Sam Harrison on Harmony Protocol’s multichain vision and DAO creation

0:01i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and the cryptocoin show and today on blockchain interviews we have sam harrison the head of ecosystem growth at harmony sam welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time to come on hey thanks for having me on ashton this is uh exciting i really enjoy this and i want to welcome you to an authentic

0:20silicon valley garage which we in harmony affectionately refer to as the harmony garage so welcome amazing thank you so much yeah um it's really an honor to have harmony on the show i know your team is working super hard you've been bringing out lots of updates there's lots of stuff to talk about in this video and some surprises at the end for the viewers so stay tuned i would love

0:44for you to kick us off by explaining a little bit about harmony and the protocol for those who aren't familiar and then we can dive into the details sure so uh it's pretty straightforward i mean as any of your viewers know who understand cryptocurrency and blockchain we are level one or layer one blockchain uh we're totally evm compatible which means that anything that you build and

1:06deploy on an ethereum or any of those other uh evm networks you can also deploy on us very quickly the question then becomes why would you want to do that and the answer is well we have super fast finality transactions are finished within two seconds we have thousands of transactions per second but the interesting thing about that is that we are the first production-grade

1:29sharded proof-of-stake network which means that we can scale horizontally to as many transactions as we need to scale to um currently we have four shards that are spun up but that's just because that's what the demand is you know we could easily go more than that uh on top of that we also you know the thing is that that a lot of people think about is

1:50when we're looking at why you'd want to deploy on one chain versus another the technology is pretty much the same we're all about the same level you know some people have things a little bit better some but really what harmony is makes us different is our community and is the way in which we are actively engaged in creating a very robust and and uh self-perpetuating ecosystem

2:15that embraces the future of multi-chain we're building as many bridges to as many different chains as possible but at the end of the day it's not just about building bridges to other chains it's also about building bridges to people um because that's what honestly blockchain is all about it's about communities and so when we talk about bringing people

2:35over and we talk about why people should deploy on us that's what it is join our club be part of the group uh you know don't be exclusive we make a joke that we're non-monogamous um but uh definitely come and join us and that's that's really what harmony is about amazing intro sam thank you for that and yeah you're right about the community i think that's super important and

2:59especially having an open community and the fact that you mentioned there it's all about multi-chain having evm compatibility uh not trying to take away what's already been built in blockchain but working together for a common goal i think is super important and speaking of community it seems like the latest organization of communities has to do with these taos the decentralized

3:21autonomous organizations and i'd love to hear how the community is sort of shaping into that and and what's the vision with harmony in endows yeah uh the vision of the harmony endows is we are going to fund and back over a thousand dows over the next year or two the it's a it's an ambitious goal and it's not easy um because at the end of the day you

3:48know um the difference between code and people is that when you design a piece of code it'll operate exactly how you have it planned more or less uh you can't really do that with people they're a little bit squishier um but what we try to do is like i said kind of at the top about what makes harmony different is we try to bring in and create this community where we can share like the

4:12three central pillars of what daos are um a lot of people have a variety of different definitions of daos but almost all of them say that you share assets and you share accountability and you share interests the interesting thing about assets is a lot of the time all you think about is it's a bank account or a pool of investable assets but it's also

4:37information and that's one of the things that we really really try hard to do is make sure that anybody in a dow and anybody in the organization has as much information as anybody else so at the end of the day yes dows are the future we really really believe that it's also very early days and we are are building and learning and tripping up occasionally uh but we're

5:02pushing forward yeah no great points and you're right uh humans are a little bit squishy uh when it comes to you know giving them a goal and you know getting uh thousands or hundreds of thousands of people to work together on a common goal uh when they're thinking differently and to have a goal of funding creating a thousand dollars i could see you know they'll eventually

5:27will be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dows but you're right about us being really early and it seems like you need to work on the architecture and the functionalities of you know these these trillion dollar corporations there's a lot of intricacies business operations that go into a large scale business you know and with a decentralized autonomous organization

5:50eventually these will be autonomous organizations that could be as big as the largest companies in the world today you know and i think there needs to be a lot more functionality uh that we're still working on right now as we are in early days do you have any insight into how these dows can scale out and uh grow to coordinate tens of thousands or more

