Harmony announced today that it raised USD $ 18 million from a series of investors. This includes Lemniscap VC of Hong Kong, BCA Fund of Australia, UniValues Associates of Singapore and Consensus Capital of Silicon Valley, and others.
The co-founder, Nick White, announced to CoinDesk that the sale of tokens was the only path that made sense. He said, “Our long term vision is to create a decentralized protocol.”
Harmony Blockchain
The Harmony Blockchain will be launched with a pre-mine of 12,600 million tokens. In the presale, investors have bought just over 2,800 million of these tokens. The startup is considering ways to use some of the remaining pre-rolled tokens to incentivize the first users of the network. Including distributions to those who participate as nodes.
At the time of launch, the network consumption test nodes will be compensated with an inflation rate not yet determined. Which should gradually decrease over time like Bitcoin. Although there is no predetermined maximum bid unlike Bitcoin.
White commented that the large number of investors scattered around the world should help Blockchain win adoption. In addition, many of these investors have supported existing decentralized applications. “That’s where it gets more interesting,” the co-founder said.
Democratic vision of information
The Harmony Blockchain is specially designed to facilitate the transfer of dapps from the Ethereum network.
Therefore, if a dapp has capacity but is in trouble with confirmation times or gas rates at Ethereum. Teams can find ways to offer users a superior experience when running their dapps on Harmony.
By having investors who have backed these dapps, Harmony believes it can help persuade companies to transfer their operations to the new chain. An investor who joined the Harmony round commented:
“The architecture and central focus of Harmony are the right ones to scale the Blockchain protocol. A protection of states and networks between peers,” Maximilian Thyssen said in an e-mail. And he added, “Innovation in centralized systems slows down and is bottled by large traditional operators such as Google or Facebook.”
The bigger goal
However, the goal is much greater than that, according to Harmony. The company wants all personal data transferred to a decentralized protocol so that people can start earning money with the data they generate, as a kind of universal basic income. Although White acknowledged that this vision is far from materializing. He claimed, “When we start attracting a significant number of users, a new data economy is created. And that, in the end, is what allows the data to be an income.”
The team includes alumni of Web 2.0 giants such as Google and Amazon, companies that have made the most of the data of people on the Internet. For example, the founder and CEO of Harmony, Stephen Tse, has spent time at Apple, Microsoft and Google. This explains why the founders of Harmony do not lose sight of the implications of this democratizing vision of information.
In this regard, White commented, “The companies our team came from monopolize all of this, and extract much of the value that perhaps users should be receiving.”
Also published on Medium.