We have collected the questions and selected answers from the AMA held last week for ease of viewing edited lightly for context
I have done my absolute best to make sure even the questions that weren’t answered during the AMA period received a response that was useful.
Let me know if I missed anything!
Catch up with you at the bottom for closing thoughts
(Credit to Jimbo_JCR.one for collating the responses to 9 questions below)
Question from Madara.ONE
Future Jeremy Note - Many of the proposed solutions submitted by the community and reviewed 08/24 have components of both the BAYC and transaction fees as part of their overall proposal. Letting the community submitted ones have their chance to breathe was a pretty important place for us as the hope to address as many of the concerns as possible, in a sustainable way.
Question from Ray
Question from SejinDoesArt
AMA questions were open for submission through Sunday 08/14/22 and above is quick recap of the answers that were provided there, admittedly I and the remaining team want to ensure all questions are answered in a timely fashion, some presented unique challenges to answer in a forward facing context.
Going to dive into some of those as to why they weren’t answered, and when you can expect to hear more on others
(also why the questions from Bricktop_One and AffinityShard were addressed by me directly long after the submission window closed)
Question from UnArge4
Is a great question! However working with partners like AAVE , Tranq, and others require communication directly with their teams and sharing that information before everyone is on the same page, would just cause more confusion. Working diligently with key partners to review submissions from Recovery1 and the community in this regard.
Question from monsterstonk1
was addressed by community members and @giv (prior to his departure)
No affiliation was implied or ever warranted, that’s the case of the internet taking a grain and turning it into a mountain. (I have a set of those books, and I promise I couldn’t call a16z on my best day and expect a response)
Further questions from monsterstonk1
Repeg in general is a complicated one, and is ultimately tied to the community request for “a better plan”. Review of those was scheduled to complete today publicly, and now as a community there is opportunity to weigh in on which of these (or which combination of these) make the most sense; without Harmony Team getting involved in much more than the execution of that.
Liquid Cash in the treasury was mentioned in todays AMA in a general figure, but we expect later in the quarter/Q4 to publish more information regarding that, specifically.
These are “why everyone think” questions, and from a public relations standpoint don’t offer any response that would satisfy the original post.
NOT because they aren’t valid criticisms or concerns, but because the reasoning WHY they are being asked is a past tense, its already happened. Forward facing statements don’t really do much to quell that, really only proof of effective change and better communication overall lends itself to answers.
Not an “avoid” the answer, the answer is ultimately “we have to do better” (and that’s true anytime questions like that are asked. I just personally hate writing fluff as much as you all hate reading it).
These fall under the “if the information isn’t yet available to the public” category. Essentially, one is asking for an answer to the question that will ultimately be included in a post mortem. 99% of the time brand new information won’t be disclosed via a governance forum AMA when it comes to details like that.
The final question is primarily a hindsight/forward facing question.
This was the first of a few question from @White_Wolf I had the opportunity to ask @stse during the Twitter space. Along with
Now, those are very deep; detailed questions with a lot of context that @stse is more aware of than most anyone, just going to recap some high points discussed during the Space and since:
Leadership - With feedback from recent departures, as well as internal team feedback being taken more seriously than ever before; empowering the leaders in charge of each initiative was a constant. The idea of “loosening the reigns” is tossed around a lot, but trusting the professionals that are brought into the team to accomplish a task, is kind of the most important thing to do going forward.
Lack of quality control and DAOs
Initiatives that fail to meet the standard of the Harmony community need to be reviewed with the community, feedback taken and steps forward given in clear and concise language.
DAO- DAOs is something I mentioned in a reply to Bricktop_One and have since sent all collected information over to the core team to review, and respond to.
Grants- While the program at large is not accepting new applicants at this time, Al, Jack, and a number of others are working with pre-approved grantees and resuming milestone payouts. This is a key way we strengthen the ecosystem and a point that is taken very seriously. (A TON of work to do in that area, but it is finally moving again)
100 Day Plan - The idea of Clearly communicating
WHAT the team members are working on
HOW they are progressing
Updates and Hurdles
was talked about at length as a way to improve the communication between team and community/partners.
I have personally seen dozens of telegram groups that have gone by the wayside because they weren’t actively managed and this is something I personally have spent the VAST majority of my time over the last week or so working to address.
We published (Monday August 22) a thread with detailed updates from both engineering and Business development
The @harmonyprotocol leadership team and project leads have been writing weekly updates on their deliverables and progress internally.
We wanted to start sharing some of those highlights with everyone.
👇Here are a few team deliverables from this past week.
This is something we are committed to publishing going forward, substantial updates may not occur in that magnitude each week, but generally there is always something to share.
In a separate category we have questions from forum members like @WhitePeach
Super valid question, but not one that gets answered in a forum, or generally in the public (pre-announcement) in any industry (web3 included)
partnerships and communications are typically reserved for after formal announcements because up until that point, anything can happen that would affect the language used, terms, etc.
That being said, official channels (including this forum) will always host specific announcements about any given partnership or collaboration, usually accompanied by a press release.
This is a forward facing question as well, see above for a detailed response.
TLDR? Concrete information and plans first, speculation and future vision statements can be worried about at another time. We have to nail the fundamentals before we get there.
