Harmony 2020 Year in Review & Ecosystem Growth
By: Li Jiang
Tags: Uniswap, Cross Chain Swap, News, Interoperability, Ecosystem

Harmony ONEs!

While 2020 was a year of new changes for all of us, the Harmony team focused on delivering a strong foundation for our network and ecosystem. We are grateful for the engagement and support of our validators, stakers, developers, grantees and collaborators for a fruitful year.

Here we look back on our 2020 milestones and progress on the Harmony Network, our engagement with the broader Blockchain Ecosystem, and our support for Developers & Application Partners.

For those of you who are new to Harmony, you can learn more from our website and documentation and join our Discord and Telegram to meet the community.

Harmony Network & Blockchain Ecosystem

To begin the year, we launched our native ONE token with all of our major exchange and wallet partners and began full preparations for open staking. After engaging in extensive testing with our Stake Heist on Pangaea testnet and engaging over 1,000 individual stakers, we became the first public blockchain to successfully launch staking on a sharded network in May.

Since launching staking, we’ve expanded to 640 open validator slots on our 1000-node network, well on our way towards a fully decentralized and community-led network in 2021. We have also made significant improvements in the core protocol including optimizing our finality from 8 seconds to 5 seconds then to 2 seconds. Transactions are fully settled on Harmony in 2 seconds, allowing users to experience dApps in a new and smooth manner.

We also launched our Horizon bridge to Ethereum allowing users to seamlessly bridge assets on Ethereum over to Harmony. Since launching Horizon, we’ve been working on the next version to optimize it as a gas-efficient trustless bridge. Specifically, we collaborated with top researcher Mahdi Zamani to publish a technical whitepaper including our contributions on super-light clients.

As a demonstration of the Ethereum bridge, our community launched Swoop, a cross-chain DEX modeled after Uniswap. We are also in the process of building a BTC bridge in our journey to become a hub for seamless asset transfer across all of the major blockchains. Furthermore, our team finished integrating with Coinbase Rosetta, an open-source framework to simplify blockchain interactions. We continue working with industry leading partners including Chainlink and Band Protocol as oracles and Magic (Formatic) for authentication and login for dApps on Harmony.

Developer Community & Application Partners

2020 was also an inflection year for Harmony as we built up our developer ecosystem and continue to grow our 100k+ strong community.

We hosted 150 developers in our DevPost hackathon building DeFi projects for cross-chain swap and lending. Also, we partnered with Gitcoin and their 47,000 developers to grow the future of web3 together, starting with 6 themed hackathons. Our first hackathon, Hack the Horizon, is off to a great start with over 350 developers building on our wishlist of ideas for cross-chain infrastructure, DeFi and NFT showcases and fiat applications.

This past year, we also expanded our ecosystem globally including onboarding many new members that allow fiat holders to join via CoinDCX and launching ONE on Binance.US. We kicked off our $7M grant program with the first 13 grantees. Together with our grantees, we launched cross-chain finance dApps Unifi trading, Jelly Swap, and Blits cross-chain loans.

This year we are grateful for our over 150 validators and 2350 delegators. With our grantees and team, we have launched 25 dApps on mainnet. Our 45 contributors on Github upgrade our protocol weekly and our community continues to grow past 100,000 total members.

Launch with Binance US to integrate with fiat gateways and fintech partners.

Looking Forward

We will be sharing an update in the coming weeks on our project roadmap for 2021 on cross-chain finance. Building utility and serving as a hub between the major blockchains are our core efforts. Harmony is well positioned and we are excited to pursue the explosive growth and new applications this year to help drive the global fintech revolution.

Become ONE with Harmony

Developers can build on Harmony today, a fast and open blockchain for decentralized applications. Harmony Mainnet supports state sharding with instant finality. Our staking mechanism reduces centralization while supporting delegation and slashing.

We ❤️ Developers.

Got an idea? Build it on Harmony and Apply for a Grant.

Telegram | Twitter | Discord | Youtube | Medium | Facebook | LinkedIn | Reddit | Instagram