What is Harmony?
Harmony is a high throughput blockchain project that aims to transform the world into an open marketplace, and it supports the coming decentralized economy by operating at an extremely high scale. The Harmony team aims to provide a consensus protocol over the open internet that is able to facilitate 10 million transactions per second (tps) with a 100-millisecond latency, and a maximum fee of 0.1%.
The team aims to build a platform that operates significantly faster and cheaper than both Bitcoin and Ethereum, while also being able to operate at a scale similar to Google. As a result, they are set to rebuild the decentralized economy by focusing on and innovating a number of key existing components, including:
--Transport network – Google’s UDP, Bloom tables, 5G mobile.
--Consensus protocol – Byzantine committees, acyclic graphs, monopolist fees.
--System tooling – Unikernels, multi-core in Rust, zero-copy streaming.
Google’s UDP currently powers 35% of its traffic (or 7% of the Internet) with 50% latency improvement, while the OmniLedger Byzantine protocol benchmarks to 13,000 tps and 1.5 second latency with 1,800 hosts. In addition, unikernels in Rust archives 10 million concurrent connections on a standard 96-core machine on Amazon Cloud, as a result the Harmony team feels that by employing technical innovations to structures that are already proven in research, and implementation they will be able to create a high speed and low cost blockchain infrastructure that is able to support real world industries.
Harmony have also outlined a number of crucial benchmarks which include a maximum transaction fee of 0.1%, in order to support new marketplaces of metered content or fractional work. Furthermore, as the proposed infrastructure for the world’s data firehose, their bandwidth must scale to 10 million tps in order to be able to process data from supply chain IoT devices, financial institutions, or energy grids. Most importantly, the platform must settle agreements within 100 milliseconds in order to be able to support instant reactions for autonomous robots or on-chain quotes in exchanges.
Product Readiness
The team has released a public Github
page with the MIT open source license. It is possible to view the development of
Min (Harmony’s proprietary programming language), the security-verifying programming language that eliminates the common dependencies of libraries or system tools. The compiler currently bootstraps itself in x86-64 instructions and supports development in MacOS. The team also states that
Min compiles to Java VM without any third-party tools in an unpublished repo.
In addition, the team were scheduled to validate that the OmniLedger protocol in Go could sustain 10,000 tps, and adversarial attacks with 10,0000 nodes in Q2 2018. They were also scheduled to move ahead with forming a team of five engineers and securing funds via a seed round. The project is currently hiring new engineers and appears to have secured $18 million worth of funding so things seem to be moving along as planned.
Two additional validation benchmarks have been set for Q3 which should currently be underway. The team are verifying that lock-free and allocator-free algorithms in Rust scale linearly on a 96-core unikernel on Amazon Cloud, and that Google’s UDP sustains broadcast at 100ms latency with 10,000 nodes and saturated 10 Gbps links. Once completed, the team is also scheduled to open public benchmarks for up to 10,000 nodes during Q3 of this year.
Space in the Market & Competitive Landscape
Harmony is attempting to provide a blockchain infrastructure with a high potential for scaling and processing transactions at a high speed for a low cost. As a result the project faces competition from platforms that seek to do similar things such as EOS, Cardano, Hashgraph, and Zilliqa. There are also projects such as High Performance Blockchain, Dfinity, and Seele that are addressing similar issues, and Harmony is entering a rather crowded sector that will only continue to attract further participants. The team are adamant that their ability to execute efficiently and improve current systems such as OmniLedger will see them gain a competitive advantage over their rivals. They generally seek to master innovations already proven in practice, and focus on the key components of transport networks,
consensus protocols, and systems tooling.
Competitors’ valuations:
- EOS, valued $14B.
- Zilliqa, valued $700M.
- Hashgraph, raising $300M.
- Thunder, valued $100M.
- Dfinity, raised $100M.
- Kadena, raised $12M.
- Algorand, raised $4M
Size of Potential Market
Despite the existence of a significant number of projects aimed at tackling similar issues, there is still a sizeable market for the Harmony team to target. Scalability remains a crucial issue in the blockchain economy and any project that is able to solve the problem and also attract users to their platform will experience a considerable appreciation in value.
