Hi everyone, I’m the founder of Cosmic Universe as many of you already know, and my team and I have been tirelessly working full-time for months developing a 3D open-world fantasy MMORPG built using Unreal Engine 4. You can see what we’re been working on here if you’d been out of the loop. I felt the need to address some major concerns myself, and many other project leaders on Harmony, along with validators and DAO governors, are having regarding Harmony’s future. I speak from a position of being completely invested in Harmony’s ecosystem and giving it everything I have since last summer.
To date, Cosmic Universe has received $10K funding out of an original $50k approved, which was less than our original request amount of $250K. The next $10K milestone will not be received until testnet is out from what I remember. These sort of funding barriers would have made it literally impossible to get CU to where it is today. The only reason we are still able to move forward to developing it is because we used the $ONE proceeds from our 2D Wizards NFT sale to fund our team of developers. To date, we have spent a few hundred thousand dollars on developing our MMORPG and everything that goes with it. We deliver updates practically every day to our community and even have a Weekly Wizard gamedev and community update newsletter on Medium. Those who have sharp business acumen could see that what we are developing has the potential to become a $1B+ project on Harmony.
I recall Harmony didn’t like our 2D Wizards, which were originally going to be gamified avatars and once we had more funding we would develop 3D Wizards, which is exactly what we did, and we’ve started showing off what they look like, to be fully completed all 10K 3D in-game models by the end of March from what the 3D modelers tell me. This 10K 3D NFT collection will be airdropped for FREE to all current 2D holders, even while we spent over $100K developing them, showing we’re not a money-hungry project but actually care about being fair and giving back to our community that has given so much to us. What is strange to me is how Harmony doesn’t share the same sentiment. It almost feels as if Harmony doesn’t care for Cosmic Universe at all. My repeated questions and requests for discussion in our CU <> Harmony TG groups go ignored and unanswered. This is making me quite concerned about the leadership decisions going on behind the scenes at Harmony, especially given the massive scale of our project where we have around 30 people altogether, most of them providing their services full-time to our MMORPG and community.
All we got was $10K so far from Harmony, which is definitely appreciated, but a drop in the bucket when you’re developing an MMORPG. We’re developing what I am certain has the potential to become the largest project on Harmony once the full release is out, and one of the largest in all of blockchain gaming, but to do that we need to be able to keep paying our devs to keep doing their great work. You gave another project $250K in an equity swap like the standard VC sort of deal, yet this was not something ever proposed to us, even after assurances that Harmony would find us funding somehow beyond the $50K grant approval that has rather tall orders for the development of an MMORPG. In any case, we are currently prototyping and will have a gameplay demo out in a few weeks most likely.
As I understand it, one of our Advisors spoke to someone at ETH Denver on the Harmony team about our project but it didn’t seem like they were interested which I found very confusing, discouraging, and disappointing, to say the least.
I feel like CU and myself are being ignored here, which is concerning for me from a business standpoint.
Let’s be realistic; we already know there will be a mass exodus from Harmony if concerns aren’t being addressed properly. Also, DFK is expanding to Avalanche, so myself and many other project leaders and validators believe time is of the essence here to ensure projects are expanding to Harmony more than the other way around.
What happens over the next couple of months can make or break Harmony, and that includes the projects on it like ours.
I want to keep CU on Harmony but it feels like the team doesn’t care about us at all anymore. I see $250K was given to essentially a mobile game I will refrain from mentioning, while one DAO was given $250K out of $2M it will be receiving from my understanding, which is fine and all but the issue to me is that we’re building the most advanced game (which takes time btw) to ever grace Harmony, yet were given very high barriers to funding from the get-go and now we’re being ignored completely. I see this as being unfair.
We are developing a full-blown 3D MMORPG. We have the Cosmic DAO. We have community governance on Snapshot. We have the most advanced game NFT marketplace on Harmony. We are launching a completely game-changing DEX called OneFi in a couple of weeks. We have 3D Wizards airdropping in a few weeks. We have a prototype and game demo in a few weeks. We have the pre-alpha live by the end of May. We’ve done character and land sales. We’re reaching for the stars with Cosmic Universe, showing of several sneak peek videos and other alpha already. We’re developing our own custom way of connecting Unreal Engine with the blockchain and player wallets after Harmony couldn’t come to an agreement with Venly, used by The Sandbox for example, that would benefit far more projects on Harmony than ours and help it be a gaming hub in crypto. It would go a long way to show that Harmony still cares about us.
What is going on? A lot of us are concerned about Harmony’s future. We do not wish to see more projects leave the ecosystem and the blockchain suffer in a far more devastating way that it already is, and I strongly believe it will if something doesn’t change. Harmony’s ecosystem is small as it is, and rugpulls, soft rugpulls, de facto ponzis, etc have been too many, leading to weakening investor confidence. Questionable funding agreements have been made in the past numerous times.
I believe we need more transparency, more strategic business decisions being made, and a Communications Manager as well as a Strategic Business Manager on the Harmony core team.
I love Harmony and its community and this is why I raise these concerns. I live and breathe Harmony practically every waking moment of my life and as a business owner, it is my duty to raise these concerns.
