[Project Speech] Nick White HARMONY Co--Founder at Korea Blockchain Week 2019

[Music] hi korea i'm nick white i'm co-founder of harmony and i'm looking forward to talking today about adoption i think it's really cool to come on stage after all this talk about regulation and the countries around the world that are actually looking at bringing blockchain to mainstream adoption and that's actually what harmony is about so let me dive in this is where we started back in may 2018 we were just a group of ex-google ex-apple and ex-amazon engineers witnessing the breakthroughs of bitcoin and ethereum but realizing that the fundamental limitations of blockchain infrastructure was not going to allow the full expression of the potential of blockchain as a technology platform so we thought about one thing and that is how can we build a blockchain for massive mainstream adoption and in thinking about this um well before we go any further actually i want to say this is a meme that our community made of me it's kind of funny but as an engineer myself i send myself i spend a lot of time thinking about numbers lots and lots of numbers so i'm going to use numbers as a sort of anchor a vehicle in this talk to describe adoption and harmony strategy so when it comes to designing a blockchain for mass adoption we think there are three key features that we need to hit and those are scalability you need lots of throughput to allow many users to use a platform low latency you want to have a good user experience you don't want to be sitting around for an hour or even 15 minutes for your block to be for your transaction to be approved and third low cost you want the blockchain to be economical to use and three is also an important number in terms of the blockchain trilemma and we actually think that the blockchain trilemma is not impossible in fact when we looked at it we realized that in order to solve it we just had to bring the best research to production and that's what we've done we call it deep sharding so deep sharding is this concept of combining state sharding which allows you to increase throughput with optimizations at the networking and consensus layers and that maximizes the performance of the chain and so some some tech highlights are that we combine vrfs and vdfs to create randomness we use rateless erasure code to accelerate block propagation and bls multi-signatures to enhance our pbft consensus but all that's kind of jargon and that's not why what we're really talking about today but what is important is that when an internal test net we were able to achieve 118 000 transactions per second with an average latency of 5 seconds so this architecture we feel does address the problems of scalability and latency but what about cost so this number is 24 cents this is the average transaction fee on ethereum and this is a really important number because we feel that in order for us to reach mass adoption for blockchain we need to reduce this number significantly by a thousand times or more and so that's why we've adopted proof-of-stake because proof-of-stake allows you to secure your chain without burning electricity so that the operation on the network can be much cheaper and furthermore we designed our network such that you can run a node on a laptop and that's important because even even someone anywhere in the world can run a node and also that the cost of operating is is much lower and this is important because we kind of demonstrated this that this also drives mass adoption for validators as well not just users this is a map of pangaea which is a an experiment we did with our global community where we had people from all around the world run a node for the first time and you can see all the different cities where people were running a node africa south america even there's a place called ponto delgada in the middle of the atlantic it's actually in portugal where they're running a node and i have a bit of a sore spot because i'm from hawaii and there's actually no hawaii node so next time i'm going to make sure someone in hawaii is running a node and here's some of the stats we had 2000 signups 96 different countries and most people was their first time running a node but anyway we feel like we've you know achieved these three key features but that's not why we're here today i'm not here today to give you another talk about some really fast blockchain that's going to change the world or you know the block the one blockchain to rule them all because we've heard that way too many times already i'm i'm here to talk about you know is anyone really using it and frankly the truth is that in my opinion technology is meaningless without adoption adoption is what makes technology have its impact and the other truth that uh is that most of us protocols don't have the luxury of being a first the first mover ethereum was it is synonymous with smart contracts in the same way that bitcoin is synonymous with cryptocurrency because it was the first platform to do this and because of that they are sort of the go-to they have all the assets they have all the layer two protocols so how is it that a new protocol like harmony can actually build a defensible mode build an ecosystem of our own and so that's what i want to talk about what is our strategy for this and our strategies actually comes in in two sort of primary points the first is we focus on high growth applications first is gaming we think gaming is has a big potential because there aren't any regulatory hurdles i know we just heard a lot of great things about regulation but that's in certain pockets and it's still slow gaming has no barriers and data we feel has great potential because blockchain as you're just hearing allows users to take control and ownership of their data and monetize it in new ways and finally finance it's sort of the fundamental application of blockchain if you think about bitcoin and decentralized finance so and next we we target something that we call adoption shortcut which is rather than trying to build everything from scratch we want to work with companies that have pre-existing users and many times these companies also can't use existing infrastructure because it's not scalable enough so it's really a sweet spot there so this involves the applications that have already lots of users on existing protocols and are struggling with the scalability of that network or also established companies that don't yet use blockchain but could use blockchain to improve their product or service and so we've been working on this for the past two months and i'm excited to share our progress so far first on the gaming side we've been working very closely with a partner named animoka they're veterans of the mobile gaming space but they've been making big strides investments and acquisitions and blockchain gaming and in fact we participated with them in acquisition of quidd which is a global collectible uh platform and they have over 7 million collectors worldwide with 325 major brands including nba marvel game of thrones disney and we're really excited to be working with quidd to apply blockchain in new ways that enables new business models for them i don't know if you guys have heard of non-fungible tokens or nfts but they're really exciting uh application to this whole digital art digital collectible space and this is a great example of a company that is not yet using blockchain and if it you know it's six transactions per second wouldn't be able to operate on a network like ethereum but harmony is the perfect place and secondly we're working with limpo which is a health fitness tracking app and limpo uses its limb tokens to incentivize people to complete fitness challenges and they were originally operating on an ethereum network but again they were growing so quickly now they have almost 300 000 users that the ethereum network was not able to actually sustain and provide the utility that they need so and you actually imagine 5.4 million fitness challenges you have to pay each one of those in an individual transaction and each transaction fee is 20 cents you're looking at already 1 million dollars in fees alone just to operate on ethereum and so limpo will be migrating to harmony and so this is a great example of an existing d app that needs a scalable platform and can bring all their users over to harmony and most excitingly limpo is also very focused on data as a use case they think that fitness tracking and health tracking they can enable the user to monetize their data in terms of to advertisers or to insurers in new ways and we're excited to explore this whole new realm of possibilities with data and new business models that blockchain can enable and finally we're working with a company called carbon on building the key financial infrastructure for our blockchain so they will be integrating a fiat on-ramp that allows users to onboard very quickly into our network and second of all they'll be issuing a stable coin and the stable coin is really important because it's the sort of fundamental key piece for a lot of financial applications that can be built on top and so anyway in conclusion i want to come back to the only number that really matters and that number is one blockchain is a computer science is all about ones and zeros but the number one has a very you know special uh place and to us you know one is a very good metaphor for blockchain because if you think about it one both means an individual and the whole at the same time and in in blockchain nodes are each individuals but they're coming to consensus around one single point of truth and furthermore it's also a metaphor for what blockchain can enable in society it can enable more sovereignty for individuals like you all but it can also enable us to co-exist in uh more peacefully as a greater whole and so that's what we really believe in and in an age where finance we can't really trust financial institutions and we can't trust the internet giants to have our best interests at heart we think of blockchain as something that can really defend our humanity and that's why we call ourselves the blockchain for humans we want to defend our rights and keep you know be the thing that protects our humanity in the digital age so thank you very much for listening i hope if you are you know resonate with this and you want to work with us um you know follow us on twitter join our discord and you can be the one thank you very [Music] much you