Q3 and Q4 Execution Plan

Community Announcements
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In this Q3 and Q4, our team will have dedicated focuses to deliver more traction. Our overarching focus will be to reduce operational costs, deliver high-impact results, and build innovative improvements to the blockchain and our ecosystem.

That said, recent events have brought difficult times for everyone in the Web3 space. Many projects are building their plans to weather the storm and Harmony is no exception.

We have a number of exciting launches lined up in Q3 and Q4 but, to get there, we must make a handful of tradeoffs in certain areas. During this time, Harmony will focus on high-impact deliverables while a) on boarding great projects and b) executing on our next-level technical milestones.

Our efforts to reduce our operational costs include:

  • DAO Funding, Operations, and Infrastructure

Harmony will pause new DAO funding. In addition, contributors behind our DAO Operations team will be moved into other teams / guilds and their deliverables will be adjusted to match their new focus. Existing DAOs can expect for the Harmony team to establish communication within the next couple weeks to discuss a path forward.

  • Events

Harmony will freeze event sponsorships. The Event Operations team will re-prioritize their time and spread their efforts across high-impact deliverables. Event attendance will be considered on a case-by-case basis and spending will be strategic.

  • Inbound Grants

New inbound grant applications will be paused. Outbound grants will continue for high-impact, strategic partnerships. The Grant Operations team will continue working with and communicating with existing grantees. Their time will slowly be split into other areas with more impactful deliverables.

Note that while funding may be halted in certain areas, Harmony will continue to offer support for DAOs and our community of users and developers. Co-marketing with ecosystem teams, AMAs with core DAOs, and keeping open lines of communication are some ways the Harmony team will show and provide support for those a part of our ecosystem.

Moving Forward

These changes will be in effect starting today while the team continues to reduce our operating expenses. We aim to continue producing high-impact deliverables such as strategic partnerships, the trustless Ethereum bridge, elastic RPC infrastructure, and cross-shard messaging.

Read more on the off-site report.

The team plans to revisit our spending on events, new inbound grant proposals, and DAO infrastructure in the near future. While we understand this will disappoint some, we all hope you find this helpful in knowing that Harmony is exercising careful due diligence with our expenses.

The best times are ahead of us, and we look forward to the exciting launches coming in Q3 and Q4 of this year.

Update [June 22nd 2022]

To our community of users and developers:

Our decision to pause grant funding was made with great hesitation but a strong need to treat our resources with prudence. Supporting our ecosystem is important and we wish to do everything in our power to help our developers succeed on Harmony.

We understand the concerns that have been expressed and have worked to create a way to continue supporting our developers. That said, starting July 1st, 2022, Harmony will resume milestone payouts for existing, approved grantees.

As a reminder, below is a list of guidelines that existing approved grantees must meet:

  1. Payouts are for existing, approved grantees. New grant applications will remain on hold and we will not be accepting any new applications.

  2. Completed milestones must meet the highest standards. Harmony will review deliverables to ensure quality and impact. For example, it is not sufficient to simply deploy contracts to testnet as a completed milestone. Applications on testnet must be feature complete and usable.

  3. Source codes must be open source and repos publicly accessible.

  4. Payment will only be made in ONE tokens and to a Harmony Gnosis multisig wallet with 5 of 9 signatories.

  5. We require a 6-month exclusive campaign with Harmony ā€” we can work with you to plan out time windows to work across chains.

  6. [New] Given our need to focus resources and urgency in building traction, we will review and pay out up to 180 days after the initial date of approval on the forum. Milestones submitted after 180 days will no longer qualify for payouts.

In addition to the list above, we will continue with our new co-marketing pipeline and help our community of developers amplify their products on Harmony. We sincerely hope you find this helpful and our Grant Ops team can help answer questions from our developer community over our existing channels.

ā€“ The Harmony Team

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Evening Daniel,
Could you elaborate on what you mean by ā€˜supportā€™ for Core DAOs like the Community DAO?
Are we talking financial, mental, emotional?

From my understanding the CDAO has been waiting on getting paid for a month now with no response from the team.