Transaction fees were discussed during the Recovery1 space on Aug 25th and were also debated a bit post during other community held spaces for the reasons you mention, transaction fees even during the peak of last cycle weren’t enough to be a cohesive solution on their own. All that to say, they could be part of a overall approach that includes other plans to address larger issues.
This was specifically one of the issues I raised with Bricktop_One and AffinityShard and am working to address it with leadership to engage in a meaningful way (i.e actually solve)
Happy to bring you into those conversations, just easier to accomplish over dm’s and will quote Bricktop_One here from that conversation
“you have got that further than anyone has done in an extremely long amount of time in a few days”
A ton of work to do in that regard, but its top of mind and something that affected my decision back in the fall to not re-run for election for C-DAO.
There’s a much larger conversation that needs to occur around DAOs in a post mortem sense, but getting those particular issues finally resolved, really HAS to happen first. Will keep you guys updated.
Grants are another example of something that has been taken back to a fundamental basics.
We failed in those examples, and rightfully have seen the outcome of those, so how do we improve?
Complete re-tooling of Grant management. Led by Al, Jack, and others from Harmony Ventures
(more to come from Ventures in the coming weeks) to properly track, itemize, and understand the scope of a program that TRULY enabled some of the greatest developments our community has seen.
Data analytics to measure on-chain success and work to establish more holistic milestones for projects to achieve
Re-engaging with many Grantees who were working through their milestones when the pause was announced to resume funding (for processed milestones) and resume payments for grantees within their development window
these are just the basics, but those alone show a resound improvement to both practice and execution. Will work to continue soliciting feedback from grantees as those improvements are built upon.
Realize this was primarily directed towards leadership but wanted to provide some insight in this regard.
The entire situation is pretty unprecedented in terms of “having a plan”.
So from the preparation of the recovery plan that was presented initially, it’s pretty difficult to gauge community sentiment until said plan is actually out in the wild.
Not speaking towards the validity of it, but (in general) even the most effective
“thinking groups” are only as effective as they are engaged within the community.
Which leads me to a larger point, Recovery1 spawned from the demand of the community to have a voice in the process, and I’m super proud to know that we had so many proposals submitted to them in such a short period of time.
Closing Thoughts
Sips Water
WOW that ended up way longer than even I thought it would be.
This is just the start of what I sincerely hope is a much more engaging relationship with the Harmony community, and plan to engage with as much as humanly possible. We have a number of great things announced over the last week, and we will continue to share those with you regularly (as evidenced in a few examples throughout this post)
If I can commit to anything, it’s working to bring more content like this to you, that even if it’s a question that doesn’t have an answer yet; we can work together to be more communicative, and more cohesive as a community.
I’m honestly struggling to believe it’s been over two months now without any action or even acknowledgement related to this, seems so out of character for Harmony. Feels like people are unnecessarily becoming victims twice here. As crazy as that might sound, if someone had $10k bscDAI and $10k 1DAI, as of today the amount of value they would have been able to at least have the option to choose to recover on the 1DAI would be anywhere from $1k to $10k(if they got super lucky) in ONE, whereas the bscDAI despite not being stolen and still held and secured by Harmony is effectively dead weight right now and if someone had an emergency or even just wanted to buy ONE with it the amount of value they could get out of it right now is $0(but is of course worth $10k on BSC and could buy $10k worth of ONE easily). And that is essentially the same story for all $700k or whatever the market says all the tokens left on the bridges happen to be worth this instant. Maybe it feels like ‘dust’ relative to the amount the hacker stole making it a non-priority, but of course it’s not dust to the users affected.
Anyone hearing just the facts and timeline out of context without knowing Harmony and its values would likely conclude some pretty bad things(and some are doing so unfortunately as I’m sure anyone reading social media has seen). Call it Stockholm Syndrome, but I refuse to believe any real ill-intent here from Harmony, as this really seems like the antithesis of what the project is and has been thus far. But people have really been left hanging for a long time.
@Globey.one Thanks for the reply. Again - It’s not an indictment on your performance, but I really think that this doesn’t reflect as a promising reply from Stephen.
I hope that @stse doesn’t consider my/public criticism as an indictment of his character - But it definitely speaks about the leadership clarity that has been within the chain & it’s existing think-tanks, which literally needed a financial catastrophe for them to open their eyes. Blaming former employees or other existing C-suites might take off the burden of responsibility from their shoulders, but doesn’t absolve them of it.
It does not bring me any pleasure that their actions have sucked the confidence out of community stakeholders, public perception & other internal pipelines. CEO’s lead by example, and then make themselves redundant - by getting a mix of thought leaders & execution specialists.
Deliver the critical engineering milestones (secure-resharding & cross-shard transactions) and maybe then could a VC fund take this project seriously.
@Jacksteroo - This was a rudimentary list that comprised of early Harmony One ecosystem projects by community members (not complete). Hope it can be of some help, if ecosystem retention is a goal.
A re-engagement needs to happen ASAP, if the team dreams of a future about creating or preserving on-chain utility.
An update on bridge resumption (BTC Trustless) & other engineering deliverables such as Cosmos bridge etc. would be of great help too.
Maybe the Stephen can try to reach out to Weija Zhang (Regional Head, Ethereum Enterprise Alliance China & VP of Engg) at Wanchain to discuss about running secure trustless bridges & security. They support multiple chains & recently are on Cardano as well.
