Harmony Protocol AMA RECAP
Hello Everyone ! Welcome to our Second AMA (Ask Me Anything) with Harmony. On 20th of July 2021, CryptoSpartans had a live AMA session with Sahil Dewan (Co-founder of Harmony Protocol). In case you missed it here is the recap.
AMA Summary:
Segment 1: Questions for Harmony Team
Segment 2: Live Q&A
The transcript has been edited for clarity.
INTRODUCTION PART
Sahil Dewan |Harmony
I am Sahil, currently leading product at Harmony. I am originally from Chandigarh and did my CS engineering in India a few years ago. I came to the US for business school and got excited about blockchain back in 2016. So i started exploring different projects and decided that I wanted to be a builder in this space. I met Stephen Tse the founder of Harmony back in June 2018 and loved the problem of scalability that he was trying to solve. And three years of roller coaster later, here I am.
Segment 1: Questions for Harmony team
Priyank Gupta |HOST
So let’s start on this intro to Harmony. Can you tell us more about why it’s great as a scaling solution and Are you guys planning on layer 1 and layer 2 work with both combination ?
Sahil Dewan |Harmony
Harmony has built a sharded Proof of Stake blockchain, much like the design of ETH 2.0. Today, we have close to 1000 nodes and over 4.2B ONE staked to ensure economic security. At the same time, the network finalized transactions in 2 seconds, with negligible txn fee. Besides the fast blockchain, we also have two more things supporting the growth in developers and dapps — bridges with other chains like Ethereum, BSC, Terra, and full EVM and Ethereum tools compatibilites. We believe that scaling layer 1 (eth) through trustless bridges is the way to go.
~S~| HOST
What kind of DeFi and NFT apps are being built on Harmony currently? How is the response you are getting from the community and why you think NFT is important for crypto? What applications do you see Harmony being used for besides DeFi and NFTs?
Sahil Dewan |Harmony
We’ve seen Defi apps like Sushiswap and other Decentralized exchanges like Viper, Mochi already serving thousands of users and have exponentially growing asset growth. We’re about to see other defi protocols like aggregators, lending-borrowing come soon. On NFTs, we’ve had a lot of success with DaVinci marketplace (https://davinci.gallery)
NFT is an application of crypto which majority of mainstream users may understand easiest, and thats why it has the potential to have a wide outreach in the near future. Once users can easily buy/trade their favorite collectibles, it will drive more innovation on the type of things you can tokenize and create in the marketplace.
Besides DeFi and NFT, we’re seeing some innovation around wallet UX, Blockchain domain names and DAOs.
Lucifer Morningstar |HOST
Does Harmony Protocol seek to solve any specific problem in the Crypto ecosystem? Any plans to expand your work in india ?
Sahil Dewan |Harmony
The critical problem we’re trying to solve is to build a scalable platform that can enable apps that can serve billions of users. Today we struggle with the infrastrucure for such high scale of usage. We’ve already visited India back in 2019 and have worked with some great blockchain entrepreneurs. We wanted to solve for cross-border payments in India and are still looking to partner with early adopters on this. Besides, we welcome developers to come join our communities — we just announced our $1M hackathon — hack.harmony.one
Segment 2: Live Q&A
Q1. @LoLi_BB: What major partnerships does Harmony Protocol intend to use or how does Harmony Protocol bring its products to the average consumer — especially non-crypto users?
Ans: This is a great question. we need a combination of use cases that people care about (like earning yield, fixed savings, collectibles) along with great onboarding through keyless wallets. This is one such initiative in that direction https://docs.harmony.one/home/network/wallets/1wallet
Q2.@MinatoONE: My 3 questions are:
(I). How would you persuade investors and developers who are convinced of the usefullness of ETH 2.0, to instead get into Harmony?
(II). How is Harmony‘s sharding different from the other sharding PoS protocols like Elrond, Near Protocol and others (anything else than the ability to add shards and hardware) ?
