Harmony Has $300M for Projects Looking to Expand Beyond Ethereum

The Harmony Foundation is allocating more than $300 million in the network’s ONE token over the next four years to attract projects, the blockchain startup said.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based team said Thursday the initiative, part of what it is calling a “full-stack ecosystem strategy,” aims to support 10,000 startups with bounties, grants and other sweeteners. It comes as competing base layers like Avalanche, Fantom and others pony up large funds to reward projects in an increasingly competitive space.

“We think that Harmony has the right vision for creating wealth together, for having the infrastructure and platform to do it,” Harmony founder Stephen Tse told CoinDesk.

The company will allocate $180 million over the next year with $50 million going to 100 decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) that can then decide how to use the capital, including supporting smaller projects. There’s an additional $30 million going to partner organizations that have deployed on Harmony and can reach end-users.

The foundation will distribute most of the remaining funds, which it has built up in a reserve fund from investors and current network participants through different-sized grants, rewards and investments. Small groups of network participants will vote on individual projects.

“When we started this project, we allocated a token that network validators and investors would get a certain reward, but there are huge reserves,” Tse said.

Harmony is a proof-of-stake blockchain that claims to process transactions in two seconds at a low cost. It raised $18 million in an April 2019 token sale to strategic investors and the following month, sold an additional $5 million worth of tokens via an initial exchange offering on the Binance Launchpad.