The Harmony ONEWeekly: June 19th Edition
Welcome
Welcome back my fellow Harmonauts. This week, we saw a community meme competition, new ecosystem projects coming to Harmony from our zkDAO, a new DEX aggregator as well as new network infrastructure updates. Let’s jump in!
The community ran a meme contest led by community member Jerome. The meme contest circulated the Harmony community with the theme of Harmony socks. Check out the highlight reel on Harmony’s new TikTok account. We’re holding a giveaway to celebrate the meme. All you have to do is follow, like and comment on your size, small or large, for a chance to win.
The team released Harmony’s Q3 and Q4 Execution Plan outlining specific areas where the team is aiming to reduce operational expenses in this difficult market. Three areas of focus are DAO funding, Events, and Inbound Grants. These changes went into effect on June 15th, as the team is focusing its efforts on producing high-impact deliverables such as, the Elastic RPC infrastructure, strategic partnerships, the launch of the Trustless Ethereum Bridge, and Cross-shard messaging.
Partnership News
We are excited to announce an upcoming partnership with a publisher whose founder is a 26 year veteran of the gaming industry, with credentials to his resume that include being one of the first developers of the Madden and Street fighter franchises.
He will serve among our expanding roster of industry veterans bringing exciting titles to Harmony, as well as being a mentor to up-and-coming web3 game developers in the Harmony ecosystem.
Dark Forest
Our first ecosystem highlight comes in the form of porting a popular Ethereum-based game, Dark Forest. For those unfamiliar with the game, Dark Forest is a space-conquest game that is built on Ethereum and uses zero-knowledge proofs to validate in-game moves. Players explore space to discover and conquer planets in an infinite, procedurally-generated and cryptographically-specified universe.
Behind the Dark Forest port is Kousik Rajesh, a Computer Science major at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati India and Tosin Shada, a software engineer at a leading bank in Africa. Both members are Teaching Assistants at Harmony’s Zero Knowledge University.
Team member Tosin announced that zkDAO members will be able to participate in and test the port on June 18th, 2022. As Dark Forest originated on Ethereum, the team is excited to see it get a strong use case through Harmony’s low gas costs and two second finality.
zkPhoto
The next highlight from our ZK University is a DApp called zkPhoto. This DApp enables users to trade private data through Zero-Knowledge, which is an incredibly powerful tool in demonstrating authenticity and ownership of your items. zkPhoto works to further the photography ownership initiative through the use of downsizing minted images to a low-resolution quality while allowing the owner to keep a high-resolution quality.
Through the Zero-Knowledge application, it creates a cryptographic hash linking the minted image and the original, allowing the owner to verify original ownership and the authenticity of their original photo.
The team identifies two real-world use cases; the first is enabling mobile photography NFT minting for all users. Individuals will be able to utilize their cellphone’s camera to mint the NFT, removing barriers for all participants. The second is the focus on privacy and removing the public’s ability to simply screenshot or download an image, therefore challenging your ownership of the NFT.
We see the potential of Non Fungible Tokens and are seeing the development of real world use cases for this technology. This is now possible through the hard work of the zkPhoto team and their Zero Knowledge technology on Harmony.
OpenOcean
Harmony’s decentralized exchanges are getting another boost with the integration of OpenOcean. While there are many different aggregators in blockchain, only OpenOcean brings together centralized and decentralized exchanges. Working with Binance, OpenOcean connects users to 14 different chains, such as Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Solana, Polygon and many more. We’re thrilled to have Harmony added to the list of partners integrating with the OpenOcean platform.
The platform operates on two interfaces, depending on which action users choose to utilize. The first is the “Go Swap” interface for users wanting to swap tokens on decentralized exchanges only. Simply connect your MetaMask wallet to the platform, select your pairs and users will see the price and can execute the trade.
The second, called “Go Advanced’’, shows users the spread on both centralized and decentralized exchanges and after registering with OpenOcean they can complete their trade quickly and easily.
Through identifying the most efficient swaps for traders, OpenOcean’s algorithm optimizes key factors when determining the best route which include; price, gas fee, slippage and routing in order to bring maximized results to traders. OpenOcean’s dApp is free to use and users only have to pay the low gas fees on Harmony and exchange fees when conducting trades.
Harmony Supported Wallets
Over the course of the last year, Harmony has onboarded numerous wallet partners for community members to quickly and easily get started in the ecosystem. With Harmony now supporting 5 new wallets and more being added through the year, the Harmony community has an ever expanding choice of where and how they securely store their digital assets. Our newly supported wallets, some of which are launched on mainnet or are currently in beta. New wallets onboarded this year include Infinity, D’Cent, NoBank, ONTO and Useless.
Team Member Rongjian Lan has submitted the first part of the code to upgrade the existing crosslink feature, decoupling it with the beacon chain synchronization. This is only the first part of the code for the crosslink heart beat signal feature. This feature lets Shard 0 validators broadcast the latest crosslinks they received from other shards. This basically lays the foundation for the possibility to remove the dependency of beacon chain (Shard 0) for validators on Shards 1,2, and 3.
Jenya Piskunov continued to develop and build the code for relayers within Harmony’s Trustless Ethereum Bridge. On top of relayers, he continues to develop the front end dashboard as well as the back-end application that will track bridged events and collect statistics for metrics. Relayers are a critical component of the upcoming bridge and will be run by community members who will earn rewards for their part in securing the bridge.
Through continued efforts to deploy our Elastic RPC network, the team is now redirecting 50% percent of traffic to api.harmony.one at this time. We are pleased with this process so far and are looking forward to full deployment of our Elastic RPC in the near future. Stay tuned for more updates.
Conclusion
Well that wrap’s up this week’s ONEWeekly newsletter. For those who have questions, please visit the talk.harmony forum or our official social media channels on Discord, Reddit, Telegram or Twitter. We thank you for being a part of our Harmony community and look forward to next week’s article. Until then, take care.
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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