Harmony

In 2018, Stephen Tse - armed with a PhD in compilers, experience at Google Maps, and a successful startup exit to Apple - recognized a critical challenge in the blockchain space: scalability. While blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum had proven the value of decentralization, they struggled to handle the transaction volume needed for global adoption. Tse founded Harmony with a bold vision to create an open blockchain infrastructure capable of serving 10 billion people, combining academic rigor with practical engineering to solve the trilemma of scalability, security, and decentralization.

Harmony has since developed a high-performance blockchain platform utilizing state sharding and secure proof-of-stake to achieve remarkable throughput while maintaining decentralization. The protocol has demonstrated the ability to process 10,184 transactions per second across 25 shards with 10,000 nodes - setting industry benchmarks that measure both transaction speed and node participation. Beyond the technical achievements, Harmony embraces open development principles, publicly sharing team performance reviews and maintaining radical transparency with their community. Today, Harmony continues to build toward its mission of scaling trust for billions of people and creating a radically fair economy, with applications spanning DeFi, NFTs, social gaming, and the emerging frontier of social AI.