Harmony AMA on Guarda Wallet – Recap
Hi there, community!
We know that you love participating in our live AMA’s.
Here is a recap of our recent AMA with Nick Vasilich and Nikolaos Kost from Harmony $ONE. Don’t forget that you can easily create Harmony wallet and stake ONE with Guarda.
Harmony name is matching a music instrument so most people thinking is a music industry field project so do you have any plan to enter music industry?
Nikolaos Kost
Harmony indeed has some music origin, but nope we don’t have plans to expand in the music industry. Harmony is a fast and secure blockchain for decentralized applications. Our production mainnet supports 4 shards of 1000 nodes, producing blocks in 8 seconds with finality. Our Effective Proof-of-Stake (EPoS) reduces centralization while supporting stake delegation, reward compounding and double-sign slashing.
Nick Vasilich
We’re already there – we’re in sharding melody industry but actually if i got your question right – you’re asking about the name of Harmony – and it’s definitely related to the melody
What is your marketing strategy to attract customers and investors to #ONE geared towards blockchain users and newbie?
Nikolaos Kost
Thank you Alttire for your question. In the upcoming weeks we are launching a large-scale marketing campaign to approach a larger community in celebration of the launch of Open Staking.
We will have campaigns with exchanges such as Binance, and many other partners.
The Definitive Guide to Harmony Open Staking
In terms of business has two main industries to bring wider communities: cross-border finance and game collectibles.
We have announced already that Quidd, the biggest game collectibles marketplace will build on Harmony, with goals expecting 200000 users and 1 billion transactions.
What are you plans for the project with regards to the most anticipated event of 2020, the Bitcoin halving? In your opinion, how do you think this will affect the project and, more broadly, on the crypto industry?
Nick Vasilich
Thanks for the question! It’s a very good question. Unfortunately adoption for blockchain faces lots of circumstances as we can see, but as you can find in our core vision such lines:
There’s no consensus without open participation!
with our staking product we opened the doors of blockchain industry to any volunteer. We have participants who started for node from 0 to hero in 1 week – we make it easy to join to anyone and it correlates as our marketing strategy and motto – Open Consensus for 10 B
Bitcoin halving attracts more attention to the industry now – it creates more visibility for all the projects and Harmony included – I positively estimate BTC halving affection on the whole industry and harmony especially.
But it’s only MHO
What are the benefits for Validators at Harmony and What are the requirements to become a validator of Harmony?
Nikolaos Kost
Of course benefits outside of being part of those safeguarding and assist with the governance of a leading blockchain are monetary.
I am sharing here a spreadsheet which allows you to go through the rewards you can earn as a validator
Nick Vasilich
Requirements to be a Harmony Validator:
- tech savvy – linux basic knowledge as ssh, sudo, etc
- minimum amount to run a validator is 10 000 $ONE – you need these funds for spinning up a node
- time – you need time to monitor the process and align validator when it’s needed
detailed guide is here https://docs.harmony.one/home/validators
Nikolaos Kost
1st year yields range: 164% (at 5% staked) to 9% (at 95% staked)
Nick Vasilich
441 000 000 ONE per year for 320 validators – doesn’t it sound good for you to start learning linux
Nikolaos Kost
Here you can deepen more on Harmony’s token economic model: Harmony’s New Tokenomics
Also running a node it’s reflectively easy, and our tech ambassadors known as P-OPS are available 24 hours to assist you! We had many people who had no idea how to run a node, and now they do it with great success.
What are Harmony plans shaping up for marketing and building a strong, core community which is important for any new project in the crypto space?
Nick Vasilich
Don’t forget about delegations – paying small fees and forgetting about any validator’s headache – we designed protocol for any typeof participation – you can also mix validators activity and delegation
Nikolaos Kost
Our plans are multi- dimensional:
- Dev Grants to attract more developers, at the end of the day as a blockchain infrastructure, we want our blockchain to be used by many engineers. Soon we will announce the very first projects building on Harmony
- Industry focused: we are investing heavily resources in 2 industries, money remittances in the emerging world and game collectibles
- Community Driven: We are building local communities across different geographies: we have strong presence in Russia, China, India and other countries
- Tech Enthusiasts: We are trying with educational material to support newcomers, deepen their knowledge, experiment with tooling, and start building projects and growing startups
Nick Vasilich
Check our global telegram group and join sharding community
Tell us step by step to take a STAKING? What percentage of profits do we get if we take risks?
