Not long ago, Stephen Tse’s Sunnyvale, California, garage was filled with boxes and storage bins. Today, it’s home to Harmony, a brand-new company that’s already getting a lot of attention for its potential to rebuild — and scale — the decentralized economy. Stephen and his fellow founding members Alok Kothari, Nicolas Burtey, Rongjian Lan, and Minh Doan explain why they believe they can revolutionize blockchain, what new team members should know, and where they see Harmony in six — and six hundred — years. Also, Harmony is hiring! Email s@harmony.one to learn more.

What is Harmony, and what problem are you solving?

Rongjian: We’re building the infrastructure for the next generation of blockchain. Blockchain is still in its early stages, but it has enormous potential beyond payment transactions, from streaming content to mobile marketplaces. It can be useful to millions of people in their everyday lives, and we believe we can support that mass adoption by making blockchain 1,000 times faster and cheaper than Bitcoin and Ethereum.

As the day begins and team members arrive, Nicolas catches up on emails.

Alok: The value of blockchain is that it enables trust — it’s a public, unchangeable, decentralized record. For example, if I give you money, everyone on the network will have a record of that transaction. The problem is that so far, the process is slow, and fees make putting together a “block” of records expensive, especially on the more popular blockchains. Bitcoin is 10 years old and still at six or seven transactions per second. It can’t scale.

Minh Doan (left) problem-solves with Nicolas (right) on the whiteboard.

Stephen: Right now, only hundreds of thousands of people are participating in crypto-economics and its marketplaces. We want to push that to millions and more. Through a combination of research-proven innovations in transport networks, consensus protocol, and system tooling, we think Harmony can eventually support one billion users.

Why do you believe Harmony will succeed?

Alok: Lots of people are working on blockchain systems, but they’re starting with a thesis and then trying to build a system to support that. What’s unique about Harmony is that we’re starting with good ideas for every layer of the stack. We’re all senior engineers, and our backgrounds are diverse — we come from AI and machine learning, blockchain, VR, and compilers. We intend to apply our deep understanding of research in all components of the stack: transport networks (Google’s UDP, 5G mobile networks), consensus protocols (Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance, sharding), and system tooling (unikernels, zero-copy streaming). And we’ve worked at companies like Apple and Google so we understand how to deliver large, scalable systems. But at the same time, you can see in our white paper that even though our ideas are ambitious, we’ve done a lot of the groundwork.

While the rest of the team works in the garage, Stephen and Alok have their one-on-one in the backyard.

Rongjian: I think another key advantage for Harmony is that the innovations we’re combining are already proven. They’re based on the latest data from research, and in some cases, implementations. We’re using OmniLedger, for example, which is a scalable and permissionless protocol that has been tested in a lab environment. Now we have the opportunity to bring it to life at the production level.

“The value of blockchain is that it enables trust — it’s a public, unchangeable, decentralized record.” — Alok

Nicolas: Of course, for a successful blockchain project, you need a strong community in addition to good tech. We’re just getting started on the community side with our first couple of hires. But even before we have a website up, we’ve had more than a thousand requests from people all over the world who want to get involved. We don’t even know where they came from! It’s crazy to have that kind of traction with zero marketing.