Harmony Team - Please Explain "Wallet 2" Staking Procedures

WHAT A COINCIDENCE

MyCointainer is elected for the first time in 8 months within 4 days of me creating this post…

Imo, there’s near-zero chance the MyCointainer team read my above post. Why do I say this? The VDAO has reached out to them several times over the last few months, and MyCointainer still hadn’t fixed their node! The only reasonable explanation is that someone from Harmony read this and reached out to MyCointainer, or maybe someone from Harmony is MyCointainer…

Despite 8 months of wasted rewards, Harmony is still staking with them? Despite likely having read this and realizing their months-long and numerous follies, the Harmony team still hasn’t bothered to reply to this post or the post I made on Reddit? Harmony doesn’t have the decency, the courtesy, to do THAT? It’s DISRESPECTFUL.

"RADICAL TRANSPARENCY"? Just no. This is Harmony’s typically poor transparency and communication. Such a shame. The way the core team operates causes the entire community to lose confidence in the future of this protocol. There are too many persistent issues.

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What issues are those?

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WE ARE ALL PAINFULLY AWARE OF THE NUMEROUS DAO FIASCOES:

(But it’s much worse than everyone’s favorite “vegan dao” whipping boy):

  • For starters, who states a goal of creating 10,000 DAOs without realizing you didn’t have enough funds to actually fund all 10,000 in the first place?

  • Kind of like how Harmony agreed to pay core DAO governors $75/hr, but didn’t provide enough funding to actually pay the governors for their full term (one of the DAOs had to point this out to Harmony last year).

  • Harmony still hasn’t fully paid the term 1 VDAO governors what they are owed; the Harmony team REFUSES to complete the payment and has been ghosting those governors for months. This is well-documented on the Talk forum.

  • MORE core DAOs funding issues: Harmony froze funding for the current term, so all governors (CDAO, VDAO, etc.) have been working for free and have no idea when/if they’ll ever be paid. Except, the Ambassador DAO was funded last month. And Blu3 DAO is reportedly being funded for $150k in Q3. So why the inconsistencies?

  • Except it turns out that not all core DAOs have had their funding frozen. Ambassador DAO is still being funded. Why? Why the inconsistencies? Why the lack of communication? Why do none of these decisions make any sense?

  • Are Harmony team members allowed to be on Harmony-funded DAOs? CDAO had a poll on this (54/46). Is this a centralization concern?

  • Does it look poorly when DAOs that Harmony members are part of continue to be funded while other core DAOs have their funding paused?

  • Obviously Harmony’s funded many worthless DAOs that brought zero new users to the community and did nothing but drain funds. One of MANY such DAOs was approved for $500k USD in funding despite being on ETH and not mentioning Harmony once in their funding proposal. What? How? Harmony still has not said how this specific DAO will benefit Harmony despite numerous requests for such on Talk. Core Harmony team members are using this DAO as a personal vanity project and charity.

  • Why does Harmony have to control payments to the core DAOs? Shouldn’t the DAOs be self-sustaining/self-funding? Yes, they should be! That’s the point of decentralization. Why does Harmony refuse to take this step?

  • How do you create a whole bunch of DAOs and not give them the initial start-up funds to be self-sustaining? Why was that not one of the very first milestones? Why did Harmony not build out the multi-sig wallet infrastructure to allow DAOs to stake their funds with a validator in order to earn rewards and be self-funding?

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THE COMMUNICATION:

  • It takes months for the Harmony team to reply with feasibility reviews on VDAO matters.

  • It takes months for Harmony to approve and fund bounties brought forward by its own core DAOs.

  • The shuttering of Harmony extension wallet was a bleep-show that unnecessarily created panic and confusion in the community.

  • January’s 30x increase in minimum gas fees per tx was forced on the community without a governance vote. DECENTRALIZED.

  • The Blue Metaverse was a horribly conceived, promoted and communicated marketing fail. The sad thing is, if Harmony actually had a BAYC/Yuga Labs-related project to announce, it would’ve all been worth it. But you had nothing and wound up looking like fools.

