We are delighted to announce that we have engaged in a partnership with Hyperion, a blockchain project building a sustainable and self-governed map economy for the world.

Hyperion aims to establish a global decentralized map economy for billions of people, a vision jointly shared by Harmony.

As Rongjian Lan, co-founder of Harmony stated, “We are very excited to partner with Hyperion, the fully decentralized mapping platform. Hyperion’s team has deep experience in location data service and mapping technology and they’ve designed a coherent ecosystem to make maps decentralized.”

Kai Law, the co-founder of Hyperion, said, “Harmony is one of the few teams in the world with superb development capability focused on building a fully-secure and decentralized protocol.

“The Harmony team has top technical talent from global-scale technology companies (Amazon, Apple, Google) as well as blockchain domain knowledge, which is rare. Hyperion is looking forward to cooperating with Harmony to open a new continent in the blockchain world.”

Hyperion is unique in that it aims to bring a cost-effective method of map development and maintenance. Its platform allow users to own their location data, keep it secure/private and potentially monetize it, if they choose.

Why blockchain for maps:

Location data has been popularized over the past decade helping daily commuters, travelers, and numerous services (i.e. Uber, Pokemon Go). However, users are increasingly concerned about the misuse of location data.

Centralized companies that collect individuals’ locations history and movements have sold data to third parties, often without user knowledge. This goes far beyond a reasonable consumer expectation of privacy and individuals who create the data gain no financial benefits.

From a product perspective, location information do not stay the same for long and requires frequent collection and updates. Hyperion incentivizes a decentralized way of maintaining and acquiring mapping data to ensure greater accuracy and timeliness for the more than 2 million apps that rely on mapping data.

How Hyperion partnership benefits Harmony:

D-app developers building on Harmony can easily integrate Hyperion maps or location services in their applications rather than relying on a single centralized service.

Hyperion provides both indoor and outdoor maps and ease of maintenance allows it to timely updated, therefore ensuring the most effective service for location-data.

Security is one of the most valuable aspects of blockchain, however, if decentralized applications use services from centralized enterprises, the privacy of users is not secured. Finally, imagine a version of Pokemon Go, which heavily relies on location data, built on the blockchain. Use of blockchain will allow easy and secure transaction of digital assets.

Looking forward, we see a vibrant ecosystem of applications that will use decentralized mapping data for both user privacy and data monetization.

Hotel & travel: users can book travel and hotels seamlessly using Hyperion’s location platform while Harmony enables privacy, customer loyalty rewards, and a trustworthy review system.

Health & fitness: apps can use Harmony protocol to safely and securely save health data, and users can choose to monetize it for anonymous research. Integrating with Hyperion location-services allows for exercise tracking.

Social & community: users can “check-in” or play location based games without fear of apps abusing their location.

Retail & shopping: dapps can better serve users by easily finding stores and services closest to them. Retailers can still engage users (send coupon to nearest 100 users) without needing to know/capture exact user location data — a win win for both sides!

To allow seamless Hyperion maps usage, a Hyperion SDK will be made available allowing easy integration and use of Hyperion services for Harmony based decentralized applications.

Finally, Rongjian Lan, co-founder of Harmony, believes that, “With Hyperion’s expertise in map services and Harmony’s scalable blockchain infrastructure, we aim to disrupt the current centralized map service industry and bring the value back to the individual users and data contributors.”