(III). Do you believe that the VRF is enough secure to defend against possible network attacks and spam attacks?
Ans: Our platform is already in production, along with bridges and supporting tools and that’s the big advantage — you can start building today.
Sharding is similar with some intricate differences in design across these projects.
Q3. @Pandalucu66: In regards to your sharding system, What kind of reaI-life application or adoption will sharding improve to heIp bring the masses to Harmony ecosytem? And what is so speciaI about harmony’s deep sharding?
Ans: Sharding enables higher capacity in the network to supports dapps and transactions. Sharding doesn’t enable new use cases, but rather enables more apps to exist on the platform.
Q4. @Hodl_Harmony: I think the harmony team has done an excellent job increasing exposure in recent weeks due to partnerships and incentives (Terra, Sushi, pancake swap etc). This has been great to see, and has translated into more users and daily transactions (and tx volume). A job very well done — we appreciate the hard work you all do.
One of the original reasons I became involved in harmony was due to its technology; its speed, low cost and scalability. We’ve now seen a pick up in activity in the last month or two which has slowed down block time / finality, led to occasional unresponsiveness when using various dapps built on the blockchain, and to the newly acquainted perhaps falls short on some of harmony’s differentiators. What actions are you taking / will you take to continue to encourage new users to join but also then remain active in harmony’s ecosystem in light of this?
Ans: This is a growth pain for any blockchain project. we’re working hard on redesigning our end-point architecture so that our network can be accessible 99.9999% by Dapps.
Q5. @crypto_antaryami: Recently you announced about a hackathon to bridge TradFi and DeFi. Can you please give more details about the event and your take on why TradFi should be bridged with DeFi?
Ans: hack.harmony.one — blockchain can really disrupt middlemen in traditional finance and that’s why we need tradfi developers to start building on blockchain.
Q6. @lionkingOO7: (I) Why haven’t harmony got the mass adoption? What are the challenges / painpoints you are facing to be in leaderboard.
(II) Could you through more light one privacy space as Stephen consider it as 4th trilemma
(III) What will be competitive advantage harmony will have once eth 2.0 and cardano smart contract have been launched. And When will be ONE token converted into INR coins?
Ans: Privacy will become more important as we’re able to scale zero-knowledge based privacy primitives. There’s tremendous number of applications in healthcare, finance, marketplaces where privacy will play a key role.
Q7. @carlos671: Can you mention some highlights of the team behind your project? What is your background and experience that gave birth to the platform and ensured its vision and future development? Knowing this is important to earn the trust of investors.
Ans: harmony.one/team Stephen our CEO does a great job at sharing our founding story. This is dated but you can read here https://medium.com/harmony-one/introducing-harmony-an-open-scalable-marketplace-for-the-decentralized-economy-2c2b551d4b87
Q8. @minhnguyeua: Community is the successful key of any projects, so what are HarmonyProtocol’s plans for expanding community and which area you are priority?
Ans: https://medium.com/harmony-one/the-way-of-harmony-daos-68003bfeaace we’re super excited about engaging community through DAOs
Q9. @Yasmin1234: What is your strongest advantage that you think will make your team leading the market? In contrast, what is your weakness? How do you plan to overcome it?
Ans: our fast execution and listening to what developers and users really want.
Q10. @leronyB: I Saw you guys partnership with LUNA ? Why harmony need this partnership?
Ans: Terra is doing great things in the algorithmic stablecoins, payments and all amazing traditional finance use cases. We’re excited to bring Terra and LUNA to Harmony.
Sahil Dewan |Harmony
Awesome, thanks so much for all your questions guys, I know there’s a lot of interest with follow up questions, I encourage you all to join the Official telegram group and be a part of the Harmony community. https://t.me/harmony_one
Thank you everyone once again for participating in this exciting community AMA! It was our pleasure to host AMA with Harmony Protocol.