  • The community has been asking for “marketing” for as long as I’ve been in the community (> 1 year), and just now Harmony is attempting to hire people/firms for the marketing and communication roles? That level of responsiveness to the community is impressive.

  • The year-long RPC issues. My word. That is a primary function of the blockchain and it hasn’t been fixed yet? Think about all of those users who came to Harmony last year because of DFK, and then think about how unlikely they are to return to Harmony for anything else given all the constant RPC issues. There was talk last year of adding up to ~4 RPC partners similar to Pokt; what happened?! Why couldn’t Harmony and DFK figure out a way to create a DFK RPC in order to alleviate some of those issues and paint Harmony in a better light?

  • Multiple DeFi and gaming projects have either left the chain outright or have called out Harmony for the way they’ve conducted their funding and other practices. Defimons, Ragnarok, Defira/Tranquil, Cosmic Universe, MTop, and Cerebral Gaming, to name most of the notable ones. This is not how you do business. This is not how you grow the community and attract new users.

  • Recently a project was denied funding by a mysterious, internal, 3-person vote. Harmony has refused to say who the 3 people were and explain the reasoning behind their votes. Radical transparency.

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EPoS, Governance and Validators:

  • How does Harmony launch this with limited safeguards in place? Who’s idea was that?

  • By not restricting validator growth from the beginning, a validator could grow excessively large? Until HIP-16 there were no parameters in place to prevent a validator from growing large enough to completely overtake a shard and/or halt the protocol. Even with HIP-16 now in place, validators are allowed to have 6% of all BLS keys. This allows for the possibility of Harmony having only 17 elected validators. That’s. Not. Decentralization.

  • And when a validator inevitably did grow excessively large, they’d cause great risk to both consensus and governance voting? Just look at Binance validator. They currently have over 900 million ONE staked (> 16% of all staked ONE). That’s more than the next 3 largest validators combined, and more than the bottom ~112 validators combined!

  • As a consequence of the Binance problem, current governance has screeched to a halt. Despite HIP-25 receiving 99.85% YES votes, 0% NO votes, .15% ABSTAIN votes, the HIP failed because of Binance’s non-participation. This issue has been ongoing since February.

  • Governance was also migrated from gov.harmony to snapshot org. But there’s another issue with governance because snapshot doesn’t allow for the same voting options and features as gov harmony. There are multiple issues preventing governance on Harmony. It’s been over 3 months since the snapshot migration but the issues affecting governance voting have yet to be fixed:


  • Four of the 7 largest validators are run by/have ties to core Harmony team members. And there are more validators run by other Harmony contributors. I’m not suggesting any wrongdoing, but perception-wise it’s an easy target. For transparency, would all Harmony employees disclose which validators they operate?

  • Harmony promotes EPoS as a way to prevent “stake centralization”, but it doesn’t prevent it. The 10 largest validators on Harmony have 50% of all staked ONE.

stake centralization2
stake centralization

  • EPoS incentivizes elected validators to lower their effective stake by acquiring additional BLS keys. Among other things, there is an aspect of security that this provides to the network. However, it also has the consequence of limiting the total number of elected validators. Elected validators, whether intentionally or not, are able to block new/small validators from being elected. Issues related to this have been discussed on the Talk forum for over 2 years: Discussed in May 2020. And discussed in March 2021. There have been countless other discussions on here as well.

  • There has been zero increase in the number of elected validators in the last 8 months. Without Harmoforce, a grassroots group focused on supporting new validators into election, there wouldn’t have been a single newly elected (and stable) validator in MONTHS. Yes, the current market conditions play a role in the recent number of validators. But the bigger issue is how Harmony’s election process makes it prohibitively difficult for new validators to become elected, and how easily it allows elected validators to prevent any increase (whether it’s done intentionally or not).

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The community wants Harmony to have a clearly defined, coordinated vision. We want significantly more devs to build the tech. We want transparency and decentralization. We want Harmony to engage with and respond to the community’s concerns. When someone in the community creates something like the OP, don’t ignore it. We want action and follow through, not words and promises.

@lij @Jacksteroo @Sam @giv @papi @leo @sophoah @ganesha @sahil @dpagan-harmony

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