Sesameseed and Harmony Are Leading a New Era of Staking — AMA Recap

Learn how Sesameseed will incentivize community staking with SEED and Sprout

On March 5th, Sesameseed and Harmony livestreamed an in-depth conversation that covered the mission of each company, their partnership, and Harmony ONE staking. Garlam Won, Head of Marketing at Harmony and Juliun Brabon, CEO of Sesameseed represented their respective organizations.

This recap provides a summary of what was shared in the livestream, and is edited only for clarity. We have split the discussion into topics for ease of reading. You may see the full video on YouTube, linked below.

Without further ado:

Introductions

Juliun: Sesameseed is a community staking organization representing community governance. This AMA seeks to introduce Harmony to the Sesameseed community, and Sesameseed to the Harmony community.

Garlam: Harmony is a sharded PoS protocol. Harmony is the first proof of stake blockchain to make sharding a reality. And we are about to launch staking. Sesameseed has been a great supporter of Harmony, and educating the community on what is Harmony, and how to start staking.

Juliun: For those who are new to Sesameseed, our organization incentivizes community staking. Sesameseed represents the community in delegated governance, and rewards people who stake for our nodes. We track votes and stakes delegated to Sesameseed across multiple blockchains and distribute rewards in the SEED rewards token. SEED is backed by its node rewards, and is redeemable for that backed value through our staking platform, Sprout.

Sprout was developed by Sesameseed as the premiere multichain staking wallet and will support staking on Harmony at the launch of Open Staking. Additionally, it will allow simple wallet creation, and sending and receiving ONE. What Sesameseed seeks to achieve when joining a blockchain is to make sure things are fair and decentralized, to make sure there is a rich understanding of the blockchain’s technology by educating people on how the technology works and to interfacing with it, and incentivizing people for participating.

Garlam: Without getting into all the details on what makes the Harmony protocol different, Harmony seeks to make using the blockchain faster and cheaper to run transactions. In 2018 many people were talking about scaling including off-chain solutions such as Lightning, Plasma, DAGs, and sharding. As the industry matures we are now seeing how these concepts could work. Harmony is building a scalable solution that works in the real world in terms of cost and speed. The current block time is 8 seconds. Compared to transactions on platforms like Binance Chain, Ethereum or Bitcoin this is extremely fast. The transaction cost at the current price is 0.00005 cents. Making transaction costs minimal enables people to use the blockchain without worrying that it will break the bank. As we move ahead into staking, I am very excited to see how it will work with Sesameseed.

Staking

Juliun: In terms of how staking will work with Sesameseed, our focus is on making the process as simple as possible, while using key blockchain fundamentals to make it successful. There are solid fundamentals that make this technology work that allows people to operate in a private and secure way. The most important piece, in my opinion, is custodianship in terms of staking. When a blockchain like Harmony enables staking, they allow the community to stake without losing control of their assets. There is no third party you need to trust and send your assets to. You can stake and retain ownership of your assets. It’s secure, fair and represents you in the blockchain.

With Sprout, you can create a mnemonic wallet, log in using an existing Private Key, and in the future log in with Ledger. Once within Sprout, you can view your assets, and transact (send, receive, and stake). Sprout will make it simple to look at your staking portfolio, track earned rewards, and engage beyond that. You will also be able to redeem your SEED for ONE and other blockchain tokens that it is backed by (currently TRX, ONT and ONG).

Garlam: For those who aren’t familiar with Sesameseed, they may be wondering what SEED is. For example, when you stake on a blockchain you traditionally earn that blockchain’s token as a reward. But with Sesameseed you earn SEED. Earlier in the conversation, you mentioned that SEED is like a basket that holds different cryptocurrencies. Can you elaborate on that?

Juliun: Yes, SEED is a “basket” of tokens. Sesameseed operates nodes on multiple blockchains and has a fairly substantial community that stakes for us. These people who stake for Sesameseed earn SEED. The interesting this about SEED is, for example, when you get rewarded SEED on Harmony you don’t just get the ONE token in the “basket”. You get all the tokens that are contained in the “basket” (ONE, TRX, ONT, ONG). What this means is that anyone staking for Sesameseed on any of the blockchains where we operate a stakable node, they will earn SEED comprised of the ONE token as well. If those individuals staking on any blockchain redeem SEED for the tokens it is backed by, they will have a Harmony wallet created for them and be awarded ONE amongst the other blockchain tokens. They can they stake their ONE tokens on Harmony, engage with the community, learn about the Harmony EPoS system, sharding and other interesting elements of the blockchain. This is primarily why we take so much time vetting our blockchain partners. We are very protective of our community and want to make sure our vision and ethos align so that we can all grow sustainably.

Garlam: In addition to SEED, I have seen your team preparing to launch Sprout. Can you tell us more about it?

Juliun: Yes, Sprout is a platform we have built to enable you to stake, redeem and swap SEED, monitor your portfolio’s performance. It is built to be the simplest way to stake and engage with the blockchain.

Garlam: I believe it is now in Beta, correct?

Juliun: Yes, it is. We have many community members involved in testing and helping us improve the experience. You can sign up for the Private Beta here.

Q&A

Are there plans to develop any specific dApps on Harmony, similar to the DEX on ONT?

Garlam: Right now our focus is completely on staking and making sure it rolls out on time. Once staking is launched, we have plans to integrate with Lympo, which is a Samsung Galaxy health tracking app that rewards users based on their activity. They are built on Ethereum, but are interested in Harmony for its scalability and low transaction cost. We are also integrating Quidd, which is a digital collectible that we acquired. We are currently exploring an integration point to allow for transactions to operate on Harmony. Lastly, our biggest focus is our Cross-Fi platform. Our team sees a huge opportunity in Cross-FI (Cross Border Finance)finance. We have done a lot of exploration in South Korea, China, India and South East Asia to figure out which horizontal layer of the vertical stack it would fit best. Is it the settlement, credit rating for the international accounting layer? We are trying to figure out how Harmony will best integrate in terms of its speed and low transaction costs.

