Harmony Q2 2022 Offsite Report

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Harmony Q2 2022 Offsite Report

Introduction

The Harmony team held its four-day Q2 offsite meeting on May 9th 2022. The meeting consisted of ~30 team members including Harmony contributors and full-time fellows. This write-up is meant to highlight action items and initiatives resulting from the offsite event, provide transparency to the community, and ensure our exciting plans are shared with everyone in our ecosystem.

Purpose

The offsite event was held for a handful of reasons, most importantly to discuss the state of the Web3 space, align on our mission and vision, review areas of improvement on ecosystem grants and management, and address community sentiment.

Our discussions resulted in a handful of new initiatives, prioritizing of existing initiatives, and adjustments to improve existing processes. These takeaway items are meant to bring Harmony’s blockchain protocol to the next level, expand our ecosystem with quality projects, and bring our accomplishments and advanced technology to the forefront of external messaging.

Action Items / Initiatives

Focus of the Harmony team will be placed in four overarching areas, each with multiple, exciting initiatives that will elevate Harmony to the next level.

Technology | Ecosystem | Marketing & Communications

The next section will provide information on each initiative but please understand:

1. The team’s efforts are not limited to the list below. Technical efforts not listed, such as block explorer integrations, are still proceeding as planned.

2. Details will be withheld for marketing purposes (see Marketing & Communications).

Watch the related special edition of ONEWeekly:

Technology

Cross-Shard Messaging

Harmony will be one of the first sharded blockchains to accomplish cross shard messaging, allowing for incredible scalability across our ecosystem. Shards will have the ability to communicate with each other using a fully-meshed design. In simple terms, projects can launch on one shard and utilize features of an application on a different shard. With this feature, Harmony can scale beyond four shards and provide limitless scalability.

1BTC Yield Program

The team is working to launch the 1BTC Yield Program where holders can stake their ONE with the trustless BTC bridge and earn rewards in ONE and 1BTC. By staking ONE to the bridge, users provide collateral and increase the health of the BTC bridge while earning 1BTC.

In other words… stake ONE, earn Bitcoin.

Harmony’s Game Shard

On-chain games will bring in millions of users to the blockchain space. Our team will encourage game developers to launch on Harmony through a shard dedicated to gaming. By launching on this game shard, project teams will receive special incentives, co-marketing, and support from the Harmony team. In addition to incentives provided by Harmony, game shard launches will provide developers with a dedicated space free from existing, concentrated traffic on Shard-0.

Elastic RPC Infrastructure

There are approximately 100 active, globally dispersed RPC nodes in Harmony’s infrastructure. Nodes are added and subtracted manually as needed - this is a time consuming process and cost ineffective. With Elastic RPC, Harmony’s RPC infrastructure will dynamically scale to meet the needs of the network. Elastic RPC allows nodes to be added and subtracted on-the-fly and in minutes, allowing for a significant increase to RPC scalability and affordability.

In short, Elastic RPC allows Harmony’s RPC infrastructure to scale dynamically to meet traffic needs while adding and removing nodes in minutes, not days, in a cost effective manner.

Ecosystem

Gaming Studio of Studios

The gaming industry holds a great opportunity to onboard new users outside the Web3 space. From MMOs to racing to infinity runners, games of various genres bring massive potential for players and the blockchain industry. Harmony is onboarding new games and players by forming strategic partnerships with gaming studios with ready-to-launch titles and existing relationships with development. Details will be withheld until a more appropriate time for announcement.

Game Engine SDK

The team will establish an SDK in specific game engines, opening the door for hundreds of thousands of game developers around the world to integrate their game into Harmony with ease. This initiative is another serious push towards onboarding quality games to the Harmony blockchain.

Harmony Scouts

Pushing our gaming strategy further, the team will hand-selected talent from specific regions around the world to onboard quality game development teams and launch on Harmony via Launch Grants.

Scouts will walk teams through our grants program and be compensated only for approved proposals. Scouts will be incentivized to ensure their project teams progress through all launch milestones. Through this program, we will incentivize the onboarding of high quality games and grow our gaming ecosystem exponentially. Details will be posted on talk.harmony.one.

Grants - Raising the Bar

Requirements to receive a grant from Harmony will be higher, and the grant structure will be refined through new processes. The team is working to ensure these adjustments produce quality over quantity. For launches, this means higher quality projects, working demos or prototypes, and experienced teams. For DAOs, this means having a plan for independent financing, accountability, and clear measurable contributions to the Harmony ecosystem.

In all cases, grants are evidence of our support for contributions, not operational cash flow for the grantee.

Marketing & Communication

Marketing Lead

Harmony is seeking to onboard a full-time Marketing Lead. This person will be responsible for strategizing and executing marketing strategies for new and existing products in the ecosystem, establish a new pipeline for product marketing, and collaborate closely with project leads. The Marketing Lead will ensure our products are launched with maximum impact.

Communications Lead

We are also looking to onboard a full-time Communications Lead to ensure our external messaging is clear and consistent. From our vision to our website to our product write-ups, clear external communication is critical to ensuring users, community members, and Web3 enthusiasts are aware of Harmony’s direction, strengths, initiatives, and accomplishments.

Website Rebuild

Rebuilding our website from the ground up is a priority initiative to ensure it reflects Harmony’s leading position in Web3, provide visitors with a clear understanding of Harmony’s vision and roadmap for growth, and serve as a useful resource for new users and developers. Fundamentals will be front and center on the new website, showcasing Harmony as a leading platform for scaling Web3 applications. From NFTs to DeFi to Gaming to decentralized organizations – visitors will know why Harmony is a leading blockchain to choose for Web3.

Strategic Co-Marketing

We are establishing a new co-marketing pipeline while working closely with our ecosystem partners, helping them market their products and accomplishments to our growing community. Efforts to co-market with our ecosystem partners span across our social media platforms, newsletters, YouTube video series, and more.

Closing Message

The Harmony team will continue building the most advanced blockchain for many millions of users around the world, focusing on fundamentals, and expanding our ecosystem with quality projects, talented teams, and the best and most passionate community in the Web3 space.

Our initiatives take our technology and ecosystem to the forefront, creating the foundation for Harmony to lead the way in blockchain innovation, scalability, and affordability for a global decentralized ecosystem of builders, users, dreamers, and enthusiasts.

The Harmony Team :blue_heart:

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These are great changes and I am very happy to hear this, however I would also like to know if you guys are changing your direction in terms of DAO funding? apologies if I am wrong but I was under the impression that you guys were going to address the communities concerns during this offsite meeting, thank you!

Cheers!
NWF

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Quality over quantity. DAO proposal approvals will be more reliant on community sentiment. Updated (and more rigid) DAO Bootstrap Funding Guidelines will be ready soon. Thank you for your vigilance, Harmonaut.

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Happy to have seen applicants being questioned and pushed more over reason days. This is a great announcement. I’m sure everyone will benefit from higher expectations

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Awesome, appreciate the swift reply and my bad for missing the obvious, looking forward to seeing more from you guys :slight_smile:

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Looking forward to seeing you around the talk forum :blue_heart:

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Hey @No_White_Flags :wave: I think @frwrdslosh quotes a section which I hope speaks to your concern. The team will be raising the bar on DAO funding; a plan for independent financing, accountability, and clear measurable contributions to the ecosystem will be extremely important.

In other words, this means that in order to receive bootstrap funding, DAOs will need to come to the table with a well laid out plan on how they will continue sustaining themselves while contributing to the ecosystem. This should lay the groundwork for quality DAOs that grow, contribute, and generate their own income for long term sustainability.

Overall, the important take away is that grants will be evidence that we support a proposal’s objective and plan, but no grant should be considered operational cash flow for the grantee.

Higher bar. Higher standards. Requirements for self sustainability and clear contributions.

Hope that helps!

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I am glad to know that Harmony has taken advantage of the meeting that the team has had, it takes more commitment and confidence to face this new technology reaching millions of users and knowing that Harmony is the ideal place to get involved. Large projects want to use the benefits that the Harmony blockchain brings and it is very important that the general team is prepared for it. I take this opportunity to comment that in Spain, the community of Madrid is very interested in blockchain technology and they intend to be the bridge between Latin America and Europe. My team and I are currently involved in this project and we intend to present Harmony as the best option to develop all the projects that they want to carry out in this association, we hope to bring new news soon. On the other hand, I would like to know personally how the DAOs that we have previously approved are left? We presented Tucsac DAO in February for $75k and we were approved with a reduction of measures that were presented for $50k and currently we met 2 of the Milestones that they asked us for $30k 22 days ago, since then we have not received the payment for the milestones Are payments going to resume?

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This is impressive. Im starting to get extremely bullish on Harmony again. Gonna buy a big bag now that its super cheap. Super excited for the 1BTC Yield Program!!!

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@dpagan-harmony @frwrdslosh

Who is going to be approving of these grants? 1DAO Alliance?

If so, 1DAO alliance is said to be made up of current DAO members since “DAOs know how to DAO”

The community needs clarity, transparency and representation.

Why is it that someone thats NOT in a DAO be eligible to govern and audit these funding requests?

Like myself or many others who are capable?

If the same people are approving grants now that were pre off site then nothing will change and the community will cause more issues.

To this day, only @frwrdslosh has responded to any of my questions in this forum.

I rallied the community that change was coming!

