Harmony’s 2021 on Cross-Chain Finance

In 2021 Harmony strives to be a top blockchain for cross-chain finance. Our main themes are:

1. Adoption — We are bringing utility to users through developers and partners. Hackathons with Gitcoin and workshops at Ethereum events will boost our reach.
2. Interoperability — We are bridging with Bitcoin and Ethereum for broader assets. Our cross-shard and cross-chain transactions will enable new finance applications.
3. Decentralization — We are growing our validator community and network features. External voting power and resharding will guarantee our long-term governance.

How to scale Ethereum applications in 2021? Harmony is a sharding protocol with a trustless Ethereum bridge. Our developers use Etherum tooling such as Solidity and Ether.js. Users use Metamask to store and they use our bridge to swap Harmony and Ethereum assets. We achieve 2-second finality for fast transactions and support 1000 delegating stakers for secure shards. A cross-chain Uniswap fork is already live on our mainnet. Similar to layer 2 protocols, Harmony is now fully interoperable with Ethereum ecosystem.

Below are the progress of our 2021 milestones. You may learn about our ecosystem growth in 2020.

Adoption

• Toolings for Ethereum developers to migrate code with minimal changes

• Workshops for developers at blockchain and fintech events to learn

• Hackathons for developers to compete for prizes and feedbacks

• Grants for new projects or partners to grow with incubation

Interoperability

• Ethereum Bridge for Harmony applications to swap assets with Ethereum

• Bitcoin Bridge for Bitcoin holders to earn from finance products on Harmony

• Cross-Shard for Harmony applications to compose inter-shard transactions

• Cross-Chain for any chains to communicate with Harmony as a hub

Decentralization

• Voting Power for external validators to own upgrades and governance

• Resharding for network to improve security and prevent single-shard attacks

• Services for community to own dashboards, API, monitors and wallets

• Fast Sync for network to improve performance and to enable resharding

For details of the milestones above, you may read our vision on liquidity infrastructure or our strategy and architecture.

Harmony’s Strategy and Architecture

The progress icons here indicate roughly with 12% when objectives are defined, 25% when a public proposal is ready, 37% when its execution is started, 50% when a minimal demo is ready, 62% when its features are complete, 75% when live on devnet, 87% live on testnet, and 100% when live on mainnet. Ideally milestones are scoped for 4 to 8 months of execution; progress should be updated monthly. Some may take a few quarters to complete.