Juliun: You mentioned something that I think is very important to Harmony. That is scalability. What is super important to recognize here is the benefits of sharding in a blockchain. That may be intimidating to some of our community. Can we do a quick overview on what is sharding and how does it apply to scalability?

Garlam: A normal blockchain only processes one transaction at any given time. If there are a lot of transactions they are backlogged waiting to be processed. What sharding does is it distributes transactions to different processors. There can be parallel transactions going on at the same time. The more shards you have the more processing power you have. We do this by increasing the number of nodes and participants. You can think of it as having a highway with four lanes vs ten lanes.

Juliun: So basically a shard is a complete blockchain. Multiple shards are those blockchains that can communicate with each other. What is nice is a single blockchain can process a ton of throughput. In terms of shards, as you add more blockchains the throughput goes through the roof. Can you tell us how many shards Harmony will launch with and how will it scale?

Garlam: We currently have four shards. We are planning on launching with 6–8 shards, which will increase our transaction speeds. We now have 320 nodes that are externally operated. We are aiming to increase that to 600–1000 within this year.

Is an Epoch 24 hours, or 36 hours?

Garlam: Epoch is approximately 1.5 days. In terms of how it works, we use Epochs as a metric for counting periods. For example, bidding happens every Epoch, or unbinding will take seven Epochs.

Will the Sesameseed node be available immediately upon launch of Open Staking, or some time after?

Juliun: Our plan is to have nodes available right at launch. Something worth noting is when you stake on Harmony tokens will be frozen for seven Epochs. Once those Epochs have passed, you will see your tokens made available to you once more.

Freezing simply means you are unable to transact those tokens until the end of the freeze which is, like Garlam mentioned, seven Epochs (1 to 1.5 days each). Once your ONE is unfrozen you can transact them, send them to another wallet, stake for a different node, etc.

Will Sesameseed be prepared to ramp up a second validator if the number of delegates coins we receive takes us over the sweet spot for rewards?

Juliun: On Harmony there is a sweet spot for earning rewards. They don’t want one node coming in and dominating the proportion of earned rewards. So they put in an interesting parameter to incentivize a fair distribution of rewards. What that means is that if Sesameseed puts up one node and ask the community to vote that single node, it will throw us off the median of the entire chain and it will not receive the same rewards that others do. There is an incentive to more fairly distribute to participants. Sesameseed is prepared at launch to have multiple validators to better distribute participation across the blockchain.

I would like if you would explain EPoS a little further.

Garlam: The model we considered, is different from traditional PoS, which is very wealth driven. In those models if you own 90% of staked tokens you earn 90% of rewards. To encourage more decentralization, EPoS will enable a median stake. There will be a 20% up and down number that would be the sweet spot for earning rewards. In that sweet spot everyone is earning the same amount. If a validator stakes too much, they would be out of the sweet spot, and potentially earn no rewards. For example, if 7 was the sweet spot, and they staked 100, 93 of those tokens staked would not earn any rewards. It’s in the delegators best interest to find the best validator that is in the low margin of staking. The best ROI in rewards is highest when staking for those in the sweet spot.

Effective proof of stake (EPoS) is just one way we are incentivizing decentralization. Once we are live we will continue testing and improving. Our philosophy at Harmony is to deliver products as quickly as possible so we can learn faster and improve quickly.

How is cross-shard routing handled? Is it a full mesh between all nodes?

Garlam: As much as I can reveal being Head of Marketing and not Head of Engineering is that it works. Cross-shard transactions currently work across four shards. We are the first to have successfully enabled that. We have a beacon chain on Shard 0 that processes all balances and settlements across all shards.

Juliun: I would like to take more time on sharding from my perspective, because it is something that those coming from other blockchains may not completely understand.

Sharding is an interesting way to optimize a blockchain. You don’t need to increase the throughput of the entire blockchain. You can have four blockchains that communicate well together to better manage the workload of the blockchain. For example, when you come into Harmony and log into your account, it will exist on four or more shards at launch (e.g.: Shard 0 through Shard 3). If I have a balance of ONE tokens on Shard 1, I may not have any on Shard 0. If I send you tokens on Shard 1 you will see them on Shard 1, but may not see them on Shards 3 or 2. This is something a user should be aware of. When you log in, you have accounts on all Shards and can perform cross-sharding transactions; your address can exist across all Shards and may have different balances on each.

Garlam: I would like to add that sending and receiving transactions to and from Exchanges should be performed on Shard 0. Shard 0 has been dedicated as the chain for performing Exchange transactions. If you were to accidentally send ONE to an Exchange from a different Shard, you will have to speak to the customer service department of that particular Exchange. To avoid that, remember that Shard 0 to Shard 0 is always the safest for these types of transactions.

Conclusion

Garlam: Our team members have been running validator nodes, and testing the staking and unstaking features. This testing was completed on March 4th, 2020. We have now unofficially launched the testnet to a small group of trusted volunteers, Pangaea operations team, Foundation nodes for increased testing. Our next phase will open Pangaea (Testnet) to hackers, developers to stake and break our network so we can learn how to improve. After this is finalized, we will launch mainnet.

I recommend our viewers get involved by signing up to Sprout.

Juliun: Sprout is now in Beta. We are in the process of integrating Harmony $ONE. We expect that to be available very soon.