Welcome to this review of Harmony. Harmony is a brand-new blockchain coming out that promises to do 10 million transactions per second. In this review, I'm going to do a technical deep dive into why that actually may be a real possibility and I say that because there are a lot of new icos and projects coming out that are promising very high TPS but it's starting to sound very overblown and very high. Harmony is the first project I've seen that is making this claim, that I think can actually back it up and it's a very sort of iterative process how they're going to get there, and I'm gonna walk through it step by step it's a very exciting project and I spent probably the last I don't know like four or five days reading the technical white paper and all of the associated papers, that it's cited so it got pretty technical and I tried to distill everything into the project. It's going to be its own blockchain and it's going to be competing with a lot of very big projects, like Kadena, like Solana. So it's in that same boat and as we know a lot of these projects have very very large market caps and have done very well or may do very well coming up. For that reason, a lot of people are looking very closely at Harmony.
I really enjoyed reviewing the project. It was a real pleasure and I really hope to be able to speak with someone from the team to learn more about the technology of what they're trying to build because I think it's going to be very very big. So please enjoy this review of Harmony. Before started, I want to point out that when I first unveiled Harmony on the Blog a few weeks ago I called it a gem because it was sort of under the radar to the crypto community. Investors and private sale investors, they knew about it for a while, but for the general crypto sphere and crypto YouTube crypto Twitter, nobody had really mentioned the project. Since then a lot of really great reviews have come out that are talking about Harmony and mentioning a lot of the things that I pointed out in the original article but I think they sort of missed the point they're great reviews they cover a lot of the basic things like team tech token distribution token function. But the question here is really can they achieve 10 million transactions per second the core? The focus of the white paper is achieving this 10 million transactions per second throughput rate and doing in a safe and secure way. I believe they can do that, let me find out about this promising project.
Overview
Harmony is trying to fix the number one problem in blockchain technology: scalability. The platform has the objective to enable 10 million transactions per second on a distributed ledger. This goes far beyond what leading blockchain networks can deliver today and even beyond the ambitions of platforms that are currently considered as highly scalable. They open infrastructure is a revolutionary high-throughput, low-latency, and low-fee consensus platform designed to power decentralized economies of the future.
Just as other base layer protocols Harmony enables anyone to create an application without a central authority on top of the platform. Just as currently for Ethereum, the team projects that decentralized exchanges will be among the first adopters of the platform which will later on the host all kind of decentralized apps.
The team has developed a first version and a compiler for the native Min programming language. A prototype was developed that establishes consensus with Byzantine fault tolerance and the testnet achieved 10,000 transactions per second. Harmony claims to have raised an 18 million USD Seed round and is aggressively hiring new talent. The investors have not been publicly disclosed. Most of the team members and founders joined Harmony very recently.
Team & Advisors
Harmony is founded by a diversified and skilled team, that counts with experience in blockchain, machine learning and scaling of technology products. The founders and engineers previously worked for top tier Silicon Valley companies.
Stephen Tse is the founder of Harmony. He previously worked as an engineer and researcher for Google, Microsoft and Apple and founded a startup that later on was acquired by Apple. He holds a PhD from University of Pennsylvania in cryptography.
Nicolas Burtey is a co-founder and the COO of Harmony. He is a previous VR entrepreneur and has a bachelor in mathematics and computer science.
Alok Kothari is a co-founder at Harmony and previously worked at Apple’s Siri in the machine learning area, particularly in the natural language processing field. He holds a Master degree in Artificial Intelligence forms Carnegie Mellon University.
Rongjian Lan is a co-founder at Harmony and a previous Google engineer. He is also the co-chair of the ABC blockchain foundation that connects engineers from companies such as Google and Facebook. He holds a Master degree in Computer Science forms University of Maryland College Park.
Minh Doan is a co-founder at Harmony and a previous engineer at Google with more than 5 years of experience. He holds a Master degree in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from Moscow State University.
Nick White is another co-founder at Harmony and specialized in Artificial Intelligence. He is responsible for community development.
Sahil Dean is a co-founder at Harmony and a previous entrepreneur.... and more...
Several other people are involved in the Harmony project in fields such as system architecture, business development, and research.
Among the advisors of Harmony are several remarkable people that have experience in machine learning, software development, and blockchain and worked at companies like Google, Alibaba, Microsoft, and IBM. Overall, among the team and the advisors, many individuals count with some sort of connection to Google.
Strength
Harmony communicates transparently about topics such as team member’s engagement, distribution of tokens and use of proceeds. The project has a multi-year vesting scheme for founder’s equity in place which is an incentive for the team to deliver on the promises made.
Many of Harmony’s product design decisions are based on recent research and are not arbitrary. The design decisions taken by the management are explained in a comprehensive manner and make sense.
Verdict
Harmony is trying to solve the most urgent and difficult problem in blockchain technology. Their approach and concept would not be credible if it were not for such a competent and skilled team. The founders have already achieved remarkable things in the past and count with rich and diverse experience. Still, the successful implementation of the concept will be hard but is crucial for the success of the project beyond the ICO stage.