I know this is not your decision but itā€™s been over a month of vague answers from the team.

Your communication on inbound/outbound grants is perfect while the Core DAOs is extremely vague.

Could you please be more specific as to what is going on with the likes of VDAO and CDAO?

Thanks a lot!

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It is a pity that the Harmony project can only ā€œdevelopā€ on hype. For example, Binance, despite ā€œhard times,ā€ is recruiting and growing.

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Thank you Harmony team for pausing new DAO grant funding and freezing sponsorships. :+1: Please save save save money.

Also, please keep building Harmony One to be one of the best chains :pray: :sparkling_heart:

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Hello there @amartay1986. The examples on support are:

Co-marketing with ecosystem teams (and DAOs), AMAs with core DAOs, and keeping open lines of communication are some ways the Harmony team will show and provide support for those a part of our ecosystem.

We are aiming to practice frugality and careful spending in these times, but we also know that support for those in our ecosystem can extend beyond it being financial. While we are tightening the purse strings in these times, Harmony will be available in other ways (not limited to the examples above) outside of financial support.

As for next steps on existing DAOs, and speaking to your concern regarding delayed funding to the CDAO, we will be reaching out to communicate next steps and streamline communication. There are multiple DAOs we need to communicate with and a thread post is likely not the most efficient method (though, we can certainly continue posting here for transparency).

I hope this helps @amartay1986. I know this might not answer everything in specific details but I hope this is a good start in providing clarification. Thanks again.

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This response is laughable @dpagan-harmony the CDAO has been trying to communicate with the core team and all they have gotten is crickets for the last month at least. How can other chains continue to build in these times but Harmony cannot? Seems like you guys didnā€™t plan your budget very well and spent too much on frivolous parties for the core team when you should have been planning for the future. We all knew a bear market would come how did you guys not already have a plan in place?

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Hope youā€™re doing well @RagweedRasta.

To you point on continuing to build, our goals of building and launching have not changed. The trustless Ethereum bridge with community run relayers, staking ONE for 1BTC, cross-shard messaging protocol ā€“ these and more are still on the roadmap and slated for a Q3 / Q4 delivery with full marketing efforts behind them.

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I agree with the comments posted here by other users. We have also been working for months on our DAO, presented in February, it was approved on March 31, we published completed milestones after adapting to the budget change requested by the Harmony team, several months later we still have not received the funding, other DAOs and other proposals were paid, we did not understand why such a long delay and lack of transparency, now what are they going to do? Some of us committed to doing things with the funding and now we are publicly looking bad for not being able to complete it, since we never received that funding CONFIRMED by Harmony. The team doesnā€™t even reply to private messagesā€¦

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@dpagan-harmony,
I think it would be very wise for Harmony to take down the DAO proposals page.
Funding is not coming back this year or the next more than likely.
So why keep it going?

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That doesnā€™t answer the question about the lack of communication for the last month at least. Itā€™s like you guys knew what you were going to do but just werenā€™t courageous enough to actually tell the community because you knew there would be backlash like there is now. What about all the funding that was already promised and the hours of pay all these governors are owed?? Seems like all the team is worried about is themselves, dunno why this post was flagged but if someone has issue with it bring it up with me on the forum

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Also what is the answer to the lack of planning with your Treasury? Did you guys think it was going to stay green forever??

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The transparency from the core team has basically been like a blacked out window for the last long while. I donā€™t understand how you all can think that this is an appropriate way to run a business and treat your investors!!

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It is clear that this bear market will occur just by looking at the situation in all countries. But that does not mean stepping on the brakes, or not having been foreseen in this situation. How can it be that Binance hires so many people at this time? Simple, the adoption will not stop, the blockchain is more than a token with volatility, it is clear that if an ambitious and serious project is not generated, that offers security and transparency to users, nobody will bet on it. (Is it the case with Harmony?) How come there are countries that are launching blockchain-related projects right now and Harmony backs down? When the market is red is when people get down to work, they donā€™t get scared and run away. The technology that we have now offers a world of great possibilities beyond the market, utility nfts are a very useful tool that we are about to implement in daily life, they do not have to be affected by the volatility of a market, that is to say only one example of many.

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Respectfully, I donā€™t understand the lack of communication complaints.

Harmony just put out an all hands meeting two days ago. Tse put out his video recently. Github commits are still looking OKish. The One Weekly format is solid. They donā€™t blow up social media, but all the info is out there.

In any case, the news of pausing the outflow of Harmony tokens is seriously encouraging - as Iā€™m sure it is to most supporters and investors. Orgs that frivolously handle cash flow die quickly. Fortunately, the Harmony team is uniquely talented enough to overcome the temporary shot in the foot. And theyā€™re pivoting.

As someone very critical of the DAO and treasury issues, I want to give kudos to the team for their hard decisions in turning the ship.

Weā€™ll weather this.

  • Some rando validator #decentralization
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I am not in disagreement that scale backs had to be done but some DAOs were left without and communication and the promise of funding. Itā€™s more the way things were handled, I understand that drawbacks have to happen but you should fulfill your obligations before you cut off the funds.

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Respectfully if you look at any funding request on this forum youā€™ll see the lack of communication. The first DAO on Harmony hasnā€™t even been fully funded yet after a vote from the community. Nothing but crickets from Harmony.
The core DAOā€™s have a bunch of passionate people putting in time waiting respectfully to be payed for work done. Itā€™s very disrespectful to not pay people. Monthā€™s of work. We keep getting more hoops to jump through, thatā€™s fine. To now say a couple weeks longer and maybe weā€™ll say something. Keep holding that carrot out in front of us, Iā€™m getting tired.

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I want to say thank you for the good experience of creating a DAO in the Harmony ecosystem :laughing:

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Hello. I think that with your answer, you are justifying Harmony too much right now. I think that after reading the complaints from participants in the ecosystem, what the main positions of Harmony should do is apologize. We all know that we are in a difficult situation for the entire Crypto ecosystem, but this does not justify their lack of ā€œsincere, real and fast communicationā€ towards projects that have been worked hard by different people around the world. In any case, I think that this situation is not at all favorable to the development of Harmony and that, perhaps, the correct decisions must be made in times of economic prosperity and not reach this ugly situation in which Harmony finds itself in these moments. I have been following their trajectory since January, and perhaps they should have invested the money in productive marketing actions and not in so many ā€œimage actionsā€ at parties. It is simply an opinion of a citizen concerned about the development of the crypto ecosystem. Thank you very much and may this bad financial situation pass soon. :blue_heart: :blue_heart: :blue_heart: :blue_heart: :blue_heart: :blue_heart: :blue_heart: :blue_heart: :blue_heart:

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Sounds like someone didnā€™t do his 2018 homework. No finance/investment managers in the team?

The Harmony Foundation should restructure its ecosystem funding, not cut it after token price and ecosystem TVL went -90%. There are so many talents in the space that are becoming free agents after the market crash. Why not bring them to the Harmony ecosystem.

How shortsightedā€¦

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Are the grant commitments considered (bad) debt? Because if I am the CFO, I would cut everything, literally every single funding that doesnā€™t have to be paid, but hey this is crypto, itā€™s kinda grey area. I think.

And yes, I realise there would be a lot of (sometimes justified) tears and screaming. At the very least you could expect clear, concise communication from a figure like proper CFO.

I very much agree with you @shestov that Harmony needs restructuring, probably not only ecosystem funding but internal organisation as well. I have been on Harmony since before DFK, in recent months I happened to learn a bit deeper how Harmony Foundation operates and I believe there are at least few areas where Harmony can and should (maybe has to) improve as start up. One comment that stood out to me and still rings a bell: I happened to join one of the Twitter Spaces where Harmony team member defended state of ecosystem funding by saying something along the lines ā€œwe only approved $4mil of grantsā€. I thought to myself at that time already this really doesnā€™t seem like rainbows, quite opposite.

In any case, I truly wish Harmony can go through this, being part of the project that is very much embedded, one of oldest protocols on network, and in general, I want it to succeed.

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