Nick Vasilich
Swap to native ONE – login to the staking dashboard – select a validator and delegate to him
percentage depends on validators fee and shown APR in his profiles
this percent ranges from 164% to 9% based on many factors
What progress can you share for developers and users support?
Nikolaos Kost
Please have a look in our GitHub – our engineers have achieved much earlier what many teams working to deliver for Ethereum 2.0 which is a great milestone for the sharded Proof of Stake Blockchains
What’s your overview on community support & How Harmony project attracts more community towards harmony project?
Nick Vasilich
24/7 multilingual telegram chats and discord server
When will the node campaign start? How will Harmony attract users to participate in nodes election??
Nikolaos Kost
We have launched pre-staking https://twitter.com/harmonyprotocol/status/1261083499194249216
Can you tell us about the open staking? What are the requirements to participate?
What will be the use case of native ONE token of Harmony in the Harmony ecosystem?
Nick Vasilich
Thanks for interesting Question
the very important vector for harmony is an integration with DeFi industry which brings utility for token – Harmony 2020: CrossFi, Open Dev, Auditable Privacy
How has the recent COVID-19 has affected your project? How will you survive, let’s say if this COVID-19 lasts a year longer?
Nikolaos Kost
Not much affected – it just helped us take our decision to go fully remote shorter. But we didn’t notice any disturbance, of course as individuals everyone is affected due to the situation
How are you able to offer very low fees?
Nick Vasilich
based on our tokenomics design we point to 0 issuance that means trx fees will 100% cover staking block rewards – even if you consider them so small that they actually are because of their amount (hundreds thousands trxs) will cover that
What’s so special about Harmony’s sharding?
Nikolaos Kost
This is a great video of our CTO introducing Effective Proof of Stake:
And here how it works:
Core Features of Harmony are:
- Scaling Privacy
- Secure Staking
- Radical Fairness
Can you Kindly explain each and what roles they play in the ecosystem?
Nick Vasilich
This post answers all your questions even better then anyone – because it’s even called
Scaling Privacy
Secure Staking
Radical Fairness
Nikolaos Kost
Effective Proof-of-Stake, is an efficient staking mechanism that avoids stake centralization while still supporting stake compounding and delegation.
With the introduction of effective stake, the higher ranked validators are actually economically punished to stake too much in a single validator and the lower-ranked validators are enjoying extra reward for their stake. The effective stake is acting as an equalizer that pushes for a more evenly distributed stake among validators, thus avoiding stake centralization.
In terms of delegation, token holders can freely choose one of more validators to delegate their tokens based on their commission rate, uptime and their position in the rank. The block rewards will be distributed to delegators pro-rata after the commission fee set by the validator is deducted. For delegators, It’s economically more rewarding to delegate to the validators in the green area as the return to stake ratio is higher, thus avoiding the stake centralization too.
With these design features, we can achieve our goals of supporting delegation, compounding stake while preserving decentralization.
Why have you decided to bring New Economic Model? Is the rewards system also changed depending upon the staking ratio?
Nikolaos Kost
After careful consideration we have updated the economic model of our network ahead of our upcoming open staking launch. In this new model, the total reward across the network (issuance plus transaction fees) will remain constant regardless of average block time and staking ratio. The goal of this change is to achieve a higher staking ratio, to simplify the model and to create a path to 0 issuance, all of which we believe will bring long term benefits for Harmony.
In your TG community, it was said that it would be ideal for up to 80% of tokens in staking (locked) to secure the network, why is this so?
Nikolaos Kost
A higher staking ratio is beneficial for two reasons. First, the staking ratio is a barometer for the health of a PoS chain. A high staking ratio (above 60%) means that the network is highly secure since mounting a 33% attack would require at least 20% of the token supply. Just as important, a high staking percentage signals a large and loyal community that is committed to the project for the long term. If 60% or more tokens are bonded in the staking contract, you know that a majority of tokens belong to HODLers.
