Apple, Amazon Alums Behind Sharding Startup Raise $18 Million

Harmony announced Tuesday that it raised $18 million from an array of investors that includes Hong Kong's Lemniscap VC, Australia's BCA Fund, Singapore's UniValues Associates and Silicon Valley's Consensus Capital, among others.

The Harmony blockchain will launch with a pre-mine of 12.6 billion tokens.

The Harmony chain is purpose-built to make porting dapps over from ethereum, in particular, quite easy.

So if a dapp has traction but is running into friction with confirmation times or gas fees on ethereum, teams might find they can give users a superior experience by running their dapps on Harmony.

"Harmony's core architecture and approach are the right ones to scale blockchain protocol," Maximilian Thyssen, an angel investor who joined the Harmony round, told CoinDesk in an email.

Obviously, to create universal basic income from data, Harmony needs to get everyone on its blockchain.

The protocol is built to be compatible with the ethereum virtual machine, and because those smart contracts are open source, White says Harmony is able to make porting "Practically frictionless."

Harmony is currently in talks with multiple major exchanges about the terms for such a deal.

Harmony touts incorporating many well-established technologies proven at major tech companies, but the central insight of the protocol is what the company calls "Deep sharding."

Harmony puts every kind of calculation onto different shards, which is why it calls it "Deep sharding." It creates shards for everything a blockchain does.