Dear Harmony Community,

It’s been a year. We’d like to reflect on our journey, express gratitude to this community and tell you what’s next and why we’re still deeply committed to Harmony’s mission:

To scale trust for billions of people & create a radically fair economy

Harmony is a fast and secure blockchain. We are a 12-person team in Silicon Valley with 7 engineers from Google/Apple/Amazon and 2 PhDs. Our extended team of 36 strongly aligns with the mission of scaling trust and open consensus for billions of people.

Every week since early 2017, we have organized a 4-hour gathering of entrepreneurs in the Bay Area — that’s how our team and community of partners has been growing organically.

Open Consensus starts with a Handshake and Embrace (Harmony Logo)

We spoke at San Francisco Blockchain Week and won the Most Innovative Award at ETHDenver. Our investors like Qtum 帅初, UVA 李江 and Lemniscap helped organize many events for our tours in China, Korea and Vietnam.

Our 12 media partners including Deepchain and SNEK are positioning Harmony as a strong Ethereum 2.0 contender. Many mainstream press and our own documentary are broadcasting our broader social impact of secure data sharing and its economy.

Our 20 key partners include Animoca (with game assets like Garfield), Contentos (a content platform with 60M monthly users) and Timeless (a calendar-based service marketplace) are validating our value as a platform. At scale, Harmony helps businesses tokenize their assets and incentivize user engagement.

We’ve recently launched Harmony Lottery (to demonstrate our decentralized randomness) with hundreds of users on the first day. Our next app, Harmony Puzzle, will launch on Contentos aiming for 50k users in the first week, engaging our users daily for entertainment and skills.

Harmony also creates an open economy for data sharing. Businesses take years to form data consortiums such as ad exchanges and credit ratings. Harmony democratizes the value of consumers’ data while protecting their privacy.

Our token model is designed for sustainability and open governance. We allocate more tokens for protocol development and for ecosystem applications than for the team. Our node operators (about 100 in Q2 and 1000 in Q4) stake at 6% token inflation.

Harmony’s public network is operational and fully open source since Jan 2019. Our key innovations are state sharding and peer-to-peer networking. Our daily Github commits, 10 external contributors, 300 Discord members and $1M technical bounties showcase our deep belief in open development and open community.

In 2018 Q2, we raised a private round of $18.3M for 22.4% tokens at $82M valuation.

Founding Story & Core Team

Harmony team, hungry & foolish, in Silicon Valley

Since 2017 many of Harmony’s founding team members would gather every week for hours in the tradition of Google TGIF to share world-changing ideas over drinks. We were all passionate about machine learning, then quickly blockchain, as they were technologies that could impact billions of people.

During these weekly gatherings, we discussed the huge potential of blockchain to create an open data economy, but that the ecosystem was held back by an inability to scale. With our depth of expertise from the big 5 tech firms, we felt compelled to build a blockchain that could support mass adoption and unlock the full promise of decentralization. That was Harmony.

We debated how to find product-market fit and build sustainable platforms on blockchain. We researched many technical approaches for scaling and security of smart contracts. We toured in Shenzhen and Beijing to understand the crypto communities and the entrepreneurial spirit in China.

The founding team has been full-time and on-site since 2018 June: