All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer
12 short months ago Harmony completed its IEO on Binance Launchpad and set off on a path that would lead us inexorably towards the most important milestone of our journey to date: the launch of Open Staking. As the world has become accustomed to living closed off from one another, the importance of an open platform has never been clearer. Trust and privacy are being eroded and undermined in ways that will not become apparent for many decades. Decentralized technologies offer hope that there is a viable platform to restore them. There is a long way to go before we can realize that dream at scale but each step, each evolution of the protocol, brings us closer.
We are the first public blockchain to successfully launch staking on a sharded network. Now 3.4 billion ONE are staked, a strong validation that our consensus mechanism EPoS is robust and attractive to draw 50.4% of the circulating supply (as of writing). As we look forward to the milestones to come, it’s also important to remind ourselves of how far we’ve come and in how short a timeframe. I’m proud to lead a team of thinkers, dreamers and doers. Our community continues to grow at pace with talent drawn from all over the world, a committed core of validators and, of course, our beloved Pangaea Ops Captains — aka, P-OPS.
Next we turn our attention to cross-border finance and auditable privacy with $7m in grant funding designed to stimulate the first batch of dApps and utilities in our fledgling ecosystem.
At Harmony our culture is to treat every day as Day ONE. With the launch of Open Staking, that has never felt more true nor so full of excitement and promise.
To commemorate the ONE year anniversary of our Binance Launchpad IEO, we announced another major partnership with Binance: BUSD on Harmony. Adding Binance’s USD stable coin —which is NYDFS approved, fully audited, with $170M market cap — is the first major step towards our vision of enabling cross-border finance on Harmony. We look forward to demonstrating how Harmony’s high throughput, fast settlement time, and low cost make it ideal for financial uses.
We must take this opportunity to thank Binance for their continued support. We began our partnership with Binance a year ago for our IEO, but that was only the beginning. Since then, they have supported our Pangaea testnet campaigns from which came our P-OPS team and many core community members. They supported our staking launch by operating nodes and delegating tokens to validators. And now they have brought us yet another major milestone, our first stable coin.
To learn more about this partnership, read here.
The launch of Open Staking is just the start of what will be a long period of refinement as our staking mechanics settle and find a rhythm. Testnets can only teach you so much. Once staking data and feedback began to be collected one major pain-point became clear: the undelegation delay.
The delay was designed to counter rapid unstaking which would threaten security but at this early stage allowing delegators more freedom would bring benefit without significant risk. Our CTO Rongjian and the engineers agreed on a proposal to reduce the delay from 7 epochs to 0. The delay will be reinstated at a future date when redelegation has been enabled and as we learn more about the day-to-day operation of EPoS in the wild.
We are always open to ideas from the community. The best place to air yours and hear the latest thoughts from the team is talk.harmony.one — see Rongjian’s response to a community member’s Airplane Proposal for instance.
Here are our recent engineering highlights:
Where next for Engineering? Greater P2P security, planning for increase of open slots and the path to significantly reduced block times.
The business team spent this month coordinating with Foundation Node operators and major staking players such as Binance and Hashkey to bring as much of their staking weight to the network in as distributed a manner as possible.
We expanded our footprint in India with fiat pairings, our partnership with Talengana Blockchain District and a new INR trading pair on CoinDCX. India continues to be a major territory for Harmony moving forward. The Harmony wallet was listed on the Google Chrome Store and we continue to add wallet partners at a furious pace to increase access and ease of ownership of ONE tokens.
The very first HRC20 token, SEED was minted. SEED is a staking derivative token that grants rewards pegged to the staking activities of Sesameseed.org on Harmony and we’re very excited to see this nascent market get off to such a positive start.
Highlights:
Community
Up till now our core community has mainly been composed of node runners and the P-OPS team but now we have welcomed Delegators fully into the fold as active participants in the network. Within a very short space of time we’ve already seen the first grassroots tools and utilities built specifically for Harmony from the likes of Chainode Tech, Staking4All, Smartstake and Zgen Dao as well as community based news and resource initiatives.
P-OPS themselves have been onboarded with full team access as a thank you for all their hard work. They exhibit huge talent, enthusiasm and resilience. We’re lucky to have them.
Visit staking.harmony.one to go deeper, follow the discussion at talk.harmony.one or catch up on all the latest insights on our YouTube channel.
Looking Ahead
Unknown to most outside the team I welcomed my daughter, Clementine, into the world just one day before the Open Staking launch. We are still many years away from the open consensus and the decentralized economy we envisioned with this project. But my daughter’s birth has been a timely reminder of why we set out on this journey and why it’s still worth fighting for.
Thank you for your continued support — we have so much to look forward to.
Stephen Tse
Harmony CEO