Harmony plans to compete with projects such as EOS which is currently valued at $10 billion, Zilliqa which is valued at around $700 million, and Hashgraph which is valued at approximately $300 million. In addition, projects such as Dfinity, that sought to raise around $90 million during their ICO show that the high throughput blockchain sector is one of the larger segments of the industry that is consistently able to generate funds.
As the problem of producing a high performance blockchain that is able to work out in the real world has still not been solved, the Harmony platform will be a viable option to the world of commercial technology if the team are able to make good on their promises.
Innovation & Intellectual Property
Harmony is operating as a fully open source project and has made its full code available to view at
Github for native X86-64 / JVM compiler, and the open development community.
Blockchain Advantage
Blockchain technology is a central part of the Harmony project, as the team aims to build a highly scalable, high performance platform infrastructure.
Need for Custom Token
While the whitepaper does not elaborate on the need for a custom token it does state that Harmony is building an open marketplace for the decentralized economy. The team view their platform as the gateway for micro transactions and online business, and as a result a native currency will be employed to help facilitate this.
In addition to being designed to support marketplaces of metered content or fractional work, and process transactions between IoT devices, the Harmony token should be used to reward/incentivize network participants for performing a number of tasks on the network.
Precautionary Measures
The team outlines a few areas of concern and their methods for dealing with them; these include the sharding issue of high churn for OmniLedger and Chainspace. Churn occurs when network nodes temporarily go offline or unresponsive, and Harmony follows The Honey Badger of BFT Protocols; as its randomized consensus helps mitigate the churn problem.
Additionally, private leader election and fast view change are proposed as a defence mechanism to single-shard DoS attacks, and OmniLedger optimizes ByzCoin by reusing randomized seeds to elect group leaders. On top of this, the team have also developed Min, a Harmony subproject which is a new language for programming software with security guarantees that may lead to unhackable systems. It involves the devising of static types with concise syntax as security specification, the analysis of decentralized protocols in formal models, and the generation of optimized code across networks.
Decentralization
The OmniLedger Protocol remains a solid foundation of the project and is stated to currently be able to process 13,000 tps with 1,800 nodes. As a result, Harmony looks set to employ a large number of nodes and the team have outlined working with 10,000 nodes in Q2 2018, while the network is set to be deployed to 100,000 nodes at some time in 2019.
Storage and/or Mining
The team state that during Q4 of 2018 the public mining of Harmony tokens will be unveiled alongside the testnet.
Contribution for the Blockchain Economy
Harmony is one of numerous high throughput blockchain projects in existence; however, it still has something to offer the Blockchain Economy. By aiming to solve current issues regarding scalability and by providing low cost, fast payments, Harmony can act as a blockchain solution to a number of corporations and organizations and disrupt a number of key industries.
The team are also focussed on bringing forth innovations to a number of existing protocols such as the OmniLedger Byzantine protocol and update current scaling solutions, if successful they will help the greater community of blockchain developers to take significant forward steps.
Comprehensiveness
The whitepaper is presented as a 25 page document that outlines the current issues concerning high throughput blockchains and Harmony’s potential solutions. The whitepaper also addresses a number of issues concerning both more established blockchain projects and the technology which supports them. Although the whitepaper spans 25 pages it is still a work in progress as a lot of key information regarding the token metrics and token utility is missing, in addition, the team do not elaborate too much on the more commercial and legal aspects of their project.
However, the whitepaper contains a large amount of references which allow the reader to conduct a thorough amount of additional research. The team has also produced an 8 page Executive Summary which condenses the key information into an easy to read document. Across the two papers, the reader is given a good idea of how the team aims to focus on making 10x innovations in the areas of transport networks, consensus protocols and systems tools, while also basing their work on existing technology such as OmniLedger and the Shard Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT).
Overall, the whitepaper is quite brief and provides an overview of the main aspects of the project and some potential areas of concern, it also contains a simple roadmap; and the whitepaper may be revisited as the project matures.
Readability
The language and structure used is easy to understand and should be suitable for the majority of readers. Despite the scope of the project, it is quite easy to follow the main ideas and concepts without many issues. There are also a number of illustrations that help readers to grasp key points, and for the more technically advanced the whitepaper contains a large number of references to more detailed studies.
