2020 commences the 2nd decade of the 21st century. This decade is crucial to the blockchain industry as the blockchain technology is ready to make the real-world impact and ready for massive adoption to prove itself as the infrastructure of the decentralized economy. Otherwise, it may fall into trap like the early days of Artificial Intelligence with not much real-world impact.
Harmony is aiming to build the high secure, scalable, and decentralized general blockchain platform. We had launched the mainnet v0 in the middle of 2019. In 2020, Harmony will reinforce the security, scalability, and enable the staking economy of the mainnet with the phased releases of mainnet v1, and v2. As the underneath technology is maturing, the user utilization and developer adoption is the key to the Harmony blockchain’s success, which will establish the foundation for the long term success of the blockchain ecosystem and keeps the business rolling and being relevant in the industry.
In Harmony, we care deeply about our users and the ecosystem. They are the $ONE token holders, node runners, dApp developers, and business partners. The entire ecosystem will grow along with the core protocol advancement, layer 2 protocol support, dApp development, partner integration.
End-user adoption of blockchain is via dApp usage and partner integration. Developer/partner integration starts with the blockchain SDK/API and developer tooling. It is the starting point of any blockchain development process. Harmony had developed preliminary versions of JavaScript SDK, Java SDK, and Go SDK. We also plan to build a Python SDK. To be able to attract application developers and ease the partner integration, and compete with other blockchains, a complete development environment has to be established, including multiple programming languages binding, detailed SDK documentation, build and test environment, debug and development environment (IDE). Typical Ethereum development tooling includes SDK, Ganache, Truffle, Truffle boxes, Remix IDE, etc. It had set a good role-model of developer tooling for the industry which we shall follow. My goal in 2020 is to launch Ethereum-comparable developer tooling for Harmony, with support from the community and partners.
Besides the developer tooling, popular layered solutions like matic, loom, cocosbcx, are ideal candidates to port to Harmony blockchain for faster dApp development and integration. To integrate with real-world applications, blockchain oracles are also mandatory components, such as chainlink, or tellor. The integrations are expected to happen in 2020 to bridge real use cases and blockchain applications. This goal can be measured by the successful onboarding of blockchain games and fintech partners.
In addition to the essential smart contract deployment/execution APIs, Harmony will expose on-chain crypto primitives to developers for value-added services including on-chain secure and fair randomness using VRF/VDF, ring-signature support of privacy transaction, cheaper and faster zero-knowledge proof support. They are the differentiation points of Harmony blockchain compare to other sharding blockchains. One of my goals is to define and build the cheaper and faster crypto in Harmony blockchain and make them available to developers.
The new decade is commenced. Starting from end-users and developers, we are preparing Harmony blockchain for adoption and real-world impact.
