Harmony AMA review with Vite community on 11 Mar 2020



  • On 11 Mar 2020, 14:00 UTC, Vite welcome the special guest Nikolaos Kost, from Business and Partnerships Department of Harmony joining an AMA with Vite community at Telegram.

    38772c17-10c2-465a-ae76-e638aa6bab50-image.png

    About Harmony
    Harmony is a fast and secure blockchain with innovations in state sharding and peer-to-peer networking. Its sharding uses secure proof-of-stake and decentralized randomness, and its networking achievers optimal cross-shard routing and fast block propagation. Since its Mainnet launched in June, Harmony was able to draw much attention from the developer community. Dapps started to be built on Harmony blockchain and some of them issued their own tokens.
    Useful links
    Website: https://harmony.one/
    Telegram: https://telegram.me/harmony_one
    GitHub: https://github.com/harmony-one/harmony
    Explorer:https://explorer.harmony.one/#/
    Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/rdCmBpe
    Twitter: https://twitter.com/harmonyprotocol


    AMA

    Vite admin: Welcome to the AMA today, Nikost, can you tell us about yourself, and Harmony story?
    Nikost – Harmony: Harmony is a fast and secure blockchain. Our mission is to scale trust for billions of people and create a radically fair economy. We are a team of infrastructure engineers in Silicon Valley, including 4 Ph.D., 7 ex-Google/Amazon/Apple/Facebook, 2 Harvard MBA, and Stanford/Berkeley AI graduates.
    I have joined Harmony's marketing team during April 2019 when we have launched Harmony IEO on Binance, and the last months I am working with partners building on Harmony. I am working from the EU office - while Harmony has HQ also in San Francisco and China.
    Except for being intelligent, the team is also hard-working. Here you can see our GitHub Activity.
    Vite admin: Adoption is one of the important factors that all sustainable blockchain projects. Could you tell us what is Harmony's achievement and your plan to achieve ADOPTION, real use cases?
    Nikost – Harmony: I would dare to say that blockchains that will fail to build cases outside of the crypto will not be viable in the long-term.
    Once staking is launched, we have plans to integrate with Lympo, which is a Samsung Galaxy health tracking app that rewards users based on their activity. They are built on Ethereum, but are interested in Harmony for its scalability and low transaction cost. We are also integrating Quidd, which is a digital collectible that we acquired.
    We are currently exploring an integration point to allow for transactions to operate on Harmony. Lastly, our biggest focus is our Cross-Fi platform. Our team sees a huge opportunity in Cross-FI (Cross Border Finance) finance. We have done a lot of exploration in South Korea, China, India, and South East Asia to figure out which horizontal layer of the vertical stack would fit best. Is it the settlement, credit rating for the international accounting layer? We are trying to figure out how Harmony will best integrate in terms of its speed and low transaction costs.
    Vite admin: What innovations brings Harmony's Effective Proof of Stake?
    Nikost – Harmony: Harmony is a Proof of Stake Blockchain. We were researching both technically and economically how to make Proof of Stake more effective- hence we have published in May 2019 our Effective Proof of Stake.
    The model we considered, is different from traditional PoS, which is very wealth driven. In those models, if you own 90% of staked tokens you earn 90% of rewards. To encourage more decentralization, EPoS will enable a median stake. There will be a 20% up and down number that would be the sweet spot for earning rewards. In that sweet spot, everyone is earning the same amount. If a validator stakes too much, they would be out of the sweet spot and potentially earn no rewards. For example, if 7 was the sweet spot, and they staked 100, 93 of those tokens staked would not earn any rewards. It’s in the delegator's best interest to find the best validator that is in the low margin of staking. The best ROI in rewards is highest when staking for those in the sweet spot.
    Effective proof of stake (EPoS) is just one way we are incentivizing decentralization. Once we are live, we will continue testing and improving. Our philosophy at Harmony is to deliver products as quickly as possible so we can learn faster and improve quickly. More details are available here.
    Vite admin: How close is to release Open Staking? Is Harmony the first PoS sharded blockchain into production?
    Nikost – Harmony: Actually, it's a great timing you address this question. Today we will publish our announcement about the Open Staking Launch pending deliverables and launch timeline. It might be live until the AMA in our community. We believe with this milestone Harmony is set to be the first sharded Proof of Stake- validating that ETH2.0 which will come much later is technically viable and applicable. Of course, the transition might be challenging for our friends at the Ethereum foundation. The staking comes with the economic incentives- hence we have revised our Token Economic Model to make sense. Find more here. Instead of speaking, we would like to extend an invitation to Vite community to get their hands dirty and experiment with Open Staking in our Pangaea - our testnet- we have also bounties available.
    Vite admin: Is Harmony the first PoS sharded blockchain into production?
    Nikost – Harmony: I would dare to say that yes, Harmony is the first Sharded PoS blockchain. There is a great article by Blockchain Analyst Rohit Chatterjee featured on Harmony naming Harmony as the first sharded Pos blockchain on production. Check it here.
    "Not only has Harmony’s achievement shown that it can be realized in practice, but it has also paved the way for Ethereum to implement a sharded and PoS-enabled blockchain, making blockchain enthusiasts confident that Eth 2.0 might see the light of day soon now."
    Vite admin: Can we do a quick overview of what sharding is and how it applies to scalability in Harmony?
    Nikost – Harmony: Sharding is an interesting way to optimize a blockchain. You don’t need to increase the throughput of the entire blockchain. You can have four blockchains that communicate well together to better manage the workload of the blockchain.
    For example, when you come into Harmony and log into your account, it will exist on four or more shards at launch (e.g.: Shard 0 through Shard 3). If I have a balance of ONE token on Shard 1, I may not have any on Shard 0. If I send you tokens on Shard 1 you will see them on Shard 1, but may not see them on Shards 3 or 2. This is something a user should be aware of. When you log in, you have accounts on all Shards and can perform cross-sharding transactions; your address can exist across all Shards and may have different balances on each.
    Vite admin: How can user engage with Harmony now?
    Nikost – Harmony: In our roadmap with experimenting and providing feedback about Open Staking! We have $50,000 of $one reward for people to experiment with the network! it hasn't been announced yet, but I believe within the week we will release the full details on how to participate. You can engage with our community or subscribe to our announcements channel to get the latest updates.


