Launching Horizon, Swoop Dex, Magic, Gitcoin: October 2020 Update

Peter Abilla

Published in

Harmony

3 min readNov 2, 2020

We built out the foundation for our cross-chain ecosystem in October. Below are highlights we want to cover:

🚀 Ecosystem Product Launches

🤝 Partnerships

📺 In the Media

👁️ Looking Ahead

🚀 Ecosystem Product Launches

The Harmony ecosystem continues to grow. This month we had 3 product launches, 2 of which were driven by the community.

The Horizon Bridge

ho·ri·zon /həˈrīzən/ the line at which the earth’s surface and the sky appear to meet.

We announced the Horizon Bridge and deployed it on Mainnet. You can try it out here Ethereum-Harmony bridge. Horizon opens up the gates for assets to flow freely between Harmony and Ethereum blockchains and will enable users to bridge any ERC20 token, as well as LINK and BUSD. 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.

Swoop

Swoop is a cross-chain decentralized exchange launched by a team in the Harmony community. Read more about it here and use it here:

👉 swoop.exchange

This first version of Swoop demonstrates the easy migration of foundational decentralized finance infrastructure like Uniswap V2 on Harmony, an EVM compatible chain. The next version will be a fully-cross-chain Dex, relying on the Horizon bridge APIs to power cross-chain liquidity. With these launches, the Harmony community is opening the gates for DeFi developers and partners to fork, build and deploy their own DeFi protocols on Harmony, leveraging our fast and low-cost layer-1 infrastructure.

Unifi Protocol

A community-driven project launched on Harmony this month. Unifi provides a bridge to connect the DeFi markets on multiple blockchains. It already supports TRON, Ontology, and now will be supporting Harmony. Go here to learn more.

🤝 Partnership Announcements

In October we announced two partnerships whose values and goals are aligned with ours and helps us with our goal to attract more developers into the Harmony ecosystem.

Magic Link (Formerly Fortmatic)

We partnered with Magic Link, which is a technology and service that makes authentication easy for app developers. Let’s face it — using a private key, a bajillion word mnemonic, is not user friendly. Magic Link makes authentication easy so developers can focus on users. We’re happy they are supporting Harmony and the developers building on us.

Harmony and Gitcoin

Harmony and Gitcoin have partnered to grow the future of web3 together. For those not familiar with Gitcoin, they are a Consensys company and are a staple in the Ethereum ecosystem, with over 47,000 developers on their platform. They will be integrating Harmony onto their bounties, grants, and hackathon platform. We will be planning many co-events with Gitcoin, so watch out for those.

📺 In The Media

Earlier in the month, our CEO and Co-founder hosted a 2 hour AMA with the community. You can view that AMA here.

Stephen also hosted a panel discussion at the L.A. Blockchain Summit, where they discussed how every blockchain company will become a fintech company.

👁️ Looking Ahead

We will be announcing some very, very exciting news early November. Watch for it and see that as a pattern and theme for what Harmony is focused on: Harmony, Utility, Adoption, Developers.

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.