AMA With Stephen Tse

HI Sejin,
thank you for the time spent asking these questions and for your contributions to NFTs and the community within Harmony.

We have engaged with partners and will continue to do so throughout the process. We look to add to those relationships wherever possible.
Our community has been a foundation for everything Harmony since our initial launch. Engaging with that as we have scaled requires more focus from each of us on the team.

The team has engaged community members primarily by being involved, without an exact science to whom is engaged. As a result, we only know some contributors through online communities who have made incredible contributions and others who impact real-life events.

We agree there should be a key focus on communication from now on.
We have begun requiring team members and leads to write long-form recaps of goals internally and progress for better understanding across the team. (think writing styles of Amazon and others)

Assisting our community find their best fit (Discord, Reddit, Telegram) begins with informing new (and existing) community members of where to find answers to their questions and where to jump into community discussion.

@StrongMindsHold is leading the charge in establishing support.Harmony.one as a hub for information, and over time will also allow community members to find their home in web3. We look forward to the community contributing to this knowledge base.

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Ray, thank you for your impassioned questions.

Much hard work remains from our positions as leaders within Harmony. That starts with engaging with everyone, including our users, who feel we have much further to go. To listen, and understand.

Supporting our major projects begins with supporting every builder with up-to-date and adequate documentation and tools at a minimum.

We must provide a better experience for every builder, big or small.

Support.Harmony.one is one way we are working to do just that. In addition, feedback from team members (current and prior) are defining points for how we improve morale and communication as a team.

We appreciate your passion, understand your frustration, and look forward to meaningful engagement with you as we continue to build.

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working on it now. Some replies got flagged due to spam bot (fixed now), gonna reply to @AffinityShard here in just a sec.

Shoot me a dm with updated figures and i’ll see what I can do in that regard.

Responses are populating now, I had to take the spam bot out to get water.

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We understand this is a crucial issue for us to address. We need to follow up with the DAOs and their governors to re-engage them to understand both their contributions and explore ways for meaningful engagement.

Jeremy will be following up on this shortly.

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Can you please post in the format:

Question: question here
Answer: answer here

This would help everyone understanding what was the question you are addressing.

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@HarmonyTeam some of these questions were specifically for @stse

Having said that I collated my questions with your answers in this post so people can view it as a traditional AMA and readily absorb/analyze the content with context.

Q1. @stse if you plan to retain absolute control over decisions will you also become the face of Harmony again and provide your vision to the community like a traditional CEO who answers to shareholders and a board of directors. If so what is that vision? Steer the ship privately and publicly. Clear concise vision as if the end state was painted in a mural for all to see. This provides purpose and direction to investors, contributors, validators and core team members.

A1.Our vision since @stse and the founding team started the project has always been to build an open platform for our future generations to create in harmony, as we say: “Open Consensus for 10B People”. The core team is committed to set up the ecosystem to reach decentralized governance over the long term. As you may know, we have been progressively decentralizing our network and providing grants to community builders. Initiatives such as Recovery One will also be driven by the community, in coordination with the core team.

Q2. What is your plan for talent management within the core team? As of late many critical members of the core team have left for other protocols. With more than 20 years of management and leadership experience the reason is clear to me, work environment and managerial leadership style. Servant leadership is critical, always ask how you can best support your team not control them.

A2. Our core team of builders, engineers, and creatives is the essential asset of this project since day one. This is one of our most important areas to focus on so that we can keep improving the environment for these team members to thrive in. The leadership team has been listening intently to feedback from current and prior teammates to retain and recruit more talented and passionate builders to the team. We promoted and onboarded two more core team and two full time fellows this month and continue to recruit for engineering and product roles.

Q3. Is there a plan to restructure the core teams chain of supervision and project assignments in order to use your talent (and by extension be a good steward of their most valuable resource: time) in the most efficient way possible?

A3. We are formalizing account success manager roles to enable direct ownership of project initiatives. Each of our grantees and ecosystem projects will have one member from the core team supporting our engagement. This ensure both the team and our builders can work together to help more of our ecosystem developers thrive.

Q4. What is the plan to entice projects to come and build on Harmony in order to replace the many that have left? And what support can projects who have stayed expect. An L1 without an ecosystem has no use case.

A4. We are updating our team process and ownership to reconnect with our existing ecosystem partners on a regular basis (i.e. weekly, bi-weekly calls with detailed writing on progress updates).
This will be a continued and sustained effort. Our leadership team and each initiatives lead are writing weekly updates so that the whole team can be informed of what needs each project may have. @Al Cheung on our team is leading this with our existing grantees and investee projects.

Q5. What is the plan for Harmony the foundation to generate revenue outside of the token price action? SDK’s, bridges, wallets?