6:12people uh i do um i i wouldn't say i'm i'm the guru when it comes to this i just have a lot of experience here because i've been leading the dow effort at harmony but what i will say from what i have learned is uh first off you have to start with a little bit of a framework right so there's a minimally viable dial that people use that's basically a multi-sig

6:33wallet like a gnosis safe multi-sig wallet and a snapshot instance so what that gives you is your shared account your shared assets and it gives you an ability to have shared responsibility or accountability to vote and that's the basic layer but we've seen a variety of tools that have grown up like aragon um like dao house like the molok dao that give you a

6:56framework to do more and the more and more we can have those frameworks and those tools available the better we'll end up being one of the most interesting things that have happened in the last two or three months is a product called cordon ape like ape like i'm aping into something and they do an amazing job about peer balancing of the rewards for a

7:20project right so what would end up happening is that go in at the end of a week and say okay i'm working with these five people and i'm going to i start the week with let's say 100 tokens um that then i can divvy up amongst those five people saying okay yeah you were great this week you were fantastic and so i was able to kind of um recognize that in a very peer-related

7:43sense and that's gonna help but at the end of the day the biggest thing aside from tooling is the mental model and that's actually been really difficult to adjust because dows are not a nine to five right they are a 24 by seven because they rely on that very first thing that we share which is the shared interest and shared interest means that i'm passionate about

8:09i don't know let's say it's a fishing doubt i'm passionate about flood fishing and so i think about it all the time and i want to talk about it all the time and i want to do things to further the the mission of a fishing dow with fly fishing and that's what we tap into and that's actually the only way that daos can compete against these trillion dollar

8:31corporations is because it taps into this enthusiasm um i don't know the last time you had a nine to five but i remember my last nine to five uh sometimes i'll be driving to the office and i get stuck in a traffic jam and i just be like you know what i don't know why i'm doing this with my life like i would like it literally would be like i either go to work or i'm homeless

8:51and i guess i don't want to be homeless so i'm gonna go to work and that doesn't that doesn't really capture productivity doesn't capture creativity doesn't capture innovation when you're talking about a trillion dollar organization normally what happens is you have one ceo at the top that creates the vision and it can be amazing and that vision can go really

9:12really far but it's one person and so you're limited by that perspective in a dow you're capturing the interest of everybody in that doubt you're capturing the innovation you're capturing the power and the passion um and that's why i think it's gonna really revolutionize where we're going words to live by sam yeah i agree you gotta be passionate about what

9:37you do and you gotta be able to create a creative space uh to explore and be able to you know express your true self in the way that you want and i know with harmony and on the development side you know for builders creators um you have a you have some incentivizations you have platforms that are ready for people to use there's the one to earn platform i

10:00was looking into i'd love for you to talk about the tools available for builders and creators to truly express themselves yeah so the want to earn program is is very interesting because what we're trying to do is we're trying to decentralize employment payment um i i try to make sure i grab basically the idea is when you are passionate about something

10:20you're going to want to work right you're going to want to do something and hopefully you can get paid for that so what we are trying to do and of course there are hiccups every time you try to do something revolutionary but what we're trying to do is say okay if you're gonna say you're passionate about fly fiction you're gonna join a fly fishing down

10:38and then you are going to part of the dow mission and mandate is to teach people fly fishing knots i don't know i'm totally making up this analogy off the top of my head so if it doesn't work then my apologies but the idea is is that i'll hold a tutoring session for an hour and teach a bunch of people how to do fly fishing um fly fishing knots and then i can

10:59actually send an invoice to the fly fishing dow that says okay for 75 an hour or whatever it is i did this project to further and then the dow they can all vote on it and pay you right and this is one of the ways that which we are trying to realize the promise of cryptocurrency which was at the very beginning of the work the very beginning of the effort

11:22was to unshackle us from the traditional finance burdens right we're trying to get away from that and say okay you don't need to rely all the time on that nine to five and those banks and all that stuff you can rely on yourself you can have personal accountability um so yeah and that's what the one to earn is really about it's trying to create this this mechanism and this flywheel to

