Harmony — The Update — September 2022
The new monthly publication from Harmony
Harmony at its core is an open platform built by dreamers and builders. We are consistently amazed at the passion and dedication of our community, from artists who sell their first-ever piece of art as an NFT, to developers publishing industry-leading technological advances at the cutting edge of blockchain research.
With a renewed commitment to the technology that powers Harmony and strengthens our ecosystem, we proudly introduce the new envisioning of our newsletter — The Update.
Each month, we will cover the latest in research-driven, production-ready protocol development from the Core Harmony team. You’ll also find stories from our builders, including their latest updates, as well as commentary from the community on key topics related to the protocol. We hope to provide multiple ways of engaging with this content and to help amplify the voice of the community in meaningful ways.
In this issue:
Hackathons, NFTs, protocol upgrades, upcoming Bridge announcement dates, and more
Protocol Updates
September saw the introduction of new primitives that enable Harmony to continue serving as one of the most stable protocols for developers in all of web3.
We released updates on:
- Leader Rotation — The leader node rotation helps improve the security of the protocol by rotating the responsibility through different validators. This is an important step in the externalization of the protocol as internal nodes previously serve this role.
Read more here as this feature moves onto testnet testing in Q4. - Staged Sync — A primitive for synchronizing data across nodes, this update allows for full sync nodes to pull the data required, rather than requiring a full sync of all data for a node to be considered up-to-date with transactions. Read more about the Harmony implementation here.
- Cross-Chain Communication- The protocol layer that allows for our shards to communicate the state of each independently is nearing its first test release in Q4.
- Elastic RPC — Storage optimization and reconfiguring of clusters means that in September, Elastic RPC infrastructure became even more efficient. Read more about Harmony Elastic RPC here.
We continue to push new protocol updates weekly. For the most up-to-date release notes, follow our Github.
Recovery + Bridges
Recovery — 0% Minting
The Horizon Bridge Hack in June represents one of the darkest days that our team and our community likely will ever face. Over the course of the last twelve weeks, we received incredible feedback from our community, partners, and validators who worked diligently to find productive resolutions.
On September 29th (view announcement here), Harmony announced our proposal to burn de-pegged assets without minting any new ONE tokens, as well as issuing recurring grants from the treasury to partners to conduct these burns over the coming years.
This plan focuses both on protocol development as well as on recovery and prioritizes sustainable paths for both. Through the cooperation of Recovery1, Modulo, and others, we are excited to begin this process the week of October 10th.
Bridges — Datachain + Layer0 + Trustless Bridges
The work of restoring our bridges accelerated during September. Highlights include the successful testnet launch of a Cosmos to Harmony bridge via Datachain (read the announcement here) as well as new information regarding our on-chain Horizon assets via LayerZero Labs.
With a separate breakdown coming out that will cover all of the details of the LayerZero partnership, an overview of the bridge restoration strategy was published by the team via substack here.
Development also continues on both trustless Ethereum and Bitcoin Bridges during the month of September, with updates to vaults and key security audits being the priority items.
Stay tuned for details about the feature rollout for LayerZero over the coming weeks.
Highlights from Around the Community
Encode Hackathon Kickoff
Encode Club kicked off its Harmony hackathon on September 27th with $14,000 in prizes up for grabs across multiple categories.
The Encode hackathon represents a unique shift in the strategy for Harmony-specific Hackathons, as incubation and mainnet launch assistance are key items.
Encode’s incubator will assist teams following the winner's announcement in November.
MAP Protocol announces Mainnet Launch + Harmony Integration
Announced in July, MAP Protocol’s Mainnet arrived on August 31st, following over one million blocks of testing during alpha/beta testing.
Benefits to Harmony’s Community
- Connecting Harmony with all EVM and non-EVM chains securely with blockchain-level security of MAP Protocol.
- Harmony’s developer can build an omnichain application directly or upgrade their existing single-chain application to an omnichain application effortlessly through MAP’s SDK.
- MAP’s omnichain network allows Web3 residents from other chains to participate in Harmony’s ecosystem and provides user-friendly access for Web2 residents to enter into the Harmony community, which drives new traffic and assets to Harmony, thus further enlarging the Harmony community.
As part of our broader cross-chain strategy, we’re excited to continue working alongside MAP to provide Harmony developers tools to securely launch omnichain applications that are built to scale.
MADNFT Enables Support for 3rd Party and DaVinci Gallery NFTs
World Famous gymnast Katelyn Ohashi during her MAD Launch (2022)
MADNFT announced the successful integration of contract support for a number of 3rd party NFT collections on Harmony, including the main contracts from DaVinci Gallery, the first NFT marketplace on Harmony. Their team announced that this ability will be available at launch and will allow users to import NFTs from across the Harmony NFT ecosystem
What's Next?
October is in full swing, and with upcoming launches and exciting developments continuing, we look forward to sharing more of our /2023 vision with the community.
The 2023 Harmony roadmap will focus on uniform scaling, sharing fellows, and open development. More to come.
Build together 💙
Harmony Protocol
