The Harmony ONEWeekly
April 8th, 2022
Welcome to The Harmony ONEWeekly. In this weekly newsletter, we hope to provide you with an easy-to-digest summary of all things Harmony One. The goal is to connect you, our amazing community, closer with the day-to-day of the Harmony One team, the ecosystem, and spotlight various projects and efforts that might otherwise stay behind the curtains.
Our aim with ONEWeekly is to provide our audience with a newsletter that offers a unique perspective regarding events occurring within the Harmony Network. As this is our first ONEWeekly, we have a significant amount of information we would like to convey. Future ONEWeekly publications will be more concise, but let’s use this first article to catch you up. Without further adieu, let’s recap what has been accomplished throughout 2022’s Q1.
Quarter 1 Recap
Beginning in January, Harmony and OIN Finance have updated their announcement regarding the release of an upcoming stablecoin on the Harmony One network. Having been announced in April of 2021, this update nine months later brings us the next step closer to having a stablecoin backed by ONE. We also established partnerships with AAG Ventures, got listed on the OKex exchange, sponsored the NFTHack hackathon and summit, and more.
February came with a flurry of news and updates regarding the soft launch of the Trustless BTC Bridge. To date, we have successfully bridged over 124 BTC with 56 million ONEs locked as collateral. We continue to cheer on the team (led by Ganesha) who push for Harmony’s interoperability between networks to make Harmony the bridge of all bridges. But the work is far from over — we have a number of feature enhancements on the way including staking ONE to external BTC vaults and increasing collateral in exchange for rewards.
If 1BTC was not exciting enough for us, ETHDenver came with significant amounts of events, investment opportunities, and discussions between the team and the audience. Harmony and HerDAO established a sponsorship for sending womxn to participate in the ETHDenver conference. We at Harmony are proud to support each and every individual in their quest to engage with crypto in all facets of life. Project X presented Harmony with opportunities to meet with teams and enable investment opportunities to support native Harmony projects. You can check out the list of Project X investments here.
Harmony took this opportunity to expand the team and network with various Web3 projects and individuals in person. We loved meeting each person and being able to put a face to a name. In addition to these huge announcements, MadNFT brought forth their first airdrop on Harmony Mainnet. We are excited to see more creative individuals bring their products to Harmony and apply for our $300M ecosystem grant!
March brought us some important network updates and excitement. We saw the deployment of AAVE 3 bringing investors rewards. Providing $5M as incentives for users should be one way to put a smile on the faces of our community. We also want to tout the Horizon Bridge continues to impress with its performance and successfully has bridged over $560M to and from ETH and BSC.
On the final day of March, Jack Chan announced the Harmony’s ONE Accelerator Program. This push is another step in not only growing the talent within Harmony but also encouraging and promoting the growth of Harmony’s ecosystem. If you or someone you know might be interested, check it out and dare to take that next step!
Harmony Insider
A quick “behind the scenes” look at the Harmony team and some key updates we want to let you know about. Firstly, two recent hires for the Harmony Team are Max Mustermann and Konstantin Potapov. Max will be directly focused on improving Harmony’s protocols and staking, while Konstantin will be focused solely on our RPC, Infrastructure and Node Client improvements. We have heard the feedback from the community and are actively working on expanding the team to ensure the product quality is top-notch.
Secondly, we are shifting gears to improve communication, both internal as well as external. Some moves internally to improve how we function; Giv Parvaneh will oversee all products as well as internal communications, while Daniel Pagan will be focusing on external communications. We’re also looking at potentially bringing the ONEWeekly to video — giving the community a written and visual format to our weekly updates.
The ONEWeekly is only one aspect of improving our communication between the team and our community. Our new efforts to onboarding more Project and Product Managers will help us with internal communication and follow-through. You can read a bit more on that in the Q1 sentiment report.
Public Service Announcement
An item that we want to make our community aware of is the transaction spamming that has been occurring recently, the cause of recent congestion, and how we’re working to solve it. Our CTO, Rongjian Lan, recently posted a technical thread on Twitter, breaking down the situation and providing some great information.
We are happy to announce the solution mentioned in his thread is now LIVE — our newly applied time-based transaction ordering is showing a great reduction in spam and significant improvements to network performance, all while retaining low fees and 2-second finality.
The team has also finished designing our cross-shard messaging protocol, meaning the development can now begin. Once in place, Harmony’s cross-shard messaging protocol will allow dApps to scale across multiple shards for even higher transaction throughput. Games, for example, can release lands or world expansions across our shards, enjoying the full power of Harmony’s fast consensus and low fees.
Check out the full tweet thread from Rongjian himself. You can read more about our time-based transaction ordering. It’s an interesting read!
Community Spotlights
Harmony is more than the team; we are made up of incredible teams, projects and community members. As such, each week, we want to highlight some of your major accomplishments or announcements of an achievement that you accomplished. We want to congratulate our leading project, DeFi Kingdoms, on their expansion over to AVAX on March 30th. Congratulations to everyone involved in DFK’s stellar growth and continued performance!
Another item we want to highlight regarding our community is just how amazing each individual contributes to the network. Your impact on an individual level does not go overlooked. Total grants approved, forum proposals and wallet growth continue to grow at rapid paces. The funds are available to bring forth this growth; all we require is your voice to speak up and make it happen!
Continuing the topic of community, there’s a new community-run podcast created by Skyler Abilla called Harmonize. In his latest episode, we get to know “Brother” of Mars Colony, Harmony ecosystem dApp and Project X recipient. Feel free to check out the full episode here. Full disclosure — Skyler is the son of Harmony core team member Peter Abilla. Skyler has faced a number of challenges this past year and his battle against cancer is no secret to the Harmony community. You can follow him on Twitter to stay in touch.
As we begin to wrap up our letter, just a reminder to our readers and community that transparency is king. In order to best accomplish this, follow our Harmony All Hands Meeting which occurred on 3/28/22. Here you can catch up and learn about our latest updates regarding the previous month’s deliverables as well as our upcoming targets for April. Our team members continue to strive to put forth their objects and aspirations for each month.
Sentiment Report
A major component of the ONEWeekly will focus on what we would like to call our Sentiment Report. This quarterly report will be used as a direct link from the team to report the overall perception that we see from the community. It is key to note that this is only our perception and will be used to create a dialog between the Harmony Team and our valued community members.
That said, we recognize and understand that communication has not been the best; that each and every community member has felt unheard to varying degrees or that there has been a lack of bi-directional communication between the team and the community. This weekly newsletter is one answer to that concern, and we are implementing additional ideas to strengthen that two-way street of communication between the community and the team on a routine basis.
We truly believe that feedback from all communities — Reddit, Discord, Telegram, Twitter and Harmony Talk forum — provide amazing opportunities for individuals to bring forth their ideas and their concerns. Hearing from you is crucial to our long-term success. We thank everyone for their support and excitement for what we’re building as a team and a community.
We look forward to our next article and bringing more news each week.
- The ONEWeekly Team
