AMA Recap with COO of Harmony ($ONE)
AMA Recap x Harmony
Hello everyone! This is a recap of an AMA with COO Harmony Li Jiang that we held in Guarda’s community.
What will Harmony do to meet the requirements of asset security, scalability, privacy, and other characteristics? Can we expect to see a combination of Layer 1 and Lay 2 technologies on Harmony?
Hey, great question! We have been building Harmony, our layer 1 protocol for the past 3+ years and have a very stable and reliable mainnet since mid-2019. Our recent focus has been also on bridging to another layer 1s like Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain/ So the question about layer 1 and layer 2 is very interesting, because while we have all the security, scalability of a layer 1, you can also think of our job as scaling Ethereum application almost like a layer 2. One of our engineers wrote a very good article on this recent highlighting the benefit of Harmony and compare us to existing layer 2 solutions on Ethereum. At the end of the day, our goal is to unite more ecosystems. We are all ONE family.
1) Ethereum-based DEFI is getting very expensive, will ONET services become more affordable? 2) From the ecosystem I saw I could contribute in 2 ways – as a liquidity provider and validator. Can you explain more about these 2 roles and their benefits?
Yes! We are here to scale ethereum applications – see our main narrative on https://harmony.one “Scaling Ethereum Applications and Cross-Chain Finance”.
How to scale Ethereum applications in 2021? Harmony is a sharding protocol with a trustless Ethereum bridge. Our developers use Ethereum toolings such as Solidity and Ether.js. Users use Metamask to store and they use our bridge to swap Harmony and Ethereum assets. We achieve 2-second finality for fast transactions and support 1000 delegating stakers for secure shards. A cross-chain Uniswap port is already live on our mainnet. Similar to Layer-2 protocols, Harmony is now fully interoperable with the Ethereum ecosystem.
For those interested, you can try a dex that was launched recently by our community – https://viper.exchange/ You can feel the 2-second finality and almost $0 in fees. You can provide liquidity on https://viper.exchange, https://one.mochiswap.io/ or https://swoop.exchange/- all DEXs running live on harmony
For validators – you can run a validator which helps secure the harmony network or be a delegator to one of our existing validators on https://staking.harmony.one/validators/ where Guarda Wallet is on the top by uptime.
Both validators and delegators earn block rewards for helping to secure our decentralized network.
Southeast Asia is a very challenging market and many are competing campaigns here to attract investors, users and grow with Harmony – do you see how Southeast Asia is, and do you plan to develop & update here?
Ah, we love SE Asia. There are so many opportunities in southeast Asia for fintech applications and the community natively understands the pain points for traditional finance and the value proposition of blockchain. We are currently looking for a head of Asia to lead partnerships, communities and are quite excited about the potential. Singapore, Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh, Hong Kong, and many other places are places we have visited. one of our co-founders is from near Delhi so we know the Indian community as well.
How do you establish policies that promote company culture and vision? Secondly, congratulations on the Harmony and Binance Bridge – what type of long-term growth strategies do you think will deem this partnership/implementation fruitful?
http://harmony.one/culture is very important to us! Each new person who joins our team will do a self-assessment on the 27 cultural values listed in this document Culture is everywhere and not just in our team but also our community…now over 100,000 strong over Twitter/telegram/Reddit. We believe Harmony is for everyONE. we want to make blockchain technology, and the many applications on it accessible. we are ONE people, ONE world, ONE planet ❤️
As it relates to our Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain bridges – again it’s our idea to give everyone access to DeFi or on-chain products and to unite all the major blockchain ecosystems as ONE. You can now bridge any Ethereum assets and Binance Smart Chain assets to Harmony and do swaps on Harmony at < $0.001 fee and 2-second finality on transactions. no more waiting or pay high fees. Of course, Defi on ethereum is the inspiration for us, but it isn’t usable by anyone with less than, say, $1000 if each transaction just to get started is $20-100 per transaction. Come try our https://bridge.harmony.one/
How important is the community to Harmony? How do you think you can motivate people to actively join this project?
Our ONE community is the most important part of the project. We try to be very welcoming. I think that comes from the founding team and community – we were a bunch of hungry and foolish entrepreneurs and engineers from silicon valley.
We left our jobs at Apple, Google, and Amazon to come out and see if we can build something entirely different, an open and decentralized platform driven by our community. We have active community governance discussions: https://talk.harmony.one/c/governance/33
There are so many ways to get people involved. I find that everyONE who comes into blockchain has their unique perspective and brings a new idea. we want to help all of you build your vision on harmony. Already there are several projects launched on top of our network showing great promise so come talk to us. harmony.one/telegram
Live Session
The ONE name might sometimes lead to confusion when talking about it in person: “twenty-one ONE” vs “twenty-ONE”. Aren’t you afraid this might slow down the adoption of the network?
A good ONE! although many of our community love being part of ONE family.
What kind of work schedule do you all keep? Are you concerned with burnout or losing talent?
We work “crypto hours” – so we work every day that ends in a letter “y”. But we do get exercise and have some family time too! it’s not work-life balance, but work-life harmony
How can you make ONE more accessible to mainstream developers that don’t know how to use solidarity?
Ah, any ideas? solidity is getting more popular. let me ask our engineers.
Does Harmony Protocol seek to solve any specific problem in the Crypto ecosystem?
Our focus in 2021 is cross-chain finance. The specific problem is there is too much fragmentation of different chains and assets. we build bridges to ethereum, binance smart chain – with bitcoin, cosmos, Polkadot coming too – to address this exact problem. soon we can do cross-chain swaps and APIs to let people access blockchain but without the need to manage all these different chains, wallets and assets.
What role will Harmony play when Ethereum 2.0 mainnet exists?
We have a bridge to ethereum. our goal is not to compete, but rather to connect the major blockchain ecosystems
What is the future of Harmony?
Take a look at our http://harmony.one/2021 for all of our goals this year!
But will you launch a stable coin backed by $ONE after your ecosystem has achieved significant development?
We have over $1m in BUSD bridged from Ethereum and $2m in total bridged* assets. https://bridge.harmony.one/tokens this is a stablecoin that can already be used for any application on harmony