Harmony
Harmony, founded in 2017 by Stephen Tse, a former Apple and Google engineer, in San Francisco, develops an Ethereum-compatible layer-1 blockchain using sharding and Effective Proof-of-Stake. Its architecture partitions the network into shards for parallel execution while maintaining cross-shard communication and low fees, targeting scalable DeFi and NFT applications. The Harmony mainnet launched in 2019 with bridge tooling to Ethereum and BNB Chain and a grants program for developers. Headquartered with a distributed team now largely remote, Harmony remains community-governed with open-source development. Backed by leading investors, it emphasizes peer-reviewed research and pragmatic decentralization with a roadmap focused on cross-chain interoperability and zero-knowledge advances. Expect a research-oriented culture that values protocol correctness, community collaboration and perseverance in building scalable, energy-efficient chain infrastructure.