The Harmony ONEWeekly

4/30/2022

ONEWeekly Welcome:

Good afternoon fellow Harmonauts and thanks for tuning into this week’s ONEWeekly newsletter. This week we’ll be covering a recap of the Harmony ecosystem in addition to another important AMA with Harmony Core Team members. Furthermore, we’ll dive into some highlights from a new Harmony blockchain engineer, Max, regarding his work on Harmony’s protocols, an upcoming team retreat, and highlighting news from an RPC provider and partner, Chainstack.

So, let’s turn our attention to the General updates topic to kick off this week’s article.

Harmony Team AMA: Sam Harrison and Li Jiang

This week, our community had an opportunity to chat with Sam Harrison and COO Li Jiang from the Harmony Core Team regarding DAO’s and the $300M Ecosystem Fund. The AMA began at 11AM PST on the Community DAO’s Twitter Spaces followed by a Reddit AMA that began at 1PM PST with Li and Sam answering your questions directly.

The team wants to highlight our appreciation for the community taking time to not only attend our AMA’s, but also sharing feedback and constructive suggestions for the team. The turnout for these AMAs have been incredible and truly speaks to the passion our community has for Harmony, its team, and the success of the ecosystem. Our community has always been one of Harmony’s greatest strengths and we will continue to move forward together.

Please check out the AMAs to hear and read more from the team about DAOs. Do you have suggestions for the team? Head over to harmony.one/reddit and participate in the discussion. The community can also be found at harmony.one/telegram and harmony.one/discord.

GM Frens

Last week we announced a partnership with XYZZY who are bringing games to the Harmony ecosystem. XYZZY are bringing some exciting games to the Harmony blockchain so stay tuned for more on that and follow them on Twitter.

Speaking of gaming, we’re extremely happy to announce another gaming partnership, this time with game publisher and accelerator GM Frens.

With this partnership, video game developers building games through GM Frens can quickly be on-boarded onto the Harmony blockchain and fast tracked through the Launch Grant process. The GM Frens team will do the vetting and quality control, while Harmony will provide the onboarding assistance, incentives, and technical support

Crypto Royale

Our next Harmony ecosystem update brings us to the browser-based, battle-royale, play-to-earn game, Crypto Royale. In Crypto Royale, each player is given a color orb which has strengths against one color, but weaknesses against another. In-game pick-ups allow you to dynamically change your color and other attributes to your orb as you compete with others and earn the ROY token.

The play-to-earn game on Harmony has recently announced a partnership with THETA.tv where a variety of events will be hosted from May 1st to the 13th. Small competitions in Crypto Royale and AMAs are just a couple of events to expect during this streaming partnership.

Check out more by following the Crypto Royale team on their social media platforms.

Hermes DeFi

Our friends at Hermes DeFi recently announced they received a $175,000 investment from venture capitalist Momentum6.

Hermes DeFi began its journey on the Polygon blockchain in July of 2021. In late December 2021, they expanded cross-chain to Harmony with an ambitious goal of creating and growing a trader-focused DEX to bring TVL and advanced DeFi capabilities to the chain. Since this time, the team has focused development efforts to expand their DeFi capabilities to include liquid staking (hONE), bonding, and returns funded by protocol owned liquidity and DEX fees (xHRMS, sHRMS).

Hermes anticipates its DEX to launch on May 16th; users will be able to interact with the DEX via the HRMS token (utility and farming token) and IRIS (governance).

Examining the investment further, Hermes will be able to utilize the funds for three key areas; growing the team (the team has doubled since March), paying for business expenses (continued operation of Hermes’ RPC and Validator) and also enabling the HRMS token to launch with greater initial liquidity. Momentum 6 will receive 449,178 HRMS tokens which will be vested over the course of 12 months (16.6% every two months).

Austin, CMO for Hermes, commented on the investment from Momentum 6:

“Working with Momentum 6 has been a fantastic experience. They truly are building momentum within Hermes by connecting us to new partners and marketing opportunities.”

To learn more, visit Hermes’ Discord or Subreddit to engage with community members.

Q&A with Harmony Blockchain Engineer | Max

We got to talk with Max Mustermann, a member of Harmony’s Protocol Development Team. Max’s efforts focus on the protocol side of the Harmony product, specifically focusing on consensus, staking, precompiles and Blockchain bloat reduction. Max is a non-CS engineer who began his work with Harmony during 2021’s Gitcoin hackathon and began full-time employment with Harmony this year.

Users have seen the fruits of Max’s labors with the recent launch of Metamask staking on the Harmony dashboard in addition to forward looking efforts for cross shard communications and dispersing load across all shards.

Max is very excited about his work towards cross-shard communication; for example, how to deploy a HRC-20 token on Shard 0 but send it to any other shard to capitalize on lower gas fees and an expanding ecosystem. At this time, all liquidity on Harmony exists on Shard 0; with cross-shard communication users and applications would be able to create features on their token smart contracts to let each user move their balance from Shard 0 to any other. Essentially, liquidity can exist on Shard 0 but users can engage in Gamefi, DEX’s, NFT’s platforms and other activities on a cheaper shard.

We also asked Max about Blockchain bloat; what it is and how it impacts the explorer application as well as validator nodes. By eliminating excess data waste, validator related information can be captured via proximal snapshots when needed in addition to elimination of stale delegations that are stored as a part of the validator information. This greatly improves the efficiency of the space required to run an explorer or a validator node.

To keep up with Max’s latest efforts and announcements, you can hear from him on Harmony’s All Hands, posted to the Harmony YouTube channel, or on his Notion page.

Harmony’s Off-Site Meeting

One item we’d like to hint at is our upcoming off-site meeting to review Harmony’s mission, vision and values. This meeting will occur over a three day period beginning May 9th, where we’ll share topics when we can as it unfolds. Recent conversations and Harmony Core Team AMA’s have highlighted that external feedback is being reviewed and this is an opportunity for the team to sit down to incorporate it into our discussion.

Chainstack

RPC provider and Harmony partner, Chainstack, is bringing its technological prowess onto the Harmony network. One example of this is a personal bridge from the Harmony network to Ethereum’s network. Their content includes code samples and step-by-step instructions, and provides builders with simple walkthroughs for complex deployments.

As a user within Harmony’s community, you will benefit from this partnership in multiple ways. Firstly, your favorite dApps and projects building on Harmony can deploy a dedicated RPC node in a matter of minutes and scrape the blockchain for data without the need for their own specialized hardware or using the Harmony public infrastructure.

Secondly, we as users can launch our own node in just a matter of minutes. You can have a free node up to 3 million calls per month, before you will be required to pay for the premium model.

At this time, we have seen two proposals on the talk.harmony.one forums; the first proposal originated back in November of 2021 and focused on the deployment of 6 high-end nodes for mainnet that featured georouting capabilities. The image below highlights what exactly georouting looks like.

Chainstack’s second proposal was approved this month which focuses on providing both a Testnet and Devnet infrastructure in addition to operation and tooling support. While it was recently approved, we look forward to seeing and hearing more about this collaboration and its impacts on Harmony’s network.

Conclusion

Once again, we want to thank each and everyone of you for being a part of the Harmony community and we hope you found this helpful. Stay tuned next week for more updates on all things Harmony in ONEWeekly.

About Harmony

Build on Harmony, Bridge to All Chains.

Harmony is an open and fast blockchain. Our mainnet runs Ethereum applications with 2-second transaction finality and 100 times lower fees. Our secure bridges offer cross-chain transfers with Ethereum, Binance and 3 other chains.

Build on Harmony, bridge to all chains. We are an open platform for your assets, collectibles, identity and governance.

We 💙 Developers.

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