Harmony Team continues to obsess over customer’s use cases, build the network effect of our ecosystem and bring the world’s best research to production. Our goals in 2020 are cross-border utility, decentralized development and auditable privacy.
Here are our monthly updates on CEO’s newsletter and twitter:
We wear our ambitions on our sleeves. But these goals are not guaranteed deliverables. The asterisk * below denotes stretch goals. Here are the summary at the project level:
cross-border utility ($1M transaction fees, $10M assets on chain, $100M tx values)
decentralized development (20 contributors, 10 wallets, 200 app dev)
auditable privacy (2 researchers, 10x cheaper primitives, 100k users)
Below we explain the WHY and HOW to justify the WHAT of the goals above. As we have been since 2019 Q4, the team will follow up with quarterly execution plans and milestone reviews in public.
Why Finance? Blockchains enable many marketplaces but banking services are the native use.
Consensus protocols are creating new economies with tokens and trading. Smart contracts are serving as a platform for collectibles and gambling.
These early use cases are driven by the core value of blockchain: providing exchange and liquidity infrastructure for financial transactions. Harmony focuses on broader financial products as they are well validated with Ethereum and ready for mass adoption.
Why Cross-Border? Open platforms work locally but global users are the most underserved.
Finance products within one country are already highly efficient and protected. On the other hand, purely on-chain #DeFi solutions without onramp gateways or local distribution have limited impact in real-word economies.
Harmony focuses on bridging high-growth economies in countries such as China and India, hence #CrossFi for cross-border finance. Harmony remains an infrastructure layer; our local partners serve customers with country-specific products and compliance.
Why Harmony? Not only fast and secure, Harmony is decentralized and guarantees privacy.
Ethereum’s short-term pains are scalability and security, which Harmony has solved with sharding and proof-of-stake. The long-term value of open platforms is decentralization, which Harmony has committed to with thousands of nodes and open development.
Private transactions, similar to secure HTTP for the Internet, are essential to businesses and corporations. However, governments mandate audits and compliance. Harmony solves this dilemma by bringing auditable privacy to production.
How? We are customer obsessed but must identify the right customers and external values.
The market is divided into serving consumers or businesses: c2c (cash remittance), c2b (ecommerce billing), b2c (employee payroll) and b2b (marketplace payout).
Platform protocols seek rent but must inject capital from off the chain as revenue.
The values Harmony provides for customers, beyond open settlement, are forex quotes and peer-to-peer liquidity.
Stablecoins and forward contracts can manage fluctuations in fiat currencies; private matching can pool together local reserves like trades with over-the-counter (OTC).
In the CEO’s keynote, we explain our commitment to decentralization and privacy. We will expand this article shortly to cover our top other two initiatives listed above: decentralized development and auditable privacy.
Here are the individual goals of our team (a dream team!). The quoted titles each link to a 1-pager executive summary with WHY and HOW.
rongjian lan (@RongjianLan, medium, github) “Year of Fruition: Decentralization and Privacy”
sahil dewan (@sahildewan, medium) “Product-Market Fit: Explore, Exploit, and Experiment”
leo chen (@leo_hao, medium, github) “New Decade of Blockchain Adoption”
nick white (@nickwh8te, medium) “Year of Launch: Staking & Ecosystem”
li jiang (@lijiang2087, medium) “Zero to Escape Velocity: Lean Execution”
dennis won (@denni_swon, medium, github) “Scalability x Decentralization + Stability + Privacy”
ganesha upadhyaya (@gupadhyaya, github) “SDK Adoption, dApp Migration, ZKP Innovation”
howard yu (@cottontail2000, github) “Hardware Wallets, Ring Signatures and Randomness”
daniel van der maden (@danielvdmaden, github) “Adoption Tooling: ‘Flat’ On-Ramp”
yuriy (@potvik1, github) “Delightful Staking Dashboard & Website”
helen li (@chaowen28, medium) “Local Knowledge, Connection, Team in China”
gizem cakil (@gizemcakil, medium) “Testing on Pangaea and Bootstrapping Governance”
robin schmidt (@dirschmidt, medium, youtube, instagram) “Video Hero: Clarity & Transparency”
nikos kostopoulos (@nickostopoulos, medium) “Towards Business and Institutional Adoption”
nick vasilich (@vasilich_nick, medium) “Marketing Digitalization and Russification”
Stephen Tse
Harmony CEO
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