We held an “Ask Me Anything” or AMA session with our collaborator Harmony One on June 10th, 2019. Harmony One is a high-throughput blockchain, optimized from the networking layer up. They are implementing full and secure sharding that is more comprehensive than transaction-sharding projects. Harmony One Co-founder Minh Doan answers questions from the communities! This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

1 – TPS (transactions per second) on the Visa network is 2,500-4,000 on average, and its maximum may reach 24,000. With several thousand TPS, it is enough for mass adoption. Is it meaningful to have millions or even a billion TPS, as proposed by Harmony?

Mr. Minh Doan: Totally agree that several thousand TPS is enough for mass adoption. In theory, by using the sharding approach, we can scale the TPS to millions so long as we have several shards. If we have enough machines to make 2,000 shards, we can get 1 million TPS, assuming one shard contributes 500 TPS on average.

2 – Theoretically, when Harmony scales to hundreds of shards, TPS will be multiplied as well, producing incredible throughput. However — both in theory and practice — how do you solve synchronization and communication among nodes within a shard and among shards efficiently? Sometimes, 1 + 1 may not be 2, but less than 1.

Mr. Minh Doan: Harmony does state sharding, and different shards have different states. All shards do not need to sync with each other. It is a huge limitation to sync all shard states.

3 – What is Harmony’s strategy to become an active network of thousands of nodes? Despite the impressive results of the testnet, sharding seems like nothing without a large number of nodes. Zilliqa, one year after mainnet launch, has 2,310 nodes.

Mr. Minh Doan:  Your question is about adoption. I believe all blockchain projects will take time, and this is why we are working hard with communities to achieve adoption.

4 – When will Harmony have its first DApps (decentralized applications)? And what’s the biggest hurdle you are facing now in the adoption plan?

Mr. Minh Doan: One of our first DApps is puzzle game. This tweet is from CZ playing our game. We are actually giving out prizes for people who get to level 100.

5 – Can DApps from the other platforms (EOS, ETH, etc.) be migrated to Harmony? What will make DApp developers choose Harmony over these famous platforms?

Mr. Minh Doan: DApps from Ethereum could be migrated to Harmony. We have built a few DApps with solidity. We are trying to leverage a strong Ethereum community for fast adoption.

6 – I read that Harmony’s blockchain could achieve up to 10 million TPS with a latency of only 0.1 seconds. Isn’t that number a bit ambitious?

Mr. Minh Doan: The number (about 10 million TPS) was mentioned in our first whitepaper because by sharding, the TPS can be scaled together with the number of shards. Assuming one shard contributes 500 TPS on average, we can achieve 1 million TPS if we have enough machines to make 2,000 shards.

7 – Who are the customers of Harmony, currently? In the near future? And what is the incentive and key of One to appeal to businesses that need to use the Harmony blockchain?

Mr. Minh Doan: Our current customers are foundation nodes who are running our blockchain in testnet. 69 out of 72 foundation nodes have received the rewards. See here. Certainly, we expect more node runners in the future.

8 – Harmony tries to develop a high throughput blockchain based on deep sharding. How about interoperability (which is a big concern for next-generation blockchains)?

Mr. Minh Doan: Harmony is a scalable sharding blockchain, and we do not focus on interoperability.

9 – Harmony’s specific kernel is a great product. But could it have any negative impact on a device’s OS and general performance? How does Harmony test for this?

Mr. Minh Doan: All proposals related to the kernel are in our long-term roadmap, but it is not currently our priority.

10 – What is the reward mechanism for block production?

Mr. Minh Doan: For simplicity, let’s assume each validator deposits the same amount of stake. For each block proposal, every validator would receive the same reward amount x in $ONE tokens. This means that if we have n number of validators in a shard, the total reward will be n⋅ x.

If you look deeper into our protocol, as we are using PoS (Proof of Stake), the reward for each validator will be proportional to how much stake it deposits when joining a shard.

11 – I know that everyone on the Harmony team is hard-working, sometimes even working nights over the weekend. But people don’t necessarily perform their best at night, and I think that working earlier and for longer instead would achieve a better result. What are your thoughts on this? Just a suggestion.

Also, I can feel that the Harmony team focuses on many markets and has done several AMAs already. Might it be too hard to manage several markets at once?

You have run 7 AMAs in Vietnam, indicating that Harmony values the Vietnamese market. However, I’ve yet to see any clear strategies in Vietnam. There have been no campaigns, no meetups, no media, no long-term strategies published. Could you share your thoughts on this?

Mr. Minh Doan: Yes, we have worked very hard for the upcoming mainnet. I really appreciate your suggestion, and I personally agree with your opinion. Definitely, this is not a sprint but a marathon, and I hope things will get better for the team in terms of work balance.

From our observations, Vietnam, together with Japan, Korea, and China, is one of the hottest crypto countries in Asia. We have tried our best to reach out to Vietnamese communities. But we could do more. Our team is relatively small right now, and we are trying to grow to take better care of Vietnamese communities, to do more campaigns, meetups, etc.

Thank you so much Minh Doan for answering our community’s questions. We cannot wait to see what the best and brightest at Harmony One do for the betterment of the ecosystem. We would also like to thank our community members for all their interesting and insightful questions. Looking forward to the next AMA!

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