Transparency
The Harmony whitepaper focuses on the methodology behind the project and the technological solutions that the team are bringing forward. At this stage, the whitepaper is not focused on improving transparency and is still lacking in certain areas. The whitepaper does not highlight the project’s token metrics in any great detail and short bios are given for team members. It is still early days as the project does not have an official website and as a result, these issues are expected to be addressed at a later date.
Technology
The white paper outlines the structure and framework of Harmony’s methodology, and the processes that will be employed in order to realise improvements across the board. The key areas of Architecture and Innovations, Protocols and Optimizations, Locations and AI, and Contracts are well covered. The team elaborates on specific aspects of each area including
Consensus Protocols, High-Performance Protocols, Principles for Scaling, Attack Models, Language-based Security and Location Oracles.
Concreteness
The roadmap gives a general overview with regards to project development and outlines various stages of development starting from Q2 2018. After forming a team of five engineers and securing seed round funding, the team planned to validate that the OmniLedger protocol in Go can sustain 10,000 tps and adversarial attacks with 10,000 nodes, and that the lock-free and allocator-free algorithms in Rust can scale linearly on a 96-core unikernel on Amazon Cloud. Over the second half of 2018, the team plan to open public benchmarks for 10,000 nodes and open the public mining of Harmony tokens with the testnet and token economics. The system is set to be deployed over Q4 of 2018, and Q1 of 2019 and despite being minimal, the roadmap contains key checkpoints.
Feasibility
The team has produced a quite simplified and minimalistic roadmap and it provides a feasible outline with regards to project development. Much depends on the team’s ability to validate the core aspects of their project and then secure additional funds via a private token sale in Q3.
Vision
The roadmap is a quite simplified document and does not include a particularly detailed vision. The main idea conveyed is that the team is planning to work on innovating existing systems and be able to deploy certain aspects of their platform over Q4 of 2018, and Q1 of 2019.
Maturity
The roadmap is mainly focused on 2018, and the team expect to complete the majority of tasks within the calendar year. However, the incorporation of up to 100,000 nodes as well as the listing of Harmony tokens on exchanges are scheduled to take place at some point in 2019. The token listing will prove to be a contentious issue if it drags on or is delayed by a significant period of time.
The whitepaper does not include a specific business plan as the team places more focus on the technical aspects of the project. However, they also spend time illustrating the current issues that affect almost all blockchain platforms and as a result, identify each current project as potential competition and a possible source of users and market share. The team lead with the statement that they are building an open consensus for 10 billion people, meaning that they are aiming their platform at all major sectors including finance, supply chain, IoT, B2B/B2C commerce, as well as a host of real-world decentralized applications.
Concreteness & Feasibility
As a high performance blockchain Harmony will help make a variety of decentralized processes and applications practical. However, the team do not elaborate on their commercial techniques but do describe certain use cases unique to Harmony, such as location oracles, decentralized maps, and AI data marketplaces.
As the team has extensive experience with geospatial data and machine learning, they have identified incentivized games similar to Pokémon, augmented reality, and IoT devices with GPS data as areas where they can gain competitive advantage. They also aim to serve as a high-volume data marketplace, and here much will depend on their ability to stay ahead of their competitors who offer a similar service.
Clarity
The team’s business practices and specific methods of operation still need to be elaborated upon, however the whitepaper contains a FAQ section which helps shed light on specific targets. For example, Harmony identifies its first 1,000 passionate users as being token traders with binding bid/ask quotes on exchanges. They also aim to gain early adoption via tips for casual entertainment or content and through their marketplace for services and payments of IoT devices.
Furthermore, they explain their target of 10 million tps as the US equities market totals 9 billion trades everyday (104,000 tps), while Facebook handles daily likes by 800 million people (93,000 tps), and WorldPay processes 110 million payments (1,273 tps) on a daily basis. These applications are outlined as the prime targets for high-volume transactions on a single protocol, illustrating that the team are aiming to promote their blockchain solution to a number of high end operators.
