From DAO, ZKP to the blue metaverse, Harmony is betting on the future of Web3

Interview: Kit, CatcherVC

Author: Nianqing, Chain Catcher

In the past year, Harmony has stood out among many new public chains due to its robust dynamic sharding technology and strong DeFi community, with its token ONE experiencing significant price growth last year. This year, the team seems to have a clearer goal for Harmony's positioning.

Founded in 2018, Harmony launched its token ONE through Binance Launchpad in May 2019. From the beginning, Harmony aimed to solve the "impossible triangle problem" of blockchain, allowing the network to partition the database into smaller parts through random state sharding, thus reducing latency with "sharding." Additionally, sharding enables near-instant transactions while avoiding network congestion.

Compared to other L1s, Harmony's start was not early, and it still lags behind top public chains in terms of financing and other aspects, with its ecosystem currently under construction.

However, starting late is not necessarily a disadvantage. Before founding Harmony, Stephen Tse asked himself, "What is the biggest market opportunity right now? What kind of product can immediately capture the most value in the market?" His answer was: a platform infrastructure that powers decentralized economies. Because "internet technology has impacted hundreds of millions, mobile technology has affected billions; now, we need a technology that can directly impact 10 billion people in the future."

Of course, the total population of the Earth is just over 7 billion, and Harmony's slogan aimed at "10 billion people" symbolizes the future and reflects its long-term vision.

Since it aims for "10 billion people," this infrastructure must be high-speed, low-cost, and sufficiently secure. Therefore, over the past few years, Harmony has been "digging deep," investing significant effort in underlying infrastructure and technology development. Harmony is the first L1 public chain to implement sharding, which is also a goal for Ethereum to achieve in 2023. Furthermore, Harmony can process 2000 transactions per second (TPS), comparable to Visa, while a normal transfer costs about 0.000021 ONE, with transaction fees being less than one percent of Ethereum's.

It is precisely because of its late start that Harmony has chosen to extend its time dimension, opting to be a "long-termist" to avoid being overly disturbed by short-term market behaviors. Thus, four years after its establishment, the team proposed the next four-year plan and clarified its roadmap to 2026: to expand Web3 through ZKP and DAO.

So, specifically, what does this vision look like? How is the current ecosystem? To address these questions, Chain Catcher interviewed Giv Parvaneh, Harmony's Head of Product and Communications.

1. Three Keywords of Harmony

If Harmony's ecosystem could be summarized in three words, Giv Parvaneh's answer would be: Scalability, Cross-chain Capability, and Long-termism.

Currently, most public chains, even L2s, are launching their own ecosystem funds to attract developers and quality projects, making competition increasingly fierce. Six months ago, Harmony also launched a $300 million ecosystem incentive program to fund outstanding innovative projects.

In this environment, how does Harmony maintain its advantage in competition?

Giv Parvaneh stated, "This field is never short of money. Developers will certainly consider better grants, but that is only part of the attraction. We believe that good infrastructure is what truly attracts people. Harmony will never rely solely on ecosystem funds to attract developers; that is unsustainable. We rely on the fastest and best performance, which is also affordable for users." Additionally, Harmony provides a lot of support for developers in the ecosystem. For example, the recently launched Zero-Knowledge University aims to enhance the skills of 1000 developers by 2024.

Comparison data of Harmony with other Layer 2 ecosystems

Therefore, the three keywords mentioned by Giv can also serve as reasons to choose Harmony.

• Scalability: As an EVM-compatible sharded PoS blockchain, Harmony's Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerance (FBFT) consensus protocol, combined with random state sharding and Boneh-Lynn-Shacham (BLS) constant-size signatures, allows Harmony to complete transactions in about two seconds per block. On the other hand, Harmony does not compromise security or decentralization even when scaling. For example, the network assigns nodes or computers that join the network and validate transactions to different shards through a distributed random generation mechanism.
• Cross-chain Capability: Harmony believes that the future will definitely be a multi-chain world, and its bridging architecture is industry-leading. At the end of November last year, Harmony launched a cross-chain bridge called Horizon, allowing for cross-chain interoperability with Ethereum. Harmony can also interoperate with Binance Chain, and from the 2022 roadmap, it is evident that Harmony is developing a Bitcoin bridge, aiming to establish an ETH<->ONE<->BTC hub as liquidity infrastructure.
• Long-termism: Harmony believes that DAO, the metaverse, and ZK are certainly the future. In its planning from 2022 to 2026, Harmony has established several more mature product directions: first, compressing computation and state into concise representations—namely, low-cost zkEVM rollups, trustless Flyclient bridges, and stateless non-interactive PoPoW clients; second, protecting privacy across multiple chains and Web2-to-Web3 operations. For example, cross-chain mixers like Tornado, or supporting anonymous verification and voting functions; third, verifiable delay functions (VDF) that ensure blockchain fairness will become key to randomness in games and lotteries.