11:47break those shackles and enable personal financial freedom i hope that answers the question yeah no i think it's great you know to be able to put up uh to do whatever job you want and to put up a uh proposal to be like hey there's value in this somebody in the community you know the community should agree that i should be paid for you know my value that i'm creating

12:10exactly and that's what it is and part of it you know there is there there are always challenges um because sometimes people will value what they contribute more than what the community values right and so you have some trade-offs you have some mechanisms for that um but at the end of the day this is very different than me so as a story let me tell you so my

12:32undergraduate degree was in philosophy with ethical systems was my emphasis and i realized pretty quickly that i could never walk into a company and tell them hey pay me to tell you what you're doing wrong right that's just not what they're gonna do even though that's my passion and that's my skill set and i find that valuable no company is going to pay me to tell

12:53them that they're ethically problematic um and so that's what this is working to solve right i have this skill set i have this this concept this idea and i'm trying to figure out a way for the community and large groups of people to recognize that value as well definitely yeah and with this ambitious goal of creating all these dows and building the infrastructure and having the community

13:18i know you have a strong community but i'd love to get some kind of snapshot of where is this all at with harmony right now sure um so strong community definitely so a couple of different places you can find us um on twitter we have roughly 200 000 followers on harmony protocol um which you know smaller than like you know ashton kutcher is he still like the

13:42bigot no he's not i'm old obviously i don't follow it exactly who's the biggest on twitter these days um on our subreddit we have roughly 40 000 um same with our telegram channel and same with our discord it's you know 20 30 40 000. but our community is very very involved in fact this is one of the interesting things about working on an open protocol is every now and

14:07then i will find a project that is amazing that i had no idea existed um actually this happened not too long ago i knew what was happening but i had no idea this big there's this project on harmony called defy kingdoms that is massive i mean it's talking like almost 250 million total value locked on the on the program and i i knew it existed i had no idea right i

14:31had no idea it was this big until i went and looked at it myself and it's really cool program um but that's what we like i mean we're an open platform anybody can build on us um so yeah i mean it's it's that's kind of a snapshot of what we're doing we have i did a calculation the other day 40-ish dows already established we have something on the order of of 500 active

14:56governors on those um we've done they have had over 300 different votes regarding like community directions so it's active very cool i like it we're on the way towards the future of decentralized organizations on the internet and i couldn't be happier and i was looking for you know i know there's a lot of different uh daps that

15:23are being built as well on harmony just like d5 kingdom you mentioned and there are a lot of developers that could potentially be working with harmony that as you said they they they've heard about it but they just don't know that there's all these tools and it's ready to go and i is there some incentivizations uh for developers to build on harmony as

15:44well yeah definitely so we're running right now a 300 million dollar ecosystem grants program and you can get a lot of the details at harmony dot one slash three hundred and it'll break down kind of all the different categories and what we're looking for in those categories you know they could be projects that are coming from other chains right we're evm

16:04compatible and so we wanna see if you have huge traction on ethereum then bring your you don't have to leave ethereum to come to harmony you can just deploy on us as well and grow your own personal community um also launch grants and bounties and events and dows there's just a long list of of what we're funding um and for further detail on that you can look at

16:27harmony dot one slash apply and that'll break down some more details about okay how does this grant actually work um if you want to see kind of how this works because we are totally open you can visit talk.harmony.one our forum and you can see people apply and you can see me and and several of my colleagues responding and showing what we're doing to evaluate them in an open

16:53setting like none of this is happening behind closed doors and so the few people that have of declined you can see why i declined them and all the people that i have approved you can see why i approve them very cool sam yeah i will leave all those links in the description box below for the viewers to get involved with the community and i appreciate you taking the time to

17:14come on to talk about harmony all the best with this grand vision of all of these dows and bringing on growing the cryptocurrency ecosystem i appreciate the the family effort with the compatibility and having a multi-chain vision uh we can all grow to build this future decentralized world so thank you so much sam i appreciate it and let's follow up in the near future

17:38looking forward to it thank you for having me on you