The second benefit of a higher staking ratio is that it creates organic demand for the ONE token. In the long run adoption of on-chain applications will drive network usage and demand for ONE, but the first major use case and demand driver for the token will be staking. We believe that higher staking yields will lead to more desire to stake ONE, thus driving more demand.
What is the spotlight of HARMONY to convince users to invest in long-term investments?
Nick Vasilich
Harmony first of all is a technology, breaking technology, the technology that other projects are only trying to implement
Harmony is a fast and secure blockchain for decentralized applications. Our production mainnet supports 4 shards of 1000 nodes, producing blocks in 8 seconds with finality.
Our Effective Proof-of-Stake (EPoS) reduces centralization while supporting stake delegation, reward compounding and double-sign slashing.
Harmony has innovated on the battle-tested Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) for fast consensus of block transactions. Our Fast BFT (FBFT) leads to low transaction fees and 1-block-time finality in Harmony Mainnet. This is only a small list of tech achievements
Many people will want to know what Staking Harmony’s strength is, but I want to know the weaknesses and problems that Harmony faces. How do you plan to solve it?
Nick Vasilich
All weaknesses were recognized at the test phase – we can’t afford to launch product for ppl with weaknesses
When will the node campaign start? How will Harmony attract users to participate in nodes election?
Nick Vasilich
Wait for official announcement soon https://twitter.com/harmonyprotocol but you can stake your ONE today too
What’re the leading utilities of $ONE coin? Why investors and traders should look toward $ONE? Is there any reward mechanism for holding $ONE
Nick Vasilich
To invest or not it’s totally up to you, reward mechanism for holding it’s OPEN STAKING!-
I was impressed with harmony mainnet, now what milestones have you achieved since you launched your mainnet. I also saw that BEP2 tokens are still around, do you have a token bridge for swaps and do you plan to phase out BEP2 tokens
Nick Vasilich
These are achievements of our blockchain in previous months. https://explorer.harmony.one/#/
What’s pangea 2?
What’s EPOS and how is it better than POS?
Nikolaos Kost
We launched Pangaea in August 2019 as an experimental platform for thousands of users to interact with the Harmony network, test the limitations of our technology and have lots of fun while earning rewards.
If you’ve previously thought running a node was too technical or expensive, this is a great opportunity to give it a go. There is an amazing community on Pangaea to help you out every step of the way.
The goals of Pangaea:
Test Harmony’s upcoming core protocol milestones and updates such as staking smart contracts and resharding, on a network of all external nodes
Set-up and onboard a vast number of nodes, ready to jump into the mainnet, through collective knowledge building and competitions
Create an education oriented node community and reward community members who are willing to go the extra mile by taking leadership roles (An awesome example here is P-OPS!)
Who can participate?
EveryONE — the more the merrier! To create a fully secure, permission-less, and sharded blockchain we need lots and lots of nodes.
If you want to get your hands dirty and play with the network, this is the way to go! Become a node, learn on the go, secure Pangaea and help out others.
In addition, you will win rewards for maintaining superior network performance during the game.
https://t.me/PangaeaVolunteers Please join us here
How has the recent COVID-19 has affected your project? How will you survive, let’s say if this COVID-19 lasts a year longer?
Nick Vasilich
We rebuilt our work in office to work form home – we developed and grew up remote team sync in different time zone to the master level of 24/7 and biz/dev sync and interchangeability
Since time in the past, what are the remarkable things that Harmony has done with its own token ONE?
Nick Vasilich
Launch of the original mainet and native token staking – it’s remarkable for Q2 2020
Can you tell me what has been done and what are the targeted plans to do, in order to achieve real-world adoption?
Nick Vasilich
Adoption comes when community have real things “to touch” – as you can see we develop the product for ppl to use. what have been done already is a building a product for the community – next stage is use cases for the product and building on our technology. Then adoption comes, but it’s on the main purpose.
It was an amazing AMA. Grateful to Nick Vasilich and Nikolaos Kost for their participation.