Cost Effectiveness
The team has not confirmed their hard cap amount, so it is not possible to make a decision on the cost effectiveness of their project. However, within their whitepaper they make a comparison with the competitors’ hard caps, and based on it we believe Harmony can definitely easily raise at least $25 million for their hard cap considering EOS has raised billions and Kadena just over $12 million. As a result, Harmony could decide on a high hard cap in order to be viewed in the same way as projects such as EOS, Zilliqa, and Hashgraph or potentially chose to go the low cap route as Kadena and Algorand have raised more modest amounts. Regardless of the hard cap, any funds received are set to be distributed as follows:
Planned Use of Proceeds:
- 40% for technical development of protocol platform
- 20% for community engagement, developer programs
- 15% for marketing, business development
- 10% for operations, equipment, cloud servers
- 10% for collaboration with academic research
- 5% for compliance, legal, finance.
Legitimacy
Harmony is based in the USA, although we have been unable to verify the corporate structure of registration details of the company; this should become easier once further information will be made public. The team is currently hiring new team members, which is a good sign with regards to their commercial structure.
Intrinsic Value of Token
The Harmony whitepaper does not elaborate on the platform’s native token in any way, and we have to assume that it will be used to facilitate a variety of transactions and payments in the same way as other similar projects.
These should include making payments on their AI Data marketplace and for processing transactions between IoT devices. As more time passes, we can expect the team to elaborate on how their currency may be used to incentivize platform users, or be of benefit to any early adopters/participants.
Financial Security Consideration
It is not yet completely clear exactly how the Harmony currency will act as the central unit of currency across the platform. The team still needs to confirm their token dynamics and whether tokens may be earned for performing tasks on the network.
Adherence to Regulations
There isn’t a large amount of detail present regarding the project’s stance on working in compliance with the regulations that currently govern the industry. However, the whitepaper states that the team planned to complete their legal setup and distribution model for tokens in Q2, 2018. More information is expected to be released over the next few weeks.
Legal Review
It is too early to make an assessment of the legal implications regarding any potential private of public sales of Harmony tokens. The team have yet to address the various legal aspects relating to their project, and the whitepaper does not mention any potential legal or regulatory issues. As the project is based in the USA, it will be easier to confirm which jurisdiction’s laws they will be operating under.
The team has five full-time engineers and a full professor, and two part time employees, while Georgios collaborates on Harmony as a consultant. The team is extremely well decorated and balances a strong academic foundation with a significant level of real world experience. As a number of team members have previous experience of founding tech start-ups it’s clear that any missing elements will be filled shortly. As a result, it should not be long before the team grows to include experienced marketers and business developers.
Company Stage
Harmony is stated to have been founded in 2017, and is based in Sunnyvale, California; however, it has not been possible to locate the company registration details so far. Founder Stephen Tse states that the project has attracted $18 million in funds from private seed investors and appears to be building a secure foundation. Various team members have easily verifiable LinkedIn profiles and many have academic and professional achievements that can be checked quite easily.
Founders
Stephen Tse (Co-Founder) – Stephen has an in MSc Computational Algebraic Geometry from Simon Fraser University and a PhD Cryptographic Protocol, Type Theory, Functional Compiler from the University of Pennsylvania. He also held the positions of a researcher at Microsoft Research, a senior infrastructure engineer at Google, and a principal engineer on search ranking at Apple. In addition, he founded the mobile search Spotsetter after raising $1.3m in venture capital, the company was later acquired by Apple.
Nicolas Burtey (Co-Founder) – Nicolas has a Master degree in Computational Photography and founded the VR video start-up Orah in 2012 after raising $10 million. Orah served the needs of thousands of professional content creators in 70 countries by selling GPU-driven live stitching software and 360° cameras.
Rongjian Lan (Co-Founder) – Rongijan holds an MSc in Computer Science from Maryland University and was a search infrastructure engineer for Play Store at Google. He has published 10+ academic papers on spatio-temporal querying and map-based visualization. He is also the co-chair of ABC Blockchain Foundation with over 100 engineers from Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn as members.
