Harmony Insights: Etherscan ONE dashboard for users, developers and traders

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Harmony

4 min readSep 1, 2020

About Harmony $7M Grant

Harmony Grants are to drive our platform’s mainnet utility 🔧, decentralized community 👩‍👩‍👧‍👦, and cryptographic innovations ⚡ — aligned with our 2020 roadmap on cross-border finance 💸 and auditable privacy 🛡️.

Your grant and project are fully transparent to everyone. Details of all grants such as application materials, funding amounts, community discussions, governor decisions and wallet addresses are publicly available at harmony.one/open-grants.

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What is Harmony Insights?

Harmony Insights can be thought of an Etherscan for the ONE token and a dashboard for users, developers and traders

We are making upgrades and adding new features to the Harmony blockchain explorer, which we envision as a one-stop-shop dashboard for ONE users, developers, and traders.

We’ll be leveling-up dashboard features over the next month, and in subsequent grant cycles we intend to incorporate advanced HRC contract analysis, extend the API functionality, and potentially add user accounts for taking notes, setting alerts, etc.

We are inspired by the Etherscan functionality, on both the frontend and backend, and wish to bring the same experience to the Harmony ecosystem’s native block explorer.

Tell us about you and your team

The Harmony Insights team is part of Insight’s open-source R & D wing, focused on software and infrastructure contributions to blockchain and cryptocurrency ecosystems. Pranav is a full-stack blockchain engineer whose previous project was a network security and performance analysis suite, funded by the Zcash Foundation. Mitchell leads the crypto R & D department, and is serving as the project manager for Harmony Insights (and as a researcher for Vivo Pay)

Tell us about the dashboard you are building

We’re folding in several new data types and ways to interact with on-chain and off-chain Harmony information. One key feature is a live memory pool on the homepage, so that users can confirm that a transaction was broadcast before inclusion in a block, and to show real-time usage at a glance.

We’re also building in some off-chain data, such as the exchange rate and market cap, which traders might find useful. Adding statistics and visualizations, such as transaction volume, network parameters, and other data streams. Additionally, we’re adding some Harmony-unique features, like sorting views by shard number.

Of all the other chains with whom you could partner, why Harmony? What is it about us that you find compelling and different?

Harmony stands out for many reasons, both technical and non-technical. From a technological perspective, I see scaling and privacy as two of the biggest challenges facing all projects today. I’m optimistic about the benefits of sharding, and even more excited about zero-knowledge proofs. (Mitchell notes:) I’ve spent the last few years working with privacy-preserving zk-protocols such as Monero and Zcash, and I’m eager to transfer to Harmony what I’ve learned about architecting privacy mechanisms and practices.

From a non-technological perspective, there are many reasons that working with the Harmony ecosystem is appealing. The grants process is remarkably efficient! I’ve worked with many ecosystems, and the applications can often take days to prepare, and weeks to hear back. Harmony’s streamlined process only takes an hour or two to prepare, and receives feedback within days if not sooner. The ecosystem is growing rapidly, with a grants program designed to scale alongside it — the potential is endless!

If you weren’t in blockchain what would you be doing instead?

Pranav: I would be continuing my career in networking engineering at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. My passion for computer networks started with my curiosity on the internet. It led me into Full Stack developer roles in many projects. Once I found “Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies”, a whole new career path was opened for me.

Mitchell: I’d be continuing my data science research, especially exploratory data analysis and feature extraction/selection. Before entering the blockchain space in 2017, I focused on topological data analysis and leveraging statistical methods across atmospheric chemistry, genetic biology, and audio signal processing.

What is something about your team that nobody knows?

We’ve been working on some private research into active optimization of ad hoc peer-to-peer networks, with potential applications for Harmony.

Where can others find more information about you and the team?

Become ONE with Harmony

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

We ❤️ Developers.