Harmony: One of the top IEO’s of 2019

5 min readMay 19, 2019

What Really Is Harmony?

Harmony is a highly scalable blockchain platform which is built on the concept of SHARDING.

The Need For Harmony…

One of the most plaguing issues in Blockchain space is that of scalability. Slow transactions rates have been a major reasoning of critique for current blockchain technologies. Bitcoin with a rate of 7–8 transactions per second (TPS), and Ethereum with the rate of around 10–15 TPS . Over the past couple of years there has been a growing demand towards a blockchain that is simply put- Fast but preserves the core principles of a blockchain in general: Immutable, Secure, and Decentralized.

Number of proposals were put forward to scale Ethereum, amongst one of such proposal was “Sharding”. However, there have been numerous issues in developing a solution which works whilst addressing these issues. (These issues go out of the context of the article so I’ll be attaching a link at the end of article where you can learn more about them). It wasn’t until recently that Harmony developed a sharding solution that addressed majority of these concerns. Though decentralization is still an issue but it can be solved once the general public starts joining the Harmony Network as validator nodes. But rest assured, it is still very much more decentralized than EOS.

Philosophy Of Harmony

The world population is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050. Harmony was designed by the founders with a vision to create a public blockchain architecture which would be able to support the scale of requirements presented by these ten billion people. Sure, we are long way off currently, but since the inception of project, Harmony was designed in a way to quality jumps of an order of magnitude rather than incremental additions in the quality.

Team

Harmony takes full pride in the strength of their team and presents it as a core strength of their project.

They are a 12 member team, 7 of which are employees coming out from Google, Amazon, Apple. Two of these googlers are PhD qualified.

Stephen Tse: Google engineer, startup founder (acquired by Apple), UPenn CS Phd
Nicolas Burtey: VR startup founder with $10M VC investment and 40 people, Math BS
Alok Kothari: Apple Siri NLP engineer, Carnegie Mellon AI MS
Rongjian Lan: Google Search engineer, Maryland PhD candidate
Minh Doan: Google Voice AI engineer, Olympiad champion, UC PhD candidate
Nick White: Zeroth AI specialist, Stanford EE BS & MSc
Sahil Dewan: Edtech startup founder, Draper Dragon, Harvard MBA, CS BS
Eugene Kim: Amazon/Blizzard/NTT network engineer, CS BS
Leo Chen: Amazon AWS & Kindle engineer & manager of 8, CS BS & MSc
Chao Ma: Amazon NLP & fraud engineer, Math PhD
Li Jiang: logistics startup founder, Global Tech/Education Summit organizer, GSV Capital
Mary Dansker: blockchain agency founder, Draper University mentor, business innovation MSc
Garlam Won: ICONIZ global partnership, Deloitte consultant, featured in Forbes

Click this link to browse the team.

Features Of Harmony…

Low gas fees
High throughput transactions.
ICO’s can be done on Harmony.
Tokenization of business assets on the blockchain e.g. loyalty points.
Existing dApps can be migrated to Harmony.
Privacy preserving as it employs zero-knowledge proofs in the transactions.

Testnet Results

Harmony achieved 118k TPS with 41k nodes network during their testnet in Q3, 2018.

Harmony has further achieved the single shard performance of 1000+ TPS.

Partnerships

Harmony has been making a lot of partnerships with enterprises that are building projects on blockchain. They have a rich batch of 30 partners, not all of the information regarding partnerships is public right now, but they are planning to release the news in upcoming months. Amongst the most prime ones are Animoca Brands (global game developer of Garfield, Doraemon, and Astro Boy. Harmony is working with Animoca to build ERC721-compatible gaming assets and digital collectibles.), and Contentos (gaming platform with 60 million monthly active users).

Other partnerships includes the names such as CoinXP, hBits, Hyperion, NoIZ, Nomica, Picolo, Qokka, Quanta, Rymedi, Timeless. Harmony is actively working with them to provide the necessary infrastructure for their blockchain development.

Harmony’s Superiority Over Its Competitors…

Binance’s IEO report on Harmony presents us with an excellent infographic depicting Harmony’s superiority over existing and upcoming sharding blockchain solutions.

Harmony vs other projects (Source: Binance)

IEO Price

The IEO price on the Binance Launchpad sale is 0.003175 USD which is nearly half the price per token (0.0065USD) closed during the seed funding round in May, 2018. This discount gives us an amazing deal with much better terms than seed round investors.

The Binance Factor

Exchange is perhaps the third most important criterion post team and project idea when it comes to valuation of an IEO. The greater the liquidity at the exchange the better it is for the IEO. What better exchange than Binance itself (exchange with the highest volume), the exchange which started it all; the trailblazer of IEO’s in the crypto space.

Infact, let the performances speak for themselves…

Major Token Unlocks Only After November…

As you can see their are no major sudden supply increases till the 30th of November i.e. five months of relatively stable circulating supply post the IEO. The only tokens that will be unlocked are ecosystem tokens, which unlock on a monthly basis (74,858,824) and contribute to less than or equal to .06% of increase in the circulation. This slow token unlock provides launchpad investors with a greater investor protection and includes prospects of higher token valuation leading up to the months of major token unlocks.

Final Thoughts

As stated above, decentralization of Harmony is one of my concerns, but on the bright side, Harmony’s emergence as a high throughput and secure blockchain is a sign of positive developments in the crypto space. It has outmached its ancestors like Zilliqa and Quarkchain in various parameters which includes higher single shard TPS, higher single shard security, and instant finality.

If you do think of Sharding as one of the possible solutions to the existing scalability woes in the public blockchain space then this surely is one project worth looking out for.