• Hackathons are a way to empower developers by offering new venture capital funding opportunities.
• Community participation makes learning the core value of the blockchain easier to understand.
• Building a sustainable blockchain is a necessity as it helps create a long-lasting infrastructure.

Innovative projects are developed and fostered through community participation. The cult-like following behind Bitcoin has helped push blockchain and cryptocurrencies beyond their niche target. Similarly, other cryptocurrency initiatives also depend on community involvement to address and promote blockchain’s core values. As such, community involvement and empowerment are pivotal in furthering sustainability and forward-thinking practices. 

The Hackathon Method

During an exclusive interview with DailyCoin’s CEO Martynas Kasiulis, Li Jiang 蒋犁, COO of Harmony, delved into the underpinning principles and focus of their Hackathon. He believes that their one million dollar hackathon is a system that bridges the development gap between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, and helps solve the disparities. 

As stated by Li Jiang, traditional companies and Wall Street developers are all invited to come and join “this revolution and this amazing opportunity.” Ideally, the hackathon will attract not only developers from within the community, but also developers and participants who are representative of the institutional crypto user.

Their goal is to provide a use case example for developers to identify Harmony’s ease of access development and to provide an “opportunity to build applications on top of Harmony.” What’s more is that the Hackathon provides more than just community incentives. As Li highlighted, participants will “be giving the million-dollar prize in different themes.”

While the Hackathon will certainly add value to the Harmony ecosystem, it will also serve as a launchpad to capital investment opportunities. Li Jiang emphasized that “ a lot of venture investors are actually waiting to see what projects come out of this hackathon so they can invest.” In fact, widening investor and participant diversity inherently adds value, as it enhances the community’s participation and perception in the grand scheme of things.

On The Flipside

• The Hackathon conditions developers to focus on a single development scheme, and could sideline other possible innovations.
• Enabling community development helps generate ecosystem applications, but their implementation could be delayed.

Building for the Future

Harmony’s blockchain exploration encourages community involvement to build the infrastructure through user-empowered decentralization. As Li highlighted, creating community opportunities is in their “DNA,” although Harmony acknowledges that “getting ourselves more out there” is the key to unlocking more innovative blockchain applications. Thus, by creating new digital avenues as a means of gaining recognition, Harmony is simultaneously enhancing their exposure, whilst helping to grow their ecosystem.

Li further stressed that the role of community involvement is to attain an independent level of decentralization that helps power the entire blockchain infrastructure.

"We want to have a thousand nodes or more on the network, right? We truly believe in having that level of decentralization because that's the only way to sustain something"

Still, Hackathons are a tool to build out the foundation for their blockchain. Li emphasized that he was not a technical person coming into this project, but creating additional value on the protocol layer helps make it easier and easier for developers, as the entry barrier becomes lower, allowing them to build onto Harmony with ease.

Harmony’s value thus lies in its ability to create an easily programmable ecosystem, and build on it by empowering member participation. While such an avenue has already been implemented, with Web 2.0 becoming a staple of user generated content, Harmony’s chosen path is more rewarding for community participants.

In short, Hackathons have always been a practice from which projects could benefit, whether the end goal was a bounty program, or simply increasing exposure to their software. Powering a new blockchain infrastructure through community participation leads to users and developers being more likely to resonate with the network, as they will have actively contributed to its growth. 

To that end, Harmony is leveraging the future development of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations to help create a self-sustaining ecosystem in which the involved participants will help to power the network. As Li stated:

"Forming various Decentralized Autonomous Organizations within the Harmony ecosystem, and these DAOs will be the ones that carry forward this entire protocol, this entire ecosystem in the long run."

Watch the full interview here: