Harmony Q2 2022 Offsite Report

Harmony Q2 2022 Offsite Report - Community / Announcements - Harmony Community Forum

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 and cryptocurrency 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.

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

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.

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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