Now its obvious its all the same.

Your 300 total community votes, 66% no vote is going to back fire worse than it was before. I listen to every DAO OPS call.

Clear disconnect between your investors and core members.

No one here is talking about ‘how are we going to get average Joe’s to invest in Harmony during a major recession?’

Even with today’s update. Your community doesn’t know whether you are DEFI or GAMEFI now.

The disheartening thing for me everyone.
I work 55 hours a week as a CPA.
Been an investor in Harmony well over a year.
I come on here, reddit, discord, etc. to help this community without asking for a dime.

All i wanted was responses from the team. Communication and caring cost nothing.

That is what hurts the most!

Cheers!

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Hey @amartay1986. To the point of “Now its obvious its all the same” - I’m curious what specifically is the same, if you don’t mind explaining. The initiatives are both new and existing but re-prioritized, all focused on fundamentals and pushing us further.

Are you referring to specifically to DAOs? If so, I’m curious if you noticed the message under the “Grants” section stating the new requirements which should result in financially independent DAOs with clear mandates that contribute to the community.

With regards to the average Joe supporting Harmony, I would like to offer a few points from the report:

  1. Marketing and Communications - the role of each is to ensure our products and accomplishments will be digestible to our audience, which are developers and blockchain users/enthusiasts. This is how we reach them and with the right messaging, plus…

  2. Emphasis on the technology - Building on the platform with additional features and integrating new protocols. Our blockchain is advanced, and these initiatives will continue pushing us down the path of being a top-tier platform for Web3. Cross shard messaging, expanding on our protocol roadmap, resharding (from our roadmap), enhancements to the trustless BTC bridge.

Couple these with upcoming partnerships and announcements we’ll be packaging, plus our top-tier technology and features coming soon, and we have a great set of stories to tell in a well manicured package.

As for the disconnect described - I would argue the opposite based on feedback from the ONEWeekly special episode, the report post on Reddit, and the feedback we’ve seen on Twitter and above so far. We’re listening quite attentively, but remember that nothing will change in a few days or weeks.

Thanks for being part of the community. Your passion to see us succeed is clear and obvious, as well as greatly appreciated. I say this sincerely @amartay1986.

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Do we have an eta for these?

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Great to see a renewable purpose and focus on the tech and ecosystem. Glad to see the website is getting rebuilt and marketing down the pipeline.

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Daniel,
All I care about is DAOs because it is a major monetary issue for Harmony.

Lets go over a couple view points of DAOs moving forward.

  1. Will DAO funding moving forward only flow through 1DAO Alliance?

  2. Per Harmony DAO OPS call in early May. It was stated “Only DAO members can serve on 1DAO Alliance since they ‘know’ how to DAO” Is that correct? If not, who can serve?

  3. The community has found numerous DAOs that all in circle each other with rotating governors. These same governors probably account for over 10-15 ‘funded’ DAO/Project X.
    Given this info from the above statement. How could you possibly expect change to come from DAO governors when they are all friends and colluding together?

  4. Golden DAO- Was given 100k immediately by Li. Jack automatically approved it for Project X grant. Metrics are, (in all seriousness) Golden rings given to founding members, Bitcoin Miami trip, private parties. Twitter pretty much nonexistent, Discord link is supposedly private. Just within the last 5 hours they are requesting the other two portions of $100k and 200k. You have 2 Harmony team members serving a role on that DAO!!! You call this decentralization?

It’s appalling and embarrassing how many grants have been funded that are NOWHERE to be found as of writing this. You think you are going to fix this by coming up with metrics yet the same people in Harmony will have access to approve or deny grants? I like Adrian and his work ethic, he came up with the idea of Project X grants and none of them help Harmony in any way. Source (His own answer to his 1-10X Yes/No)

Who on the Harmony team has a resume of running and operating a business?
5 of us are on your page 1 list of rich list. We are all CPAs, private equity firm execs, etc.
Harmony would never take our professional advice because you just don’t care to!

I noticed you didn’t respond to my question on why anyone outside of the Harmony ‘clique’ cant get in to do some real change?

I also noticed you didn’t respond to my 300 votes, 66% non approval for community members moving forward. How do you think that is going to go over with them when they realize Harmony has rigged its DAO grant approval voting?

Marketing and Communications- No one is going to invest when they find out the CEO founder Stephen Tse is in hiding. Say whatever you want but that is the overall impression across the board. I have been calling for Marketing and more employees since April 2021. Now Harmony wants to do it when they have no other option? Price at all time low? Feels like you are forced to do it because of the community backlash.

Emphasis on technology- 2021 Defi a complete bust. 2022 BTC bridge complete bust. Where is 1wallet? This goes back to the topic above. You guys are now forced to do what the community has been screaming about because you have no other choice.

Community sentiment is at all time low and about to get a lot worse.

Ending questions:
Why not give someone from the community a chance to voice their concerns to the team?
Why are Harmony core members advising DAOs/Project X that they are personally approving? Does that seem decentralized?

Li gave everyone a look back to the financial collapse in 2008.
Let me give you my example of 2008 vs what Harmony is currently doing with DAOs.

Harmony is the equivalent of Bear Sterns executives cutting themselves checks on the top floor (true story) when shit was hitting the fan. Then they come back to the Fed oversight committee with a list of financial metrics they are going to use to do better. With the same exact EEs that started the mess to begin with.

Everything to do with Harmony DAOs is 100% centralized decision making.

Unfortunately, at this point, I am exhausted bailing out the poor decisions being made at the top.
I have said my goodbyes to the investors that helped me along the way on here and reddit.

This will be my last post in regards to Harmony because nothing is going to change until different people are brought in. Same bad choices/Same logic/Same people/ Same results…

We are out.

Cheers!

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Great update!

Regarding the gaming SDK, does this include Unreal Engine 5 and if so approximately when could we expect to see this SDK available? Second half of 2022? First half of 2023? etc. I would like to make sure our devs aren’t working on the same thing in order to reduce redundancies and costs.

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I want to comment on this with maybe a little personal example.

As FoxSwap, we have been approved for grant in September last year. Since then, first two tranches of the grant have been paid out. On March 25th, I have posted that we have long fulfilled 3rd milestone, with details. In fact, we have far and beyond over delivered if you look at product scope of initial grant. Recently, we have been asked to also make a video as a deliverable. Which we are happy to do but the point is that we have not known that and would benefit from clearer outline how grant milestones are measured from beginning.

I think stress should still be on delivering a working product first and foremost for all grantees, be it for launch or DAO grants, as to avoid grantees focusing on just creating nice videos.

I also want to point out that FoxSwap definitely wants to do just that and we have asked for it a while ago already. To be frank, FoxSwap is one of the oldest protocols on Harmony, we are native, praised community DEX with suite of DeFi products already in place, we shouldn’t have to struggle with grants, co-marketing and such. We are excited to build and deliver awesome solutions that are already there, usable for all users.

I think my main message here, beside what has been pointed out, is that these initiatives are great and I am happy to see Harmony take hands on approach, wants to listen to community and improve. I believe, these initiatives would benefit from more transparent/actionable breakdown — such as e.g. SMART definition of goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound.

I think the main advantage of business like Harmony is the ability to be agile in very fast paced space line web3, with fierce competition. I would however still like to utilise some professional management tools that have been developed in corporate world.

I think such transparency/accountability will help projects like ours (and CU as evidenced by message above asking for timeline) as well as whole community so that we can find success and benefit Harmony at the end, which we all want.

Last but not least, I think personally I am most excited about GameFi shard, even though that’s not something that will benefit FoxSwap directly.

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Hey @wizzardblizzard. We intentionally omitted certain details to avoid spoiling launch / go-live announcements. I’ll share a bit in our private grantee chat on Telegram but we’ll still keep it a bit light in what information we can share, though you bring up a great point so we’ll make sure that our efforts are aligned.

Thanks!

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Hope you’re doing well @ongon and thanks for the reply and feedback. I’ll paste a comment I made to another community member on Reddit who shared a similar concern:

News is only news when it’s new. If we want to do proper marketing, we cannot get into the nitty gritty details or we will deflate the impact we can potentially have. I want everyone to know what we’re up to, but I also want us to make sure that our launch announcements make a splash and can go out to the right media outlets.

To your other point, “I think stress should still be on delivering a working product first and foremost for all grantees, be it for launch or DAO grants, as to avoid grantees focusing on just creating nice videos.”

100% agree - the co-marketing pipeline is being worked on by @Globey.one and he’s working with me to ensure it’s both fair and strict. We want to co-market products that are high quality - some don’t have a full product out yet but 1) these teams are being vetted and 2) we’re helping attract attention so there’s more eyes on their progress. But again I 100% agree and we need to be careful here. I don’t want us to co-market a non-product. This isn’t perfect at the moment and have incorporated this into the pipeline.

Hopefully I read and interpreted your feedback correctly but, if not, feel free to let me know!

Thanks again @ongon. Let me know I didn’t address something or misinterpreted the feedback.

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Hey there @A_TI. Each are in progress with Q3/Q4 as the ETA but a more specific ETA is being determined and solidified for marketing purposes. Once we have that, we’ll make sure to communicate it. Certain details are being withheld as mentioned in the report but this certainly won’t be the last you hear between now and go-live.

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Thanks, Daniel. I am looking forward to see all those initiatives unfold by Harmony