A5. We have been working on long term sustainable ways to generate protocol transaction fees through increased utility. We have done initial analysis and modeling on network transaction fees and believe it is meaningful financially to sustain many of the network operation needs. That is just one of the ways we can ensure the long term sustainability of the platform and ecosystem.

Q6. How will Harmony support the native projects that have built here? FuzzFi, wenLambo, SonicSwap etc all come to mind. This community has an exceptional amount of talent that is leaving in droves.

A6. Co-marketing has been top of mind internally. Since the beginning of Q3, we have begun to solidify the groundwork of how we plan on doing more going forward. The bridge incident has since shifted our communication priorities but we must show what builders like you mentioned have created on Harmony.

Q7. What is the DBM(Dominant Buying Motive) to buy or build on Harmony? What makes Harmony standout from other fast and cheap L1’s? What is our market fit that separates us from the pack and will drive adoption in the future?

A7. We are updating our documentation and building more tooling to meet the needs of Web3 developers who will ultimately answer that question. Supporting our major projects begins with supporting all builders with effective documentation and tools. We are working on providing a better experience for every builder, big or small. Support.Harmony.one 1 is one way we are working to do just that.

Q8. What is the plan to get the ENG team back on track with the roadmap and to fix persistent issues with the chain?

A8. Our goal has always been to bring the best research to production. While the core protocol work is continuing, presenting an updated roadmap is top priority.

Q9. Will you also dedicate some of your time to R&D of the chain? We know that’s your best product fit.

A9. We continue to work on Protocol (cross-shard, external proposers), Network (state sync, light clients), Services (infrastructure partners, developer tooling). In the coming weeks, we’ll be publishing more details on each initiative.

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Why is everyone getting replies instead of me ?

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Hey a question that popped up on my mind today:

Could there be a way to have a page or link where we could check in real time the status of the depegged tokens (pegged or depegged) and by how much is the gap?

I’m aware that a Validator and several Projects that have decided to stay in Harmony are burning tokens. To have a better visibility would help us and as a community we deserve to know the real & updated status.

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My question is also still unanswered. Post number 5 in this thread.

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Can you please provide clarity on what’s going on with Grant Funding?

My project was approved for a grant, paid by milestone payments when reached. The plan was to use personal funds to hire external parties, such as legal experts, tax attorneys, and designers, to fill in the blanks the core team (artists and developers) could not complete themselves. Then use the funds to reimburse ourselves once the milestones are reached.

I took a brief pause when my daughter was born, and came back to see the hack happened and a bunch of conflicting information as to the state of things. When I reached out to the official channels to find out what’s going on, all I got was silence.

This hurt us professionally because some of our external contractors were top of the field, globally recognized names, who were willing to work with us on a contract basis as a favor. There was a narrow window where we could use them. We had to blow off because we didn’t know if we’d be able to pay them. So the silence is hurting us more professionally than the money that we already spent so far. We can always earn more money to make up for the loss, but our reputation in this industry is what enables us to do that. Not having the information to relay to people to explain what’s going on makes us look like a bunch of flakes.

Can you give us a definitive answer now on what’s happening to approved grants & promised funds? Are they or are they not still being honored? Some of the old URLs that we went to for information are now returning 404’s.

I see they are paused, but do not know what that actually means (does this impact existing grants or only new ones). My original assumption was that this only impacts accepting additional grants, but I was told through second parties (other developers/etc) that this impacts promised money as well. Knowing what’s really going on from the source would be appreciated.

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Still no answers Stephen.

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No answers or ignoring specific questions on purpose?

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Seems like true when they say we are like dirt to @stse .

Doesn’t deserve a proper reply to our questions , brb water break

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I have tried very hard to raise the awareness, highlight the problem and question to them but I now cannot help but only feel disregard and contempt from Harmony Team.

@UnArge4/@law_ear: If I recall correctly, the team said they will give us until the end of Sunday (yesterday) to ask more questions and would get back to us with their responses by Wed, so long as they are legally permitted to do so. If they get back to us by Wed, then they haven’t broken their word in this respect (assuming my recollection is correct). If we hear nothing by Thursday, then we can go about talking about a violation of trust. But we aren’t there yet, so I’d personally hold off on that type of criticism until then and give them the benefit of the doubt on account of setting clear expectations.

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You don’t need to wait for more questions to answer existing ones.

You can wait for more to be able to select the difficult ones to skip…

Where did they say this? We were promised them last week
Total bunch of clowns. Best option now is close down and distribute treasury.

You’re so welcome, it’s very unfortunate the way they are handling your issue and many others. I hope you get a resolution soon. Wish you well.

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Your reply makes their silence so valid .

Nope, they are treating the community like rubbish .

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