Advisory Board
Harmony employs a number of influential advisors/collaborators including Georgios Fainekos who is a tenured professor at Arizona State University and specializes in formal methods of cyber-physical systems, swarm robotics, and machine learning for real-time planning. Navneet Singh led mobile engineering at Google for 6 years, and has also been the Senior Vice President at the payment processor WorldPay and the Head of Data Science at the mobile payment provider Ezetap. Zi Wang worked at Google from 2006-2015 on Chrome, Google, Android and Nexus. He was the first Global Creative Director for the Google hardware division and co-founded a Google research lab with a budget of $20 million. He also founded the Quantum Bakery start-up in partnership with Google, Corning and Toyota to develop consumer products with ambient intelligence. As a result, Harmony has a wealth of experience to fall back on.
Blockchain & Development Talent
Alok Kothari is currently a Machine Learning Engineer at Apple (Siri), and holds a Masters Degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He has considerable research experience in natural language processing, machine learning and related areas. He has experience of working in areas concerning NLP and ML such as word sense disambiguation (WSD), information retrieval (IR), and machine translation. Alok has also presented at top conference venues such as SIGIR, ICWSM and EMNLP. Harmony’s team has an impressive and relevant past experience in the Blockchain space. One of the more impressive teams in comparison to other projects.
Business Talent
The Harmony team is packed with talented individuals, and Trausti Kristjansson has worked at a host of highly respected research labs including Microsoft Research, IBM Research, and Google Research. He also founded full-stack start-ups such as Semience and Rubber Duck Labs, in addition to working as a Senior Software Engineer for Google and a Speech Recognition Researcher at IBM. He also holds a PhD in Computer Science and Machine Learning from the University of Waterloo.
Legal Counsel
It is currently not possible to confirm the legal counsel that Harmony has chosen to employ. Any information regarding legal advisors is still to be made public.
Fund Allocation
- Sales & floating: 20% tokens
- Developer & community: 40% tokens (1-year 28% lockup, 1.5% monthly over 4 years) – Open benchmark, mining, airdrops
- Foundation & research: 28% tokens (28% no lockup, 1.0% monthly over 6 years – Reviewed publication, research grants, reserve
- Founder & team: 12% tokens (1-year 28% lockup, 2% monthly over 3 years)
Token Sold-Kept-Ratio
Investors in the project will only be allocated 20% of all tokens which is on the low side. However, the community will share up to 40% of all available tokens alongside the project’s developers which means that there may be additional ways to obtain tokens by participating in the project. The Foundation and the team take up an allocation of around 40% which illustrates that the team are aiming to exert significant control over the project. Potential public sale participants will also need to be aware of what percentage of the tokens being sold will be made available to private sale participants.
Quality of Campaign Strategy
The team were scheduled to raise an initial seed round of funding in Q2 2018, and they are currently in the process of securing additional funds via private sales. The details are not well known as the hard cap still has not been confirmed. It is difficult to know exactly how long any private sales will take place and how the team will conduct their campaign strategy once a crowdsale date has been confirmed.
The project has yet to develop any hype as it is still in its early stages. Their Telegram channel, Twitter, and Facebook accounts still have to be developed and Harmony does not have an official website yet. Despite this, the project has still received a good amount of interest from more informed members of the community and a small number of social media influencers have already earmarked the project as being one to watch. Harmony already has a lot of people speaking about the project and wanting to get their hands on a chunk of the tokens offered to investors.
A lot of the current legacy systems that are in place such as SWIFT and Visa will be replaced by Blockchain(s) in the near future. In order for this to happen, blockchains need need to significantly scale in order to gain mass adoption and deliver on its true potential. Harmony is a project that is trying to solve this issue, just like many others are. In our opinion Harmony is among the more promising projects up to date, judging by its architecture, technology, and team. Furthermore, we believe this project will be a very promising investment opportunity. Why? Firstly, the sheer quality of the team and technology are both impressive, and there is a chance that Harmony will reach new heights in the blockchain scalability sphere. Secondly, investors behind this project are not your usual retail investors, but most of them are people who have a wide array of knowledge about company valuations and investment prospects. We believe hype and demand for Harmony will only grow from here.
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eth address: 0x4Ba91a88923eE797bE4934969738E95C7607fcFC