    Community Q&A

    Sonia (@Baby_Crypto): Does the Harmony team see Ethereum PoS as a competitive platform? What is the competitive strategy of the Harmony project after moving to PoS Ethereum?
    Nikost – Harmony: Absolutely Ethereum 2.0 is going to be a competitor. Our comparative advantage is that we have launched much earlier than ETH2.0 and resolve some of the early vulnerabilities that every new blockchain architecture will experience during the early days. Of course, Ethereum is a great ecosystem and we are trying to participate actively- engaging with developers and build cross-chain bridges with the growing Ethereum ecosystem.
    Machine Gun Kelly (@cailozma1900): Does the Harmony team have a plan to increase or decrease the supply? And how will that be done to manage the supply of Harmony?
    Nikost – Harmony: The total supply will be recalculated when Open Staking will launch to include annual inflation staking rewards. We have worked carefully to design our token economy validated by research team Delphi Digital. Check it here.
    Rekt X (@whosaidyourlegit): How can I set up a node?
    Nikost – Harmony: We have set a guide on how to set up a note in out Open Staking testnet. Also, our tech ambassadors going by the name P-OPS are around in our community to help you connect.
    Dun- Devloper NG (@DuncanTraynor): Let's leave aside all the hype a la "it's good, cause it's blockchain" and speak specifically. How Harmony tech can improve my life in terms of financial service?
    Nikost – Harmony: We are focusing on developing economies and right now exploring the cross-fi market. This is a great article that we have published about Cross-fi.
    Joy Ico (@Shan_is_real_king): What are the minimum requirements to build Harmony node? Can I use Ankr to deploy Harmony node?
    Nikost – Harmony: Yeap you can use Ankr to deploy a Harmony node for Open Staking. Here are the steps to start operating a Harmony node. Technically you need the following requirements: Technical requirements: Minimum of 2 cores, 2G RAM, 50 GB (or more to be safe) hard drive. AWS t3. small or equivalent from other cloud provider.
    SURI (@demono1): There are 3 common core issues in technology today: scalability, security, and interoperability, speed and privacy. So, how will Harmony solve these problems?
    Nikost – Harmony: Here is our pitch- how Harmony is solving the blockchain quadrilemma https://harmony.one/keynote. For the last few years, the trilemma — decentralization vs scalability vs security — has sparked many advances in blockchain protocols.
    To us, achieving all these characteristics is not an impossibility but an expansion of the triangle through great engineering. But, here, let me present the blockchain quadrilemma, adding the fourth critical dimension, privacy. I’d argue this pyramid will be one of the most important problems for our generation to solve in the coming decades: to understand what privacy means in terms of human rights, product design, and the digital economy. And, to build an open platform without sacrificing performance, without delegation to a central entity, and with verifiable security.
    zafer metin (@zaferce): Harmony is among your recent plans: $10k transaction fees; $10m ONE staked; 100% uptime; 10 hires; important goals. How close are you to achieving these goals? Harmony is also very transparent in explaining her goals. This is an issue to be appreciated. How close are you to the realization of these goals? How will Harmony (ONE) shape the future? What kind of ecosystem do you plan?
    Nikost – Harmony: You did a great job going through our 2020 Goals! Every week and monthly we update through Twitter about our goals. We share here also the updates. For those who are not familiar with our TEAM 2020 goals, this is a great resource to get you started.

    The end of AMA. For more information about Harmony, please refer to Harmony Website. Special thanks to Nikolaos Kost for joining the AMA.


    Vite useful resources:

    Website: https://vite.org
    Telegram: https://t.me/vite_en
    ViteX: https://vitex.net
    ViteX telegram: https://t.me/vitexexchange


Log in to reply