Moreover, to achieve "mass decentralization," Harmony aims to build 10,000 DAOs by 2026. Ideally, by 2026, all of Harmony's funding, development, and governance will be decentralized across thousands of cross-chain DAOs.

Giv mentioned, "We hope Harmony will be the top choice for future DAOs to build upon." Currently, Harmony is working to provide better tools and infrastructure for DAOs.

"We believe this plan can last for many years and impact generations. Short-term market behavior is a distraction, and a four-year plan allows us to eliminate distractions and focus on achieving decentralization. DAO is the key to making the ecosystem more open; in the near future, Harmony's community will grow strong enough to surpass the core team, becoming more vibrant and resilient," Giv added.

2. Blue Metaverse

At this year's Ethereum Denver summit, Harmony announced the "Blue Metaverse" plan. In Harmony's metaverse, it integrates sectors such as GameFi, NFT, and DeFi.

Giv explained that the focus on GameFi is because this vertical is also a relatively successful and experienced segment of the Harmony ecosystem, especially the tremendous success of DeFi Kingdoms, which has further strengthened the team's resolve to form a dedicated team to develop GameFi and the metaverse. Additionally, NFTs and games target a larger user base, and Harmony's low gas fees and high performance are also key attractions for developers and NFT creators.

Harmony is improving cross-chain NFT infrastructure to reduce transaction fees for NFT transfers and cross-chain operations. Besides cross-chain functionality, the team is also developing other features such as NFT lending, NFT verification, and optimization.

Currently, Harmony's "Blue Metaverse" ecosystem includes projects like DeFi Kingdoms, Tranquility City, MarsColony, and Defira.

1. DeFi Kingdoms

DeFi Kingdoms (abbreviated as "DFK") is Harmony's "on-chain gem." This GameFi game once surpassed Axie Infinity to become one of the most popular blockchain games. DFK launched in August 2021, with its TVL peaking over $1 billion, accounting for half of Harmony's ecosystem TVL.

This is an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) and also the largest DEX on Harmony. The game presents a pixelated style, visualizing all DeFi functions and allowing users to earn rewards through utility NFTs. DFK has landed on the Avalanche subnet this April, creating a logically similar yet economically independent game world.

2. Tranquil Finance and Defira

Tranquil Finance launched last November and is Harmony's second-largest native DeFi application, funded by the Harmony ecosystem fund. However, Tranquil is developed as the DeFi component of the Defira metaverse, with Tranquil Finance serving as the in-game lending protocol, and it includes a complete set of all major DeFi primitives, such as DEX, liquid staking, and cross-chain bridges. Additionally, Defira uses collectible and breedable NFT heroes to create highly playable game mechanics, truly leveraging the advantages of blockchain gaming to innovate game mechanisms.

3. MarsColony

MarsColony is a new type of virtual society that allows people to imagine how to settle in a new world and build everything from scratch. The game is constructing a future community driven by social welfare, universal basic income, and direct democracy principles, integrating elements of P2E, DAO, and DeFi.

4. Tranquility City

Tranquility City is a P2E game where players can stake plants in their apartments to own real estate, decorations, and earn LUMEN governance tokens.

5. One World

One World is a virtual city game on Harmony, similar to The Sandbox and Decentraland, both of which are metaverse land projects. Users can purchase their own properties and trade in the in-game market and participate in activities.

Conclusion

An increasing number of viewpoints suggest that the future of the crypto industry will be a multi-chain world. In the midst of intense competition, various public chains will hone their unique strengths and cultivate differentiated competitiveness. For Harmony, its technological advantages and increasingly clear ecological path are driving it toward a more certain and prosperous future.