Transparent Tuesday with Stephen Tse — June 18 (The Reading Version)
Some of you missed the session yesterday so we thought we’d put this on word form so you can get up to speed on Stephen’s vision of Harmony!
1. Why are you guys on war mode already, if this coming mainnet v0 is not fully released and you would have plenty of time to test and retest, even make breaking changes? I am concerned about you getting enough sleep and rest in the coming weeks as more sleep means fewer bugs.
Question by Solver Wizard
ST: We don’t get enough sleep due to war mode, but we are working really hard on the tech side and with our (almost) 100 node operators. We really strive to give them that VIP service by not only helping them generate keys and making sure they can run them, but also be able to answer any questions they have. It is very important to us to make sure the node operators on aligned with the tasks they need to perform and having their questions answered. They are giving us feedback every day, so the long hours are expected. We are getting sleep to stay alive, they call it the sprinting marathon, the way to do a startup, the rocket ship launching. We are committed to the release date. We are very glad to report that more than half of the foundational nodes are already earning block rewards. The testnet is running stable for many people, and we are checking in with the node operators to make sure everything is running smoothly for the rest of the month.
2. What makes Harmony different from other blockchains? What use cases can we expect? What is your vision for Harmony?
Question by Guillermo Padilla
ST: How Harmony is different, depending on where you start from; whether it is a scalable blockchain or a data blockchain, we want to really tell the story of Harmony as a data-sharing platform, such that there are lost of use cases coming up to really understand what the data economy is for Harmony in the future is where we set the vision to be very different from other blockchains. In particular, even now talking about the transactions, talking about the performance is just the infrastructure layer. How we are different is how we are going to be the first network with the proof of stake and sharding so that it will be the future for anything that will become an open platform for us, so that it will be the future of any data economy, to really be thinking about how to put all the data and transactions on the blockchain to help many people to do transactions.
3. How many $ONE do you need to run a node? And what are the rewards?
Question by LongPhi
ST: This is the foundational node story that we begin with. At the beginning of the year, we set up the foundational node program in which we gather some foundational nodes to help out the system to bootstrap. So, at that time it was $10,000 USD, now it is a different amount with the tokens for the next round. Hopefully you can get on the waitlist, hopefully, you will be staking in our network to be securing and validating our transactions. The rewards consist of being apart of the community and bootstrapping the network, but in particular, there will be block rewards — there will be different levels of deciding what is going to happen with our network. Very soon when we bootstrap, 75% is going to be run by Harmony extended team, but later on, it will be completely permissionless and run entirely by the community, and whoever runs a node will have a say in the direction of the Harmony network.
4. Is there anything to look forward to in the future of Harmony puzzle?
Question by Haris Prastyo
ST: Hopefully you guys have fun. Hope you guys enjoy the idea of the puzzle. Not only the rewards of the Harmony puzzle but also during the gameplay, you guys can actually see the transactions on the blockchain which is the idea of the future. Right now, we have run a campaign by Binance helped us to validate anybody who finishes level 10, but whoever finishes level 100 can really get our special prize. Please help us illustrate what we can develop for future versions of the game.
5. When can we expect staking to be available to retail investors (an exact date)? Any estimation for the date of mainnet v1?
Question by Hoang Hoan
ST: Our original plan was to have 100 foundational nodes. The idea of the waitlist is to be able to tell us that you want to be apart of the network when it is ready. Past this month, it is really hard to scale where we will be without network, but I can say that our rough plan is that there will be 400 nodes by July 1st and we want to expand to 800 nodes as soon as possible. This is dependent on whether the foundational nodes are earning block rewards. We are fully expecting that the entire network is fully permissionless and we are expecting many more nodes, looking forward to 10,000 nodes not owned and controlled by Harmony.
Mainnet v1 will have a lot of features, and the first thing we want to have enabled is the smart contract transactions so that all the games (puzzle) and mainnet partners can enable that. Enabling a smart contract will have higher security. We also need to expand the size of the network to prove we are beyond 400 nodes. We are fully committed to doing it this year.
6. What milestones have you reached on the last testnet version? What are your plans on stress testing the protocol large scales? With sharding, inter-shard is the bottleneck, does your roadmap include simulations of the real world scale of 10,000s tps with inter shard tx ratios sampled?
Question by Solver Wizard
ST: Right now we have testnet and the release candidate (puzzle and all our latest releases going on). Testnet has all the smart contract enabling. We want to do the block rewards and give out 100% conversion to all the people.
To stress test, we engage lots of node operators now (EOS Supernodes and many friends who help Cosmos) helping us as well. Both playing game of stakes and doing security testing, formal security audits by professional security researchers and running some campaigns in parallel to v0 and the testnet to have some kind of prize to attack the network as well.
The majority of this is in our whitepaper and our network story. The majority is to figure out how to transfer data really fast in a p2p network. So check out harmony.one/networking to have a fuller story.
7. What can we expect from your mainnet, aside from having your own chain?
Question by Kristan Crisostomo
ST: In a few weeks, we will be getting v0 out so that everyone is earning block rewards. After that, we will be open up the waitlist to engage people and talk about the next features.
