2020: CrossFi, Open Dev, Auditable Privacy

Stephen Tse | stse.eth 🌉 https://s.country

Published in

Harmony

6 min readJan 10, 2020

Harmony Team continues to obsess over customer’s use cases, build the network effect of our ecosystem and bring the world’s best research to production. Our goals in 2020 are cross-border utility, decentralized development and auditable privacy.

Here are our monthly updates on CEO’s newsletter and twitter:

We wear our ambitions on our sleeves. But these goals are not guaranteed deliverables. The asterisk * below denotes stretch goals. Here are the summary at the project level:

cross-border utility (transaction fees, assets on chain, tx values)

banking: onramp gateway with china-yuan, india-rupee, vietnam-dong
infra: stablecoin, forex markets, p2p liquidity, kyc, *corporate accounting
economics: staking, branded NFT assets, derivatives, *marketplaces

decentralized development (contributors, wallets, app dev)

network: 100% external nodes, auto upgrade, *onchain governance, *light client
community: 50% contributors, full transparency, one-click migration, online brand
ecosystem: dispense 50% foundation tokens, 50% cash, *$2m dev bounties

auditable privacy (researchers, cheaper primitives, users)

products: compliance, wallets, voting, dao, *quadratic funding
transactions: zk proofs, confidential assets, *capacity-specific keys
scaling: zk sync, libsnark integration & optimizations

Harmony #CrossFi — Forex & Liquidity

Below we explain the WHY and HOW to justify the WHAT of the goals above. As we have been since 2019 Q4, the team will follow up with quarterly execution plans and milestone reviews in public.

Why Finance? Blockchains enable many marketplaces but banking services are the native use.

Consensus protocols are creating new economies with tokens and trading. Smart contracts are serving as a platform for collectibles and gambling.

These early use cases are driven by the core value of blockchain: providing exchange and liquidity infrastructure for financial transactions. Harmony focuses on broader financial products as they are well validated with Ethereum and ready for mass adoption.

Why Cross-Border? Open platforms work locally but global users are the most underserved.

Finance products within one country are already highly efficient and protected. On the other hand, purely on-chain #DeFi solutions without onramp gateways or local distribution have limited impact in real-word economies.

Harmony focuses on bridging high-growth economies in countries such as China and India, hence #CrossFi for cross-border finance. Harmony remains an infrastructure layer; our local partners serve customers with country-specific products and compliance.

Why Harmony? Not only fast and secure, Harmony is decentralized and guarantees privacy.

Ethereum’s short-term pains are scalability and security, which Harmony has solved with sharding and proof-of-stake. The long-term value of open platforms is decentralization, which Harmony has committed to with thousands of nodes and open development.

Private transactions, similar to secure HTTP for the Internet, are essential to businesses and corporations. However, governments mandate audits and compliance. Harmony solves this dilemma by bringing auditable privacy to production.

How? We are customer obsessed but must identify the right customers and external values.

The market is divided into serving consumers or businesses: c2c (cash remittance), c2b (ecommerce billing), b2c (employee payroll) and b2b (marketplace payout).

Platform protocols seek rent but must inject capital from off the chain as revenue.

The values Harmony provides for customers, beyond open settlement, are forex quotes and peer-to-peer liquidity.

Stablecoins and forward contracts can manage fluctuations in fiat currencies; private matching can pool together local reserves like trades with over-the-counter (OTC).

In the CEO’s keynote, we explain our commitment to decentralization and privacy. We will expand this article shortly to cover our top other two initiatives listed above: decentralized development and auditable privacy.

To Yearn for the Vast and Endless Sea

Here are the individual goals of our team (a dream team!). The quoted titles each link to a 1-pager executive summary with WHY and HOW.

Leadership & Vision

stephen tse (@stse, medium)

acquire 1 fintech team, incubate 5 crossfi projects, 3 keynotes, berlin for privacy tech
4 trips to china / vietnam; 25k followers, *licence for cross-border banking
decide on c2c (remittance), c2b (ecomm, bill), b2c (payroll), b2b (marketplaces)

rongjian lan (@RongjianLan, medium, github) “Year of Fruition: Decentralization and Privacy”

100% decentralized mainnet, 1k dapp dev with 100k users, productionize zkSNARKs
external contributors: core protocols 20%, tools & sdk 50%, application infra 80%
sfbw keynote on token economics, 5 research talks/articles, china eng office

sahil dewan (@sahildewan, medium) “Product-Market Fit: Explore, Exploit, and Experiment”

token swap & wallet integrations, foundation governance, india/vietnam dev partners
dai/synthetix/uniswap ports with $1M bounties, shard agnostic, cross-chain asset swap
$100M tx value on cross-border w/ 2 regulated partners for corporate accounting

leo chen (@leo_hao, medium, github) “New Decade of Blockchain Adoption”

5 lang sdk (complete as ethereum), port loom/matic/cocosx/unity game sdk
oracles (makers, tellor); onboard 4 games & 4 fintech partners; *2 enterprise shards
resharding w/ vdf randomness, 10x cheaper zk showcase, products w/ ring signature

nick white (@nickwh8te, medium) “Year of Launch: Staking & Ecosystem”

$2m branded NFTs, biweekly call w/ animoca & quidd, alliance w/ sandbox & opensea
SF office hour, monthly TGI & speaking in SF, 10x twitter engagement
open staking launch, blockchain game power user, 10 game dev captain & community

li jiang (@lijiang2087, medium) “Zero to Escape Velocity: Lean Execution”

5 cross-border partners (qbit pay, emq), 5 china, india, se asia teammates
35% tokens staked, foundation financial model (tokens + cash)
next 10 teammates, 100% team /perf participation, remote work 1 day/week

Technical & Research

dennis won (@denni_swon, medium, github) “Scalability x Decentralization + Stability + Privacy”

protocol: port dai/compound/celo (stablecoin), uma, kyc/aml
ecosystem: loom (interoperability), wrapped one, onboard 10 cross-fi, $1m tx defi
tooling: shard agnostic, one-click evm migration

ganesha upadhyaya (@gupadhyaya, github) “SDK Adoption, dApp Migration, ZKP Innovation”

one-click app migration toolkit, js/go/java sdk with ethereum-like docs, shard agnostic
resharding (rapidchain, formal sharding), libsnark optimizations
light-weight node (flyclient), instant state syncing (coda)

howard yu (@cottontail2000, github) “Hardware Wallets, Ring Signatures and Randomness”

cryptographic privacy, untraceable payment through dApps
add layer 1 primitives for randomness, ring signature
port or design defi apps, adding more hardware wallet (ledger, trezor)

daniel van der maden (@danielvdmaden, github) “Adoption Tooling: ‘Flat’ On-Ramp”

one-click migration of evm apps, shard agnostic, go-sdk, game sdk, python library
improve tps/latency benchmark: 20 nodes to saturate; 5 min analysis of our logs
increase test coverage to 50%, continuous deployment

yuriy (@potvik1, github) “Delightful Staking Dashboard & Website”

Community & Empathy

helen li (@chaowen28, medium) “Local Knowledge, Connection, Team in China”

china cross-border payment (products research, partnership, content communities)
4 months in china, 4 biz roadshows, bank and payment partners, stablecoin fund
create “polka world” level community and content, 4 meets-ups/hackathons

gizem cakil (@gizemcakil, medium) “Testing on Pangaea and Bootstrapping Governance”

pangaea: testing/doc every major release (staking, resharding), dev bounties
off-chain platform & on-chain design for governance with 500 token holders
engineering process improvement: agile tools, backlog, sprint planning

robin schmidt (@dirschmidt, medium, youtube, instagram) “Video Hero: Clarity & Transparency”

*1m youtube subscribers 100k interim target, expand to linkedin, Instagram, tiktok
video production: fully self-funded thru monetization/sponsorship (4k watch hours)
fully funded documentary, major social experiment event

nikos kostopoulos (@nickostopoulos, medium) “Towards Business and Institutional Adoption”

2 products for insurance/banking/money transfer, $1m USD accrual in defi
official tech partnership w/ EU commission, central bank, international organization
business alliance with $1M tokens staked, 150 